Read food labels closely and don’t be swayed by healthy-sounding slogans, writes Sya Taha.
Image: SXC
I used to think whole wheat bread was better than white rice, that vegetables grown in temperate countries were superior to local varieties of spinach, that salmon was better for my mother’s heart than our humble fried selar (yellowtail scad) fish, and that sterile factory eggs were better than my father’s favoured kampong (village) eggs.
I also thought that chicken packaged with a green ‘halal’ sticker was automatically organic, since it was everything that my religious teachers said it was supposed to be: bred lovingly, amply fed and watered its whole life, and, when the time came, slaughtered swiftly by a devout Muslim (man).
And why wouldn’t I think so? The green sticker was approved by the Islamic Religious Authority of Singapore. The precisely square loaf of bread, bought at the supermarket, had a red triangular label that said it was the ‘Healthier Choice’! I didn’t realise then that if I had scoured the entire supermarket, I would have found that same logo on packets of instant noodles, watered-down processed yogurts, and even on some sugary cereals.
Later, I discovered that this symbol was based on general criteria, and relative to other products in the same category. For example, a brand of instant noodles with the symbol could have lower fat and sodium content than other instant noodles, but I would know nothing about its actual nutritional content (which is rather poor, as with most refined and pre-prepared food) unless I read the fine print of ingredients.
In the interest of my own and my family’s health, I started to read up more on food labels. What I found was that much of what we think is healthy is highly mediated through clever marketing and advertising. For example:
- ‘Natural flavours’: This simply means that the chemicals used are sourced from something in nature, before they are blended with synthetic chemicals. These include natural chemicals such as L-cysteine (derived from feathers or hair) and monosodium glutamate (extracted from yeast), a neurotoxin better known as MSG.
- ‘No added MSG’: Such products often contain ‘flavouring’ in the form of free glutamates from hydrolyzed protein. If the product contains disodium inosinate or disodium guanylate, it probably contains MSG because these two chemicals can only work in the presence of MSG.
- ‘No trans fats’: Trans fats are a contemporary industrialised invention and are a kind of fatty acid that is completely unnecessary to our bodies. Trans fats are created by partially hydrogenating vegetable oils to create a particular texture and heat tolerance – hence found primarily in fried food. The Food and Drug Administration in the United States allows such a label if the product contains less than 5 grams of trans fat.
- ‘Fat free’: Since fat is used to create a smooth texture in processed foods such as cookies, such a product usually compensates the loss of taste with sugar or salt. This label can also be found on products that don’t even contain fat in the first place, like apple juice, in order to move you into thinking that you are making a healthy choice.
- ‘Sugar free’: Refined sugar is bad enough for your blood sugar levels. But such ‘sugar free’ products are usually sweetened instead with artificial sweeteners (eg aspartame) that have been linked to cancer in rats, or sugar alcohols (eg mannitol or xylitol) that can cause diarrhoea if consumed excessively.
This kind of dishonesty in marketing is not only immoral, but also potentially dangerous in the long run. Many of the long-term effects of humans consuming these additives and chemicals are not even known yet – consuming them is like wilfully participating in a clinical trial.
What are we left with to eat? We need to look back to our traditional food cultures – whatever our grandmothers or great-grandmothers used to cook. When I did my research, I came to some surprising conclusions. It turns out that rice is a grain that has been least subject to genetic modification and does not require a high amount of processing before becoming edible. This makes rice (and other less-processed grains like oats) much more preferable to wheat.
As it turns out, transporting vegetables grown in greenhouses halfway across the world uses an incredible amount of fuel. This means that a consumer in Singapore (like me, at the time), who chooses local leafy greens like bayam and kangkong from neighbouring Malaysia is making the more environmentally friendly choice. Plus, these vegetables are high in iron and vitamin K, thus their suitability for diets that traditionally contained iron-rich red meat only on special occasions.
It also turns out that fried small fish like the yellowtail scad are a good source of protein and calcium (their small bones are edible) which makes up for the lactose intolerance so common in Asian people. And my father’s kampong eggs with their orange yolks? They were in fact what sustainability activists now call ‘free-range’ or ‘pastured’ eggs. The chickens that laid them were free to roam on grass and their diet of corn (and some insects) provided more beta-carotene to their eggs.
Finally, it turns out that in Singapore that classifying chicken as halal means looking at only the point of slaughter. The system involves the stunning of the animals before slaughter and hanging them upside down in moving shackles.[i] ‘Allahu Akbar’ may blare from loudspeakers, however the breeding and rearing process can be as honest or as guilty as the farm owner’s conscience.
This really shocked me.
When I go back to Singapore these days, all I want to do is get my hand on what my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents used to eat, armed with knowledge that traditional food has its wisdom of balancing nutrients for a certain climate and genetic makeup.
Eating healthy can be easy. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and advocate for ‘real food’, summarises his 64 rules in seven simple words: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’
[i] MUIS (Islamic Authority of Singapore), ‘Guidelines to Islamic Slaughtering’, available here
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