Common products with illegal ingredients

[liv]

Sometimes we use products that actually have illegal ingredients but we do not think about this. What are such products. Please add others that you have come across.

• Pre-grated Cheese (contains a starch to prevent stickyness)
• Cheese slices (also may contain a starch to prevent sticking)
• deli meats (often contains sugars - often dextrose)
• chicken rotisserie (usually coated with a sugar rub)
• zero carb items (may still contain up to 0.5 carbs as labeling laws allow small amounts to be shown as zero - it is necessary to read the list of ingredients to make sure. Remember that except meat and fish and water virtually nothing else is zero carb)
• low carb convenience products - yes they sometimes come from companies with Atkins in their name but make sure you read the list of ingredients - most of them contain not only very many artificial sweeteners but ingredients not legal for our current phase of Atkins (chocolate, nuts, soy)
• Bacon (often has sugars)
• Sausages (often has sugars and grain products)
• Salt (common table salt may have added sugar. Check the ingredients of yours)

[Karolin]

What about Diet Coke - is it ok.
Label says 0 carbs, but contains aspartane

[kellyf48]

No aspartane is not allowed.

[Olivivi]

Sometimes we use products that actually have illegal ingredients but we do not think about this. What are such products. Please add others that you have come across.

• Pre-grated Cheese (contains a starch to prevent stickyness)
• Cheese slices (also may contain a starch to prevent sticking)
• deli meats (often contains sugars - often dextrose)
• chicken rotisserie (usually coated with a sugar rub)
• zero carb items (may still contain up to 0.5 carbs as labeling laws allow small amounts to be shown as zero - it is necessary to read the list of ingredients to make sure. Remember that except meat and fish and water virtually nothing else is zero carb)
• low carb convenience products - yes they sometimes come from companies with Atkins in their name but make sure you read the list of ingredients - most of them contain not only very many artificial sweeteners but ingredients not legal for our current phase of Atkins (chocolate, nuts, soy)
• Bacon (often has sugars)
• Sausages (often has sugars and grain products)
• Salt (common table salt may have added sugar. Check the ingredients of yours)

This is such a helpful list. I'm not into tatooing, but if I were, I'd have it tattoed to my arm.

[SunnySmile501]

Canned meats often have sugar. I tried to find canned corned beef that didn't have sugar, but even the cans that stated "100% beef" in bold letters on the front of the label had sugar as an ingredient on the reverse in small print. The processed food industry just can't resist adding sugar to everything.

[ChristyR2D2]

Thanks OV for "bumping" this old thread. Great reminder.

Exactly Sunny! I have read (and we all suspected or knew) big food manufacturers have spent billions of dollars of the years in research on finding ways to get you to eat more of their products. Partly through advertising which we all know, but also physically. They know sugar, all its forms, and other chemicals are addicting & in some cases can largely bypass your brain signals that you are full. (One of the reasons you can drink several sodas in a day, but not feel stuffed.) Things you would never think to add sugar to if you made it from scratch at home has sugar.

I cannot for the life of me find salad dressing (except super chemically altered Walden Farms), bacon, or chicken/beef stock or broth without some form of sugar. Obviously making 100% of your food from scratch from single ingredients is the only way to ensure absolutely no sugar, fillers, etc. How do you guys personally balance eating none of that & using convenience products (mayo, salad dressing, bacon, deli meat, etc.)? Are there products you use that do contain some form of sugar or fillers, but use it sparingly or is too much of a pain to make from scratch? Just curious what everyone's thoughts are. Ideally we would have none, but most people are busy or don't have the resources to cure their own bacon, butcher theit own meat, etc.

[Olivivi]

I wonder how much (or little) sugar in a serving of something that is supposed to be 0 g. sugar is actually addictive. I, too, have noticed the numerous sugar-cured bacon that lists 0 g. I did find a Carolina brand of bacon that is not cured with sugar, and it is quite good. I'll see whether I can find it again to post here.

[ChristyR2D2]

Part of the problem is I live in a small town. I have asked our grocery store to carry specific products or special order (they said maybe) & Walmart who flat out said no. Non-perishables I can sometimes buy online (and often pay a lot more for) or drive over an hour away to a more populated city (50,000), but they still don't have a lot of stuff. :-(

[SunnySmile501]

Things you would never think to add sugar to if you made it from scratch at home has sugar.

I cannot for the life of me find salad dressing (except super chemically altered Walden Farms), bacon, or chicken/beef stock or broth without some form of sugar. Obviously making 100% of your food from scratch from single ingredients is the only way to ensure absolutely no sugar, fillers, etc. How do you guys personally balance eating none of that & using convenience products (mayo, salad dressing, bacon, deli meat, etc.)? Are there products you use that do contain some form of sugar or fillers, but use it sparingly or is too much of a pain to make from scratch? Just curious what everyone's thoughts are. Ideally we would have none, but most people are busy or don't have the resources to cure their own bacon, butcher theit own meat, etc.

Most people can't do what I did/do, but my health issues are such that I felt I had no choice. I not only make 99% of what I eat from scratch, I moved back to the country on a small farmstead and grow most of the veggies and fruit that I eat, plus keep a flock of pasture-raised, organically fed chickens. What meat I don't produce, I buy from local operations (Polyface Farms/Joel Salatin) which produce with rotational grazing (grass-fed/finished beef), no GMO grain for animals that are meant to eat grain, and no antibiotics or hormones. I also eat venison, which my brothers provide every fall. I have returned to eating local, in season, like we did back when we were still healthy and not obese.

I used to eat a lot of processed luncheon meats, like bologna and hot dogs, but I now restrict that stuff to a couple times in the summer. Even the hot dogs I eat, Hebrew National Beef, which contain no sugar, contains several unhealthy ingredients like Hydrolyzed Soy Protein.

I can find bacon without sugar (Gwaltney), so I buy that sometimes. Bacon costs $15.00 a pound at Polyface!

That said, I never had a problem with sweets--don't like the taste of sweet--and I haven't tasted soda in decades--they are sweet and the carbonation burns my mouth, so I am not totally against sugar for me, personally--just against highly processed white sugar put into EVERYTHING, mostly where it doesn't belong. I do have a bag of Organic Whole Sugar (Rapunzel) that I use for the occasional dish that is sweet & sour, like cole slaw, or to put in my pulled pork BBQ recipe. I have had a 24 ounce bag for well over a year and there's at least a quarter left. I also am a beekeeper, so I have raw organic honey, but don't use very much of that. I keep the bees to have pollinators and to save the bees, so I never take but a little honey from them. Regular beekeepers take all the honey and feed the bees sugar syrup for them to live off of.

I make mayonnaise with organic, first-cold-pressed canola oil. I sometimes use Duke's mayo, but it is made with soybean oil and my sensitive digestive system always flares a bit when I consume this highly inflammatory oil.

It is not easy, and it will only get harder to be healthy with what the food industry and the industrial agriculture bunch is doing to the food supply. "Who controls the food supply controls the population."

[SunnySmile501]

I wonder how much (or little) sugar in a serving of something that is supposed to be 0 g. sugar is actually addictive. I, too, have noticed the numerous sugar-cured bacon that lists 0 g. I did find a Carolina brand of bacon that is not cured with sugar, and it is quite good. I'll see whether I can find it again to post here.

A better question might be, "how much sugar is actually in a serving that is supposed to be 0 g." They have that finagled around so that up to .5 grams = zero grams (some countries anything less than a full gram can be called zero), then they make the serving tiny, so if you eat an actual human-sized serving, you could be getting several grams. Same thing with calories. A serving can contain up to 5 calories, while still proclaiming "zero calories." Must be that new math we're always hearing about.

I climbed on this particular soapbox many years ago when I was very low-fat/very low-calorie. That was when they came out with the (Pam) fat-free cooking sprays, made from oil which contains fat. The 'serving size' was one-third of a second spray! I tried to push and let up in one-third of a second--can't be done. So I contacted the company to ask how many seconds to start actually counting fat grams. Answer was ONE full second. The size for the zero grams is the size of a dime, so impossible to actually attain. I haven't trusted the nutritional information listed since.

Okay--back off the soapbox!