Don’t overlook croutons
Croutons seem harmless. They’re just little tiny cubes of flavor and texture added to your favorite salads right? Honestly, I was really surprised how harmful mainstream croutons are when I flipped the package over. This is really unfortunate because so many people trying hard to be healthy (eating salads) are getting scammed into accidentally (and often unknowingly) ingesting harmful chemicals. This can lead to people wondering why their diet is failing or wondering why they’re not losing weight as quickly as they’d like.
Crouton “Nutrition Facts” often make the products look healthy or diet friendly, for instance – 30 calories and one gram of fat per serving. But when we look at the ingredients, we see a constellation of nightmare chemicals. You’re going to see a lot of verbs in the ingredients – for instance hydrolyzed and autolyzed – verbs are action words, meaning that someone had to do something to an ingredient to turn it into a verb. When food companies do something to an ingredient, it’s never to make you healthier. Instead it’s to increase profit by making the product last long, taste better, or have a better texture or appearance. The label also mentions natural and artificial flavors. These are umbrella terms used to mask the actual ingredients used. What is the specific Artificial flavor being used? We don’t know because they’re using a sneaky umbrella term.
Down with MSG
Another terrible ingredient often found in croutons is Monosodium Glutamate (MSG). Believe it or not, MSG is actually used to scientific studies to make lab rats consume more food. If you want to study obesity, you need overweight lab rats and rats are not naturally overweight, so in order to trick the rats into consuming more food, they’re injected with MSG. So if you were a food company and you wanted to keep people overweight so that they’d keep coming back and buying your product, MSG would be a valuable tool. Hypothetically speaking of course 😉