Kashi has become a common “health food” staple in my pantry over the past several years. While I try to stay away from packaged foods in general the Kashi bars are easy to grab on the go and most of them are pretty yummy. I’ve never purchased this particular GoLean Crunchy Bar but we have them in the office all the time and I have to admit that I have tried them.
I am a “package reader”…I read everything on the packages of food I’m eating because, hey, I like to think about what is going in my body. I don’t care so much about fat and calories as I do the ingredient list. I like my packaged foods to be made out of ingredients that I know and have heard of and I really stay away from anything with high fructose corn syrup and anything with partially hydrogenated oils. Yucky stuff.
So I was pretty surprised to read the list of ingredients on this “healthy” Kashi bar. Lots of things I have never heard of…
SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, EVAPORATED CANE JUICE CRYSTALS, BROWN RICE SYRUP, CRYSTALLINE FRUCTOSE, OAT FIBER, NONFAT MILK, CORN GRITS, KASHI SEVEN WHOLE GRAINS AND SESAME® BLEND (STONE GROUND WHOLE: HARD RED WINTER WHEAT, OATS, RYE, BARLEY, TRITICALE, LONG GRAIN BROWN RICE, BUCKWHEAT, SESAME SEEDS), MECHANICALLY FRACTIONATED PALM KERNEL OIL, RICE STARCH, WHEAT BRAN, POPCORN, CHICORY ROOT FIBER, VEGETABLE GLYCERIN, EVAPORATED CANE JUICE SYRUP, HONEY, CORN BRAN, COCOA, SALT, CHOCOLATE LIQUOR, CALCIUM CARBONATE, NATURAL FLAVORS, MAGNESIUM OXIDE, SOY LECITHIN, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), ALPHA TOCOPHEROL ACETATE (VITAMIN E), ZINC OXIDE, ANNATTO (COLOR), FERROUS FUMARATE (IRON), PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B6), FOLIC ACID AND VITAMIN B12.
First of all, that is a lot of ingredients! Something that stands out to me is that the MAIN ingredient is Soy Protein. Ewww. Not a great way to get your protein but I that should be a whole post on it's own. Next is that the next THREE ingredients are different kinds of sweetener. Hmmm. One "sugar" ingredient that stands out to me is Crystalline Fructose. What is that? It sounds weird so I did some investigating.
Apparently crystalline fructose is produced by allowing the fructose to crystallize from a fructose-enriched corn syrup. (This information is from the sugar website sugar.org) Ah, Whaaaat? That sounds a lot like high fructose corn syrup to me?!
In reading about this ingredient I discovered that crystalline fructose is made from corn just like HFCS and contains 99.5% minimum of fructose assay. That is an even higher percentage of fructose than what makes up High Fructose Corn Syrup (55% fructose). Does that mean that CF is even worse for you than HFCS? Possibly.
And here is the general makeup of this sweetner found on the website fructose.org.
Fructose ≥ 98.0% and £ 102.0%, after drying
Arsenic ≥ 1 mg/kg
Chloride ≥ 0.018%
Glucose ≥ 0.5%
Heavy metals (as Pb) ≤ 5 mg/kg
Hydroxymethylfurfural ≤ 0.1%, dry basis
Lead ≤ 0.1 mg/kg
Loss on drying ≤ 0.5%
Residue on ignition ≤ 0.5%
Sulfate ≤ 0.025%
What? Arsenic you say? Heavy Metals?
Here is what the LA Times said about the downside of Crystalline Fructose…
“A handful of animal and short-term human studies have supported the possibility that fructose could be responsible for obesity, diabetes, and other conditions, says Mary Ellen Camire, professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Maine in Orono, but the theory is still being debated among nutritional scientists. "We need more and better studies," she says.
Consuming pure fructose may have other strikes against it. A 2005 study by researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City showed that consuming more than 25 grams of fructose a day often causes gastrointestinal distress, including stomach pain and diarrhea. The majority of American adults consumes more than 50 grams daily, mostly through corn syrup added to processed foods and drinks.”
For big companies it seems to be about the bottom line. Money. Greed. These overprocessed sugars are cheap. They store for a long time on the shelf and because they are so ridiculously sweet it doesn’t take much of it to sweeten a product.
I’m convinced. Another reason to get rid of these so-called health foods in pretty packages and eat as many whole, raw, real foods as possible. Foods I can grow = good. Foods filled with ingredients I have to research to find out what they are = bad.
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