Campbell’s is recalling a large number of it’s signature Spaghettio’s canned spaghetti and meatballs products. Turns out somebody in the factory forgot to turn the oven on and the meatballs have been undercooked. If people just heat the product instead of thoroughly cooking the meat, they may get sick. Hence the recall.

Thank you Campbell’s for your responsible and swift actions. So far there have been no reports of immediate injury.

[Update: Simultaneously, ConAgra is recalling prepared meals from it's Marie Callender line. Unfortunately in this case, Salmonella may have caused illness across 14 states. (thanks Brooke)]

Hey Campbell’s: how about taking the next step and recalling ALL your canned Spaghettio products before they take their toll on additional people’s health? Not because they are undercooked, but because each serving contains a mega-dose of unnecessary salt and high fructose corn syrup, without providing any true nutrition benefits.

What you need to know:

Spaghettio’s is a product “kids love”, according to Campbell’s. No doubt. A one cup serving contains almost 3 teaspoons of added sugar (high fructose corn syrup). Not to mention nearly half the daily maximum for sodium consumption.

Though the one cup serving “Contains a full serving of veggies and grains”, this super processed product is not something your kids should be eating. Think of it, a pasta dish whose first ingredient is water? And the second one too?

here’s the list of ingredients:

WATER, TOMATO PUREE (WATER, TOMATO PASTE), BEEF, ENRICHED MACARONI PRODUCT (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, FERROUS SULFATE, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING INGREDIENTS: BREAD CRUMBS (BLEACHED ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR [ENRICHED WITH NIACIN, FERROUS SULFATE, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID], DEXTROSE, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF YEAST, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL [SOYBEAN AND/OR COTTONSEED], SALT), SALT, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, ENZYME MODIFIED CHEDDAR CHEESE (CHEDDAR CHEESE [MILK, CHEESE CULTURE, SALT, ENZYMES], WATER, DISODIUM PHOSPHATE), DEHYDRATED ONIONS, DEHYDRATED GARLIC, BEEF FLAVOR (CONTAINS BEEF STOCK AND SALT), VEGETABLE OIL, ENZYME MODIFIED BUTTER, SPICE EXTRACT, CITRIC ACID, NONFAT DRY MILK

There’s also some trans-fat (partially hydrogenated vegetable oil) to boot.

Come on people, you can do better than eat this. And Campbell’s can too. Enough of this canned madness. Sell folks real food that doesn’t need to be masked by loads of sugar and salt to make it tasty for us and our kids.

What to do at the supermarket:

If you can’t prepare a pasta dish tonight and you have no choice, at minimum buy a prepared meal that is low in sodium (less than 50mg) has little or no added sugars (less the 4 grams/1 teaspoon) and contains no artificial colorings.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Even families that cook dinner from scratch have those days when there’s nothing to eat. The fridge is close to empty, and the physical and emotional resources required to cook up something from scratch are totally depleted.

We turn to the freezer in hope of a microwavable miracle. But when even the leftovers from previously prepared feasts  are absent, we reach out for a prepared meal purchased skeptically a month or two ago.

Sound familiar?

In the last 50 years, food manufacturers have seen a surge in demand for what was once called TV Dinners. And in recent years, as our nutrition awareness has grown, new brands of frozen meals have been developed to provide  “healthy choices.”

Today we’ll take a look at ConAgra’s opportunistically named Healthy Choices brand, with a product called Cafe Steamers Grilled Chicken Marinara.

What you need to know:

The single serve chicken breast, pasta and broccoli florets in marinara sauce look pretty good in the picture on the package. The 10 oz serving is to be heated in a microwaveable packaging that mimics the effect of steaming. Steaming is a preparation method that requires little to no oils, unlike a saute.  You each can be the judge regarding the flavor.

The numbers on the nutrition facts panel look promising – only 270 calories, 21 grams of protein, 5 grams of fiber,  and only 4.5 grams of  fat. The sodium content is 550mg, a quarter of the daily max. That’s high but not as high as most other fat meal solutions.

Below is the  lengthy ingredient list.

We’ve highlighted the ingredients one would use at home when preparing this dish. We’ve underlined additives that we don’t think regular folk have at home.

Cooked Penne Pasta (Water, Durum, Semolina [Enriched with Niacin, Iron (Ferrous Sulfate), Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Egg Whites), Garlic and Pepper Seasoned Chicken Tenderloin Chunks, Chicken Tenderloin, Water, Garlic and Pepper, Chicken Seasoning [Salt, Sugar, Dehydrated Garlic, Spices Including Paprika, Maltodextrin, Soy Lecithin, Chicken Broth [Contains Flavors], Xanthan Gum, Caramel Color, Natural Flavor], Olive Oil, Isolated Soy Protein Product [Isolated Soy Protein, Modified Food Starch, Starch, Carrageenan, Soy Lecithin]). Broccoli, Water, Diced Tomatoes, Tomato Paste, Contains 2% or Less of: Full Moisture Parmesan Cheese (Cultured Pasteurized Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Brown Sugar, Onions, Garlic, Salt, Canola Oil, Modified Food Starch, Spices, Potassium Chloride, Xanthan Gum, Citric Acid.

While none of the underlined additives is inherently bad for you, their purpose is to provide the flavor and texture of a home cooked dish served straight from the pot. They “cheat” our senses to believe we are getting a better food than we actually are.

Don’t know about you, but I want the flavor of my dish to come from the chicken and the veggies, not from an additive called “Natural Flavor”.

By the way, On the Healthy Choice website, they’ll gladly boast their nutrition info, but the ingredient lists cannot be found. Sneaky and deceitful. The company says it’s because product formulations change occasionally. Oh, that’s the reason …

Bottom line: From a nutrition perspective, this product is probably less worrisome compared to other frozen meals. That said, eating it shouldn’t be a daily habit.

What to do at the supermarket:

Minimize your purchase of processed frozen meals and try to prepare your own. For rainy days, choose options that have mostly recognizable ingredient lists, that are low in sodium (less than 500mg), and are low in sugar (less than 6g) too.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Santa Clara County, in northern California, took a step yesterday towards reducing childhood obesity. The innovative measure – banning toys from being included as giveaways at fast food restaurants whose kiddie meals don’t meet healthy requirements.

To quote an LA Times article on the matter – “It’s a sad day for Happy Meals“. The ban is more symbolic than anything else, as only 12 establishments in unincorporated parts of the district will be affected. And the decision needs to be further approved to become law.

Dr. Dan Delgado, director of a county program that targets childhood obesity, said the toys are a powerful lure for children, encouraging them to eat unhealthy food, which then helps cause obesity. read more…

But as you know, health trends do tend to originate in California (trans fat ban, organic brands…)

Hopefully the penny toy manufacturers will figure out a way to work with carrot and broccoli farmers.

What to do at the supermarket:

The lesson learned for parents should be quite obvious – if the box contains a toy, it’s probably full of sugar/fat/sodium AND chemicals. Fight the urge to make your child happy for 5 minutes till the toy breaks. Buy toys at the toy-store, and food at the supermarket.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Are you a loyal fan of a specific cereal brand? Is it the flavor? The nutritional value you once took the time to look up? The only thing your kids will eat? Well here’s some bad news. Manufacturers can, and often do, change product formulations, and you don’t even know about it. Sometimes the changes are not necessarily in the consumers best interest.

Thanks to Marion Nestle’s Food Politics blog for pointing out a falling out between loyal customers and Cascadian Farms, an organic food manufacturer that was acquired by General Mills in 1999. (To be precise, it was actually acquired by Small Planet Foods earlier in the 1990’s. General Mills acquired Small Planet in 1999)

The issue at hand – Cascadian Farm Purely O’s Cereal and a recent reformulation that TRIPLED the sugar count without notifying consumers. The company’s website is abuzz with rants by (ex)-loyal customers:

As a mother of three, and devoted Cascadian Farm consumer, I can’t imagine why more sugar was added to previously excellent product. We consumed about 2,3 boxes of Purely O’s per week until my children all the sudden told med how they tasted differently. Naively, I thought it would be marked on the box if any changes of the products had taken place…then I noticed the increased sugar content. This made us lose faith in your entire brand.

OR

How you can call this cereal “Purely O’s” is beyond me. SUGAR!!??? Really???? CORN?? Really?? Why do we need another corn based,sugary cereal in the grocery aisles? And it is very sneaky to not announce a change on the box.

What you need to know:

In the past, Purely O’s had a front of pack label claiming “No added sugar”. This label disappeared a while ago. Then in October, the company changed its product formulation, without informing consumers.

To be fair, the increase in sugar is from 1 gram to 3 gram, which still leaves these O’s a better choice than virtually all other sweetened cereals.

The company lowered the sodium content from 280 to 200mg, which is commendable, but still too high for a breakfast cereal.

Other changes include removing whole grain barley flour and instead using corn meal. To compensate for the fiber loss, they’ve added oat fiber. The total fiber count hasn’t changed and is 3 grams per serving, the minimum you should be getting from a breakfast cereal.

So why hide the change? It’s not like people won’t notice – the ingredient list and nutrition panel are on the box, for crying out loud. Why the need for all this sneakiness? Didn’t General Mills know it would lose its loyal base of Cascadian Farms fans? Most likely, a focus group showed that the loss of a few loyal fans would be compensated for by an influx of new consumers for whom 3 grams of sugar is a 60-70% reduction.

We’ve updated the CerealScan database to reflect these changes. Cascadian Farm Purely O’s is still a top scorer, but for a group of (no longer) loyal customers, that doesn’t matter anymore.

What to do at the supermarket:

When buying a breakfast cereal, look for low sugar (6 or less grams. 3 grams is considered very low), high fiber (3 or more grams), and less than 150mg sodium per serving. Obviously, artificial colors are a big No No. These factors are much more important factors for your heath than whether the cereal is organic or not.

And just to reiterate, despite the changes, Purely O’s are still a better choice than most other cereals out there.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

New! Choose a better breakfast with CerealScan™ by Fooducate (it’s Free!)

If you are wary of consuming products with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), your suspicions may prove right. A new study, for the first time conducted on humans, not lab rats, confirms what many have suspected for a long time – the fructose in HFCS contributes to obesity.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation earlier this year, was carried out by a team of scientists at the University of California, Davis. It is entitled Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans.

Here’s what the experiment looked like:

Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems. read more…

Kimber L. Stanhope, the study leader, said “This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain. We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose.”

While fructose is found in fruits, honey and table sugar, it’s highest percentage is in HFCS, hence the name “High Fructose” corn syrup.

What you need to know:

Consumption of sweetened food and beverage has grown significantly in the US over the past decades. Those who blame HFCS for the country’s obesity epidemic and related maladies have shown that the alarming rise in obesity rates is in tandem with the introduction and rapid adoption of HFCS by food and beverage manufacturers since the early 1980’s.

Why did manufacturers switch to high fructose corn syrup to begin with? They certainly did not plan to make America fat. Our obesity epidemic is simply a side effect of the quest for efficiency and lower cost of production. In the 1970’s, huge surpluses of corn in the US, prompted the creation of a new sweetener, HFCS, half the price of sugar, which has become the sweetener of choice in almost all soft drinks today.

Please note that the study was conducted on 100% fructose, not HFCS, which is 45% sucrose 55% fructose.  Many scientists still maintain that there is no difference between sugar (50/50) and HFCS. As more studies are carried out in humans in coming years, the truth will become clearer. But in the meantime, most everyone agrees that we should all reduce the amount of sweet we consume daily, be it sugar, HFCS, or others.

What to do at the supermarket:

The easiest way to drastically reduce high fructose corn syrup from your diet is to stop visiting the drinks aisles at the supermarket. Switching to tap water is healthier for you, your wallet, and the environment.

HFCS appears in the ingredient list just like sugar, dextrose, and corn syrup. Watch out for it in snacks, sauces, prepared meals, and other products.

[thanks Robyn for the hat tip]

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

The LA Times Health Section has a piece on a High Fructose Corn Syrup’s cousin – Crystalline Fructose:

Diligent readers of food and beverage labels may have noticed an increasingly common ingredient in some health and energy drinks: crystalline fructose.

To some, the ingredient is a reassuring sign that the product hasn’t been sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that’s been falling out of consumer favor over concerns of a disputed link to obesity and diabetes. Others, however, may have found themselves wondering what, exactly, is crystalline fructose? And is it really any different from high fructose corn syrup?

Read the article…

Photo: Snapple

What you need to know:

Fructose is a sugar found naturally in fruit.

Crystalline fructose is processed – it is derived from corn, just like HFCS, but enriched with fructose. The fructose is crystallized, dried, and milled, then used as a sweetener in the likes of beverages (Snapple) and yogurts.

It is 98% fructose, whereas HFCS is only 55% fructose.

It’s 20 percent sweeter than table sugar, so it can shave 20-30 calories off a 12oz bottled drink.

There are studies for and against the health benefits of crystalline sugar, depending which side of the sugar industry you are on.

What to do at the supermarket:

Check ingredient lists of products before you buy. Don’t think you are getting a more natural or healthy sweetener because Crystallized Fructose appears instead of HFCS. For example, Snapple’s Red Tea Acai Berry Drink boast the following ingredient list:

filtered water, crystalline fructose (sugar from fruit), pear juice concentrate, natural flavors, rooibos (red tea), citric acid, vitamin C.

The “sugar from fruit” is, as you’ve now learned, sugar from corn. Technically corn is a grain. Misleading? (So is the serving size, half a bottle…)

In any case, cutting down on sweetened beverages and switching to water is a great start to any diet.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com

Spit those french fries outta your mouth right this instant and read on. Canadian scientists questioned more than 16,000 patients, 5,700 of whom had just suffered a first heart attack and reached the following conclusions:

Diets heavy in fried foods, salty snacks and meat account for about 35 percent of heart attacks globally…

The study of 52 countries showed that people who ate a ”Western” diet based on meat, eggs and junk food were more likely to have heart attacks, while those who ate more fruits and vegetables had a lower risk.

More…

What you need to know:

Here in the US, more than 45% of our food dollars are spent on eating out of the home. That’s over $400 Billion every year! Any given day, one in four Americans is eating at least one meal in a fast food restaraunt. While eating at home does not guarantee a healthy diet, it can greatly reduce the intake of saturated fats, sodium, and sugar.

What to do at the supermarket:

Start buying, preparing and eating more homemade fare. The less ingredients you find on a product label, the better. The best products (fruits and vegetables) don’t even have a label. Look out for junk foods waiting for you in the supermarket, and try to avoid the beverage and snack, and frozen meal aisles.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription