What's Really in Your Food?"

One of the headlining articles on MSN today was “What’s Really in your Food?”. This dandy little article was very informative and made me reconsider several of my fast food choices. I’m by no means a health nut and in general try to avoid some of the thousand calorie snacks that can be picked up through the drive through but I have a particular weakness for Chicken McNuggets. Well I did until today, after reading what goes into my happy meal I’m not to hungry anymore.
One would guess that a chicken nugget would be primarily chicken with a little breading right? If you said yes then you are wrong McDonalds chicken nugget actually has seven different ingredients in the chicken and an extra 20 in the breading. If you think that it is bad you should check out Wendy’s (30 ingredients) and Burger Kings ( 35 ingredients)and neither distinguish between chicken and breading. These super chicken nuggets contain things like water, wheat starch, dextrose, safflower oil, sodium phosphates and autolyzed yeast extract whatever that happens to be. It’s kind of scary isn’t it?
For those of you that think “who cares I don’t eat chicken nuggets” the article mentioned several other foods that you will want to stay away from. For example, Wendy’s frosty has 14 different ingredients. You can make your own frosty at home with milk and ice cream so why do they need things like guar gum, cellulose gum, and carrageenan to make theirs tasty. And Wendy’s super frostys are even worse with up to 25 additional ingredients that contain a barrage of oils and sugars. I’m not sure this is something that I want to eat after all.
Eat this, Not That! is known for dissecting food and filling the average Joe in on just what they are munching on. They have published several books for how to eat out, shop healthy, lose weight and even feed the kids. They cover more then just the calories they look and sugars, oils, serving size etc. They are responsible for uncovering the scary truth of what is in the chicken McNugget they have published multiple articles on heath web sites. One of my favorites is “The Worst Drive-Thru Foods in America” and “The Worst Drinks in America” to put things into perspective.
Things that most people think are healthy like Arby's Roast Turkey and Swiss Market Fresh Sandwich may actually be fooling (it really has 708 calories and 29 grams of fat.) Certain snacks are just obvious though. So next time you think you’ll grab a quick snack ask what alls going into or check out of the Eat this, Not that! books yourself.