What Does the Label on Your Food Say?

How do you buy your groceries?

What do you look at in the supermarket or grocery store?
Do you know what is in your food?
Perhaps advertising about healthy food leaves you confused while you deal with unexplained constipation or diarrhea?

After reading this post, your shopping will be more precise, healthier, and more economical!

To keep the message brief, I will go straight to buying food. Here are the rules in condensed form:

1. Bring your glasses if you need them
2. Read food labels carefully; they contain a lot of information
3. Do not be impressed by what is absent: free from, no preservatives, and so on
4. Aim for simple foods whose ingredients you all understand
5. Prefer food you can touch with your hands and prepare yourself
6. Most importantly, take responsibility. Do not buy according to advertising. Remember that industry looks after itself first, and many manufacturers do not eat the foods they produce, such as sausages and frozen schnitzels.

Now for the details:

Food labeling legislation came into use in Israel more than a decade ago. Since then, every manufacturer must specify the ingredients in the food they produce and sell.

Labels list ingredients in descending order, from the most abundant to the least. Let us look at the following label and understand it together:

Here are 2 labels from two breads. On the first label, the most abundant ingredient is clearly whole-rye flour, while the ingredient present in the smallest quantity is vitamin C.
On the second bread's label, pre-sprouted whole wheat is the largest component, and the antioxidant E-300 is the smallest.
So far, everything is clear. Now let us think critically:
What is needed to make bread? Not much, really: flour, water, a little sugar, a little salt, and sourdough starter or yeast. Why, then, are we facing long ingredient lists including oils, molasses (what remains from sugar production), preservatives, added fiber, and gluten (wheat protein)? Why do we not even understand some of the ingredients?

I maintain that what the head cannot understand, the stomach will not understand either.

If you are holding a product with a long, illogical ingredient list, do not take it. Simple.
The healthiest food is the simplest, as little processed and packaged as possible.

Let us look at more labels: breakfast cereals. Entire supermarket shelves are devoted to endless cardboard boxes (environmental pollution?), beautiful and colorful, promising enjoyment, happiness, health, and flavor. Health slogans appear on the packaging: rich in dietary

fiber (is that healthy?), no added sugar (is sugar bad?), 100 calories per serving (is that good?), no added protein (does that mean others add it?). Let us try to answer:

• Dietary fiber is good when it is an integral part of food. Artificially added fiber disrupts the food's natural balance, impairs proper absorption of vitamins and minerals, causes unnecessary bowel irritation, and may cause blockages in a narrowed bowel.
• White sugar is described as the poison of Western society. It has even been found to increase the risk of Crohn's and colitis, certainly diabetes, heart disease, elevated blood lipids, and so on. So no added sugar sounds good, but let us check how the product was sweetened anyway. Unsweetened breakfast cereal will not sell, especially when Israeli tastes demand more sweetness.
• It turns out manufacturers now have many ways to sweeten food "without added sugar." In this case, sugar alcohols were used: isomalt and maltitol, plus another artificial sweetener, sucralose. The first two are known to cause intestinal gas, while sucralose is an artificial sweetener discovered, like others, during attempts to develop rat poison or other pesticides. Sucralose is a harmful chemical, whether absorbed into the bloodstream or remaining only in the gut.
• Further down, we read about added fiber, bran, baking soda, and anticaking agents. Another ingredient to note is inulin. A prebiotic fiber, it may cause gas. Frequent consumption is not recommended, if at all.
• Gluten is the industry's star. Gluten is a protein found in wheat and its products, as well as pearl barley, oats, rye, and other grains. It is natural, but the problem is that many wheat varieties now on the market are engineered to contain more gluten than before, and industry adds more to its products. The aim is to help food rise and give it a more stable structure. The problem is that a sensitive or diseased gut cannot handle these quantities of gluten. It may affect the permeability of a diseased bowel and cause irritable bowel symptoms such as gas, bloating, and abdominal pain. We are not discussing celiac disease, complete intolerance to gluten, but sensitivity. My recommendation: look for natural foods without added gluten, such as natural spelt or rye bread, depending on tolerance. Or choose to give up bread for a time and see whether digestive symptoms change.

To sum up, my message is simple:

1. Read the ingredients on the foods you buy.
2. Question the safety of ingredients you do not understand
3. If a food contains preservatives, its purpose is longer shelf life. So let it stay on the shelf.
4. Prefer foods you can touch, smell, and assess, as when shopping in an open market or in health-food stores with high turnover, where freshness is more assured.

This is general news information and is not a substitute for personal advice from a doctor or dietitian.