September 27, 2010 Cheez is Healthy.
I've never had a guest post before, but my 9 year old daughter, knowing that I was stressed about some upcoming deadlines, wrote the following blog. I love it (and her for wanting to help me). Here's a little heads up: check out my note after the post to find out what is behind my daughter's comment about bugs.
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Cheese is healthy but cheez isn't. Motzarella, cheddar, montery jack, and swiss are all cheese but what is that stuff called cheez? Cheez is what you find in cheeze whiz, processed chemicals with a perfume for smell and chemicals for flavor, even the color doesn't strike true.
At least the color in cheez whiz isn't made of bugs. Some red or purple food deyes are made with ground up bugs! All the words on the outside aren't anything close to what's on the inside. Of course the ingredients tell all. If a list of ingredients is long in any product it is probably unhealthy, but if the list is short, for instance, there is one ingredient in banana and that is bananas, it is definitely healthy.
Nothing is better than a fruit or a vegetable. Your daughter is home from school and she want's a snack. You want to leave soon so you put some cheez on a cracker and say to yourself, she is getting some grains and some dairy. Instead, you could grab an apple and say to yourself it's an apple it's healthy.
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My daughter makes her momma proud!
What's the takeaway? Eat real foods, don't con yourself into thinking something is healthy by parsing the nutrients, stay away from food made from bugs. (I couldn't have said it better myself!)
I want to say one other thing: My daughter hears a lot about food and eating in our house (in fact, it's impossible for her to avoid it), and sometimes I worry that it's too much. But then the other day I walked into the kitchen and she was reading my copy of Chew on This by Eric Schlosser & Charles Wilson. I hadn't even cracked the cover yet!
The bugs in the food dye that she is referring to comes from pages 121-122:
One of the most widely used color additives comes from an unexpected source. Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid)) is made from the dead bodies of small bugs harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The female Dactylopius coccus costa likes to feed on cactus pads, and color from the cactus gathers in her body and her eggs. The little bugs are collected, dried, and ground into a coloring additive. It takes about 70,000 of the insects to make a pound of carmine, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red, or purple. Dannon strawberry yogurt gets its color from carmine, as do many candies, frozen fruit bars, fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink grapefruit juice drink.
By the way, Boysenberry, Cherry, Raspberry and Strawberry Cheesecake Dannon yogurts also get their coloring courtesy of bugs! Yum!!
To see my take on processed foods read The Ingredients Game and The 10 Most "Dangerous" Foods.
~Changing the conversation from adults to kids. ~
Reader Comments (8)
With all the chemicals and other crap they put in our foods, why are they resorting to bugs? I'm sure there are enough food dyes to be used instead of bugs.
Any idea why they use the bugs for colouring? I'm curious to know!
Thanks for bringing this topic up again. The food manufacturers like General Mills voluntarily started listing "carmine" on yogurt and cake mix labels in January 2009 (The link above is my post from HobokenMoms). Of course, with it, the marketing machine started saying "All natural" food coloring instead of what carmine means :)
Red velvet cake is the other one. We avoid all reds and pink foods in our house.
Hi. I'm also an MD that works a lot with nutrition counseling but without being a RD myself. I loved your blog about the bugs and I also loved to find a doctor that like me would like to teach people without the rigidity of a RD. I have a program to counsel people with diabetes and cancer about how to eat and enjoy food meanwhile healing theirselves. My focus is Spanish spoken people since there a lot of blogs and books in english but not in Spanish.
Glad to see people like you, Dr Dina!
Bugs aren't de facto unhealthy. Of all the things one could use to color food it would appear you are resorting to the "icky" factor rather than science. Many cultures around the world eat insects and they are a good source of lean protein. Given the amount of biomass that insects have and their reproductive capabilities and low environmental impact, it would seem that we should be encouraging the consumption of "bugs".
I was going to write the same thing as Bill - surely ground up bugs are better for you than food colourings from a chemical source. The reason I think it should be listed as a colourant explicitly in all cases is that it isn't vegetarian - if your red velvet cake is coloured with cochineal then I think most vegetarians would like to know that.
Bill and Georgie,
I agree that bugs aren't de facto unhealthy, and in my own defense, I was simply clarifying what my 9 year old wrote in her guest post. However, I agree with you Georgie that food manufacturers should have to be upfront about what they put in their products, but not only for the benefit of vegetarians. In our culture there is a sigma against eating bugs and most people probably wouldn't eat products that contain them. Maybe that is why food manufacturers conceal this little tidbit of information.
Dina
Pretty insightful post. Never thought that it was this simple after all. I had spent a good deal of my time looking for someone to explain this subject clearly and you’re the only one that ever did that. Kudos to you! Keep it up!
Life's Too Good
Nikita,
Thanks for your kind words of support.
Dina