Treating Your Body ( or Trashing It?)

Dark chocolate or chocolate sorbet:  an honest treat, one that your body will actually realize is a food.

Which is far more than can be said for far too many other items that are no longer really food these days.

“I’ve been eating so clean; I deserve a treat!”, I overhead the other day at the farmers market.

I looked out and saw two friends perusing the offerings of the farmers market, decked out in their Alo Gear, yoga mats slung over their shoulders as they walked along sipping their iced-almond milk lattes.

They’d likely come from a yoga class and had come over to find some healthy foods to pick up and enjoy for the week ahead.

One pulled something out of her bag; something in a brightly colored pink box. She took a bit and exclaimed how good it was.

Her friend looked surprised; and then she made the comment above

I’d never heard of this item, and it piqued my interest, so I checked:

“Crumbl’s origin begins with two crazy cousins and the perfect combination of flour, sugar, and chocolate chips.” (1)

Sounds innocent enough, right?

Think back to the days when we were kids (well, those of us who grew up in the 70s or 80s).

A cookie might have been homemade and made with real ingredients (flour,  baking soda, salt, butter, sugar, vanilla, eggs and chocolate chips) (2)

Breyers Ice Cream used to be made with milk, cream, sugar and eggs.

Granted, sugar or flour with any regularity isn’t exactly a health food, but back then having an occasional cookie or scoop of ice cream that were made with ingredients that the body could actually recognize, digest and assimilate may well have fit the bill for what we often call a treat.

But now?

Hardly.

With thousands of ingredients on the GRAS list (the FDA’s acronym for the phrase Generally Recognized As Safe) (3), added for reasons such as increasing shelf life, creating hyper palatability, enhancing color and decreasing the cost of ingredients, just to name a few), it’s more often than not the case that choosing to ingest something we used to see as a treat is more akin to trash.

Using the brand mentioned above as an example, take a look at the ingredient panel of one of their flavors, Raspberry Cheesecake Cookie (4):

All purpose flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Butter (pasteurized cream, salt), Powdered sugar (sugar, corn starch), Brown sugar (sugar, cane molasses, invert sugar), Cream cheese (pasteurized milk and cream, salt, carob bean gum, cheese culture), Raspberries, sugar, lemon juice concentrate, pectin, natural flavors, potassium sorbate , Sugar, Eggs, Graham cracker crumbs whole wheat flour, enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, vitamin b1[thiamin mononitrate], vitamin b2 [riboflavin], folic acid), sugar, vegetable oil (soybean and/or canola), molasses, honey, corn syrup, contains 2% or less of leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, monocalcium phosphate), natural flavors, salt, soy lecithin.), Salt, baking soda, corn starch, Heavy cream, contains less than 0.5% of: carrageenan, mono and diglycerides, polysorbate 80, Baking vanilla (watkins), Butter emulsion(water, soybean oil, natural andartificial flavors, xanthan gum,citric acid, sodium benzoate,bha, mixed tocopherols and annatto), Honey, Salt

Some of the ingredients you can likely recognize as food (forget for the moment whether or not it’s a healthy option; let’s just stick with whether or not you can identify it): flour, butter, raspberries, eggs… ok.

But what about some of the others: Soybean and canola oils, carrageenan, mono and diglycerides, polysorbate 80,, artificial flavors, xanthan gum,citric acid, sodium benzoate,bha, mixed tocopherols and annatto?

Perhaps even more shocking is that many of their offerings include propylene glycol, the same ingredient in antifreeze!

None of this is particular to this one brand; it is estimated that close to 70% of the foods sold to Americans contain some to many of these harmful, yet totally legal ingredients.

What’s worse, they’re often labeled under different, sometimes innocent sounding names, requiring a bit of detective work to decipher what they actually mean.

The good news: there’s one very easy thing you can do in order to decrease or completely eliminate your consumption of these chemicals: stop eating packaged foods and as much as possible, buy single ingredient foods, locally, that you can prepare at home.

And when you want a treat, stick with simple at that time, too.

What better treat is there than a fine piece of dark chocolate (fair trader of course) after a lovely, home cooked meal?

Such a small piece of decadence is not only satisfying, it’s a key piece and keeping an overall balanced approach to eating real food sustainable for the long term.

https://crumblcookies.com/our-story
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019232-toll-house-chocolate-chip-cookies
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generally-recognized-safe-gras
https://crumblcookies.com/nutrition/caculvercity