Decoding Ingredients: Different Names for Unhealthy Items

By divinecaroline Aug 30, 2010

Food manufacturers sure don’t make it easy for consumers to shop conscientiously. We have to do homework just to decipher the nutrition labels on the backs of boxes and cans, otherwise they’re just a mess of percentages and multi-syllabic words. Even just trying to avoid certain ingredients is hard enough; manufacturers want you to buy their stuff, so they don’t want to make questionable content too obvious. As a result, ingredient lists on processed foods are long, jumbled, and full of words you’d need a science background to understand. Fortunately, figuring out whether foods have ingredients we don’t want?like MSG, sugar, or trans fat?isn’t as intimidating once we know what to look out for. Unfortunately, considering that something as simple as sugar has over twenty names, we clearly have our work cut out for us.

MSG
Monosodium glutamate by any other name is still MSG, an additive that gives food a salty, savory flavor (also known as umami, the fifth taste). You can find it in any number of packaged goods, canned items, and snacks, but you won’t always find it listed as “monosodium glutamate” in the ingredients. If you suffer from MSG symptom complex ?having physical reactions, like headaches, nausea, and heart palpitations?or you just want to avoid suspicious additives altogether, look out for these other names for MSG:

Autolyzed yeast

Hydrolyzed flours or proteins

Textured protein

Sodium/calcium caseinate

Gelatin

Glutamic acid

Vegetable protein extract

Some ingredients aren’t MSG per se, but contain some amount of glutamate, which can cause similar health problems if you have MSG symptom complex:

Malted barely

Maltodextrin

Stock/bouillon/broth

Protein powders (whey, soy, etc.)

Soy sauce

Rice syrup

Annatto

Guar gum

Modified corn starch

Sugar
The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends that men and women eat no more than nine and six teaspoons of sugar per day, respectively. However, the AHA also reports that Americans consume about twenty-two teaspoons of sugar a day on average. A good amount of that comes from hidden sugars; that is, sugars in processed foods like crackers and condiments. Sugar falls under many different labels, so it’s all too easy to get your daily sugar quota and then some by not reading ingredient lists carefully:

Sucrose, fructose, dextrose, etc. (anything ending in “ose”)

Corn syrup

High fructose corn syrup

Honey

Maple syrup

Evaporated cane juice

Mannitol

Sorbitol

Chicory/carob/inulin/tapioca syrup

Caramel

Molasses

Cane juice crystals

Trans Fat
As of 2008, the FDA requires every food manufacturer to list the amount of trans fats in their products if it exceeds more than .5 grams. While that’s a laudable effort on the FDA’s part, it still means that products can boast “No trans fat!” even when there are trace amounts. Since trans fat consumption is linked to increased risk of heart and cholesterol problems, any amount should be considered unsafe. And since producers can fudge the truth about whether it’s even in food or not, we should be even more vigilant about checking the ingredients:

Hydrogenated/partially hydrogenated oils (if it says “fully” or “completely” hydrogenated, that means it’s not a trans fat source)

Shortening

Margarine

There are small amounts of trans fat that occur naturally in animal products like meat and dairy, but it’s the kind that occur in processed goods that we need to worry about more.

The only way to recognize every item in an ingredient list is to eliminate all processed foods from our diets, but that also means cutting out a lot more than even the most health-conscious might realize. How many of us can go the rest of our lives without eating chips, cereal, or even bread? At the very least, we can avoid the products that have particularly bad ingredients in their labels. Processed foods without trans fat, excess sugar, and MSG do exist; it just takes some detective work to find them, but on the plus side, we won’t get headaches, endure sugar crashes, or raise our bad cholesterol levels in the process.

Do you think you have been unknowingly eating ingredients you’re trying to keep out of your diet?

Originally written by Vicki Santillano for DivineCaroline.com

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Comments

by basilandcatnip | GARLAND, TX

Sep 01, 2010

And they spent a lot of effort a few years ago to get MSG out of the food, only for it to get back in. Dr. Oz did a good segment on this the other day too. Thanks for getting the information out there so we can be more infromed consumers, especially ones with family members that may have health issues, triggers, and allergies!

by liz2121 | Watervliet, MI

Sep 01, 2010

Thanks for the info, would love a further list of others.

by DailyGrommet | Lexington, MA

Aug 30, 2010

Great, informative article. Who would have thought "textured protein" was MSG? We will be looking for these terms in our own food and in our Grommet testing. Thanks!

by msfriendly | MONROE, WI

Aug 30, 2010

I'm so sick of deceptive advertising! I'm sick of business touting "natural ingredients" when they are genetically altering food (like high fructose corn syrup). Be informed and read those labels!