Top 10 Fake Foods You're Probably Buying Every Week

Your grandmother bought cream for her coffee. You buy whitener. She ate yogurt made from one ingredient, whole milk. You eat yogurt where they've stripped away the natural fat and tried to chemically rebuild the texture. And why is it that so many Americans can eat bread in Europe without problems, and then as soon as they come home, they get bloated and have upset stomach. Hello, health champions. Today, we're exposing 10 foods that aren't quite what you think. And it's really critical that we start understanding the difference between food now and before, because food has changed dramatically. We have gone from food that nature produced, food that grew, that we picked and harvested and hunted, to food that is manufactured. And one example is with lots of foods that are naturally rich in fat, but because of our modern fat phobia, we remove the fat and then we have engineers try to recreate the texture. And one of the main things about food processing and food manufacturing is to try to increase the shelf life because that means we get less spoilage which will make it cheaper and a lot of these modern foods are incredibly cheap to make and then they spend lots and lots of money on advertising and what they're trying to do is to create consistent consumer expectations if they can make a uniform product with absolutely no variability unlike nature then people can come to expect that and now they can position their brand they can pay lots of money and people expect certain things every time from that brand and through this advertising they can also start creating trends so that people change their behavior over time based on advertising. And with all these practices they can build a loyal customer base with high high profit margins and trust me none of this is about nutrition or health. So let's do a countdown and start with number 10 coffee creamer. So like I mentioned in the opening your grandmother bought real cream and we buy creamers or whiteners think about it how crazy is that to name a food product after a color that's a property of color not food and then in these products they put vegetable oil seed oil they put high fructose corn syrup emulsifiers they put artificial flavors artificial sweeteners So over a few generations, we've basically gone from a food to a chemical experiment. So here's a list for a typical food label, ingredient label of such a creamer or whitener. And it's a long, long list. I'm not going to read through it. There's some 20 plus ingredients. And some of these are really, really bad for you. And some are not necessarily harmful, but it's just the fact that we have gone from nature-making food to manufacturing a chemical concoction. Number nine is bread. And here's an interesting thing. I'm not a huge fan of bread in general because it's high in carbohydrates. And once we process it too much and people eat too much, it's not necessarily good for them, especially if they have a metabolic problem to start with. But people tell me all the time that I could eat all the bread and all the pizza and all the pasta in Europe. But as soon as I got home, my stomach got bloated, I got upset stomach, I got irritable bowel, and all the problems were right back. But in Europe, I had none of those problems. So let's talk about some of that. Bread typically has four ingredients, flour, water, salt and a yeast culture to help it rise and to break down some of the ingredients in the bread. And traditional bread is usually made with very long fermentation, several hours or even days. We do a sourdough culture and now the yeast breaks down. It changes some of the properties so these breads are better tolerated. Also in different parts of the world, they often use different wheat strains with different types of gluten. So it's not that they're all ancient grains, but they haven't necessarily been hybridized and developed for all the same purposes. And in the United States, bread is supposed to be super fluffy and super white, and it's supposed to be soft so we can make sandwiches and wrap those flat slices around large ingredients without it falling apart. The rest of the world may have different properties, different criteria they're looking for such as a crisp crust for example. Now of course these breads are still full of gluten and if you have a gluten sensitivity then that's still not something that you want to eat. But it is striking that a lot of people can tolerate these breads but they can't tolerate these industrial mass-produced breads that we get in plastic bags. So oftentimes there is a rapid production which reduces the fermentation time and now again it's harder for us to tolerate the breakdown. Also in the U.S. there is the modern wheat. Wheat used to be like three feet high and now it's about a foot, a foot and a half and that's so that it can resist weather rain and wind and also so that it can produce the most pounds per acre and of course a lot of these strains are developed so that they can tolerate glyphosate which is a popular pesticide and it's not that all modern wheat or everything has glyphosate but most of it probably does. Then they bake with a lot of different dough conditioners and just know that these are acronyms d-a-t-e-m-s-s-l-a-d-a etc and they're chemicals to give certain properties to the bread. Then they use emulsifiers mono and diglycerides. Most of them have preservatives such as calcium propionate. Now here's something that I have noticed from personal experience that there are certain areas in a grocery store where the smell is so artificial that I get nauseous. And the three places are where they sell pesticides, where they sell over-the-counter medications, and believe it or not, in the bread section. And this is so sad to me, because if you walk into a real bakery where they're baking fresh bread from these four ingredients that we mentioned on the previous slide, that bread can smell like some of the most wonderful food you have ever experienced. And yet, when they add all these chemicals and all these processes to it now it's something that smells so bad I get nauseous. So give it a try and see if you can notice in these three sections in a grocery store and then ask yourself what is it really that they're selling. Number eight is fruit yogurt and yogurt traditionally is going to have milk and cultures and it's going to be plain. Now you can add a little bit of fruit you could add a little stevia and it's going to taste wonderful not so overly sugary sweet. And a tip because I make my own yogurt a lot of the time and if you use half and half and milk mixed to where you get about seven to eight percent milk fat then it's going to get thick and creamy and there's no straining required. So when they make milk from whole milk like three and a half percent they still have to strain it or it's going to get a little bit runny. But now because of fat phobia they are using almost exclusively skim milk or non-fat milk for yogurt which leaves it extremely runny and it's got a watery mouthfeel to it. So now the engineers have to step in to try to recreate that creamy texture and they can make it more solid. They can make it less runny but if you notice, it's never going to have that wonderful creamy mouthfeel that you get from a higher fat percentage. So they use modified starch, modified cornstarch. They use pectin, gelatin, various forms of gums, and or milk protein. Very often they'll use carrageenan gums as stabilizers. And then they add high fructose corn syrup sugar and artificial sweeteners to that because most people have developed a preference such a sweet tooth that they want everything they eat to be candy and then they add other flavors natural and artificial flavors and colors and preservatives to that so here's an example of a label and if we zoom in a little bit on this again i'm not going to read this to you there's some 20 plus ingredients but here's the interesting part that they use sucralose which is Splenda and acesulfame potassium or acesulfame K which is usually not sold by itself but it's very very common to add in as a second artificial sweetener in food. So you would think this might be like a low carbohydrate food but not really it has sugar and it has high fructose corn syrup in it as well and then you look at the serving size here which is three quarters of a cup which is not much at all and yet even though they had two types of artificial sweetener in there they still add 16 grams of added sugar to this plus what's already there with the milk sugar. So you get 26 grams of carbohydrate with this. And I can't even imagine how disgustingly sweet this must be. It's sweeter than Coca-Cola for the same volume. Number seven is margarine. And first of all, butter is what nature makes. It's nature's perfect tasty spread. it's wonderful on on bread on crackers it's wonderful in cooking and if you bake but then they had to go and invent margarine which is solidified industrial oils they start off with soybean oil and canola oil and corn oil etc but then they hydrogenated and it used to be that they partially hydrogenated these oils and that makes a lot of trans fats and then people became aware of how bad trans fats were so then they switched and they started fully hydrogenated but these partially hydrogenated oils are still used in some baked goods so if the product is sold to the end consumer like a margarine or a spread now they're typically going to avoid partially hydrogenated but these are still going to be found in a lot of baked goods so the fully hydrogenated is much better but there's still huge variations across the market so don't assume just because they tell you that there is zero trans fats that there's no partially hydrogenated or that there is no trans fats in there because because of labeling rules anything under half a gram can be rounded to zero so they keep the servings really really small so that they can round everything to zero and butter of course tastes absolutely amazing naturally by itself and therefore it becomes the benchmarks for all these margarines to reach to meet in terms of flavor so they use all these different flavoring compounds both natural and artificial and one of these slogans that a brand uses is I can't believe it's not butter and of course I can certainly believe it because all you have to do is is eat butter and there's no comparison. So of course all these products are going to compare themselves to butter and call it smooth buttery taste but made with plant-based oils and it doesn't mean it's all plant-based because there's a bunch of stuff in here that they get from dairy to try to achieve that same flavor and of course you can see here the long long list again. Nature made something with one ingredient that tastes wonderful and then we try to manufacture a standardized product that is similar but not the same. And I don't know about where you live but here we have lots and lots of deer and everything that you plant in your yard they refer to as I can't believe it's not lettuce. And number six is processed cheeses. So cheeses have been made for hundreds and hundreds of years. There's hundreds of varieties, depending on which bacterial culture. But then in the U.S., for the most part, you have two choices. You have white or yellow cheese. And cheese originally is milk with cultures and rennet, and then it spends a certain amount of time in aging. But processed cheese is reconstructed, reconstituted. So they're looking for a completely standardized product and they're not looking for flavor at all. They're just looking for something that melts consistently. So they use emulsifiers, they use sodium citrate and phosphates. They use added oils and starches and milk proteins. So starches of course have nothing to do with cheese normally. And the most characteristic thing about these cheeses is the engineered structure which they have developed on purpose because they're looking for consistent melting. It's not about how it tastes because it really tastes pretty horrible. And then of course they add again artificial flavors and colors or natural flavors and colors a lot of the time as well as preservatives. Now it doesn't necessarily mean that these ingredients are dangerous. It's just that they put a lot of stuff in there that is not cheese. That is not what's supposed to be in cheese traditionally. In fact many of these products are mostly real cheese. It's like they start with that, but then they remanufacture, reconstitute it so that they can create these consistent properties. But then again, because they add things that are not cheese, that are not milk, now they have to call it pasteurized processed cheese food. They can't just call it cheese because they put other things in there as well. And like I said, cheese making goes back hundreds of years and there are very very few ingredients they basically start with milk and some cultures and then with the food manufacturing the way we have changed our food we end up with ingredients like this instead number five is fruit drinks so first of all real fruit has water and fiber and vitamins and minerals so it has a texture to it it has cell walls with this fiber so you have to chew it you have to spend some time in chewing and swallowing and you still don't free up all of the sugar in there so it it still has a significant amount of sugar but it's processed much slower and you can't eat or consume as much as if you make juice from it like you eat one orange and it takes you a while but you squeeze four oranges into juice and you can down it in 10 seconds. Now real fruit juice has all the same things except for the fiber. So they have taken the fiber away. You don't have to chew it and you can consume it much faster and you can consume more. Now fruit drinks is something different and very often they'll put fruit on the front. So it looks very very similar to actual juice drinks. But in addition to some juice, they have water and sugar and flavorings with this. And very often, here are two of my pet peeve terms when they say made with or made from, because that's such a vague term. It doesn't tell you anything really about the product. Made with could be 0.1% all the way up to a hundred percent so just because there is fruit on the package doesn't mean that there is very much of that in the product so i don't really recommend any of these products but you want to make sure if you ever bought this that you're not close to the zero end of the range like a lot of products will have proudly proclaimed that they have two percent real fruit juice in there and then of course the rest is going to be high fructose corn syrup sugar artificial sweeteners and artificial flavorings so fruit juice even if it's sort of the real thing and they have just taken out the fiber it's still basically liquid sugar it's very very rapidly absorbed but when they adulterate it further and they just use a little bit of fruit and they add all these sugary concoctions and flavorings now becomes even more addicting, even more habit forming, especially to kids. And it's way too easy to consume a lot of it. Number four is chicken nuggets. And with real chicken, if we consume the whole bird, now we have meat and skin and fat. So it's not all that different from other forms of meat like beef or fish but now with chicken nuggets it's a different story because now we take the meat or we take parts undisclosed parts of the chicken and we chop them up we grind them up and then we reconstruct it and mix in different binders to make it take shape and then the question is how much of this is actually still chicken and for most product is going to be a range. So there's some on the higher end where they actually use whole chicken pieces and they just use breading. And then you might end up with about 70% actual chicken. Whereas the lower end where they chop it and they reconstruct it now, you're probably closer to 40% of the product being actual chicken. And the rest of it then, of course, being breading, emulsifiers, binders, stabilizers, and flavor enhancers and preservatives. And most of the time, these nuggets are pre-cooked. So they're going to be fried in these industrial seed oils. And you're basically getting the same kind of oils that you would in a fast food restaurant. And when people think about chicken, they think protein. It's like the meat part of the meal, but with chicken nuggets, the protein is very much diluted by other things. First of all, there's a lot of carbohydrates added, but then they took out a reasonably good form of fat, and then they replaced it with frying oils with really bad fats. And again, when we look at a label, it reads like an encyclopedia of chemicals. Number three is grated Parmesan cheese. So The Real Thing has a long, long history. The Real Thing is made from milk, salt, and rennet. Very, very few ingredients. And traditionally, it's aged at least 12, sometimes up to 36 months. And you can buy the real thing where they have shredded it up in packages, or you can buy a whole block and you can grate it yourself. However, most of the Parmesan cheese sold isn't really Parmesan cheese. It's pre-grated and people buy it for convenience and shelf life. And it's, of course, much less expensive than the real thing. Now, as always, they want to create a consistent consumer experience. It should look and feel and dispense the same every time. So they use different anti-caking agents. And one is cellulose, which is wood pulp or a form of plant fiber. And they also use other forms of anti-caking agents as well as preservatives to improve shelf life. Some brands also use fillers where they grind up cheaper forms of cheese and they mix in with starches as well to sort of fill it out inexpensively. So my recommendation would be that you buy the real thing and you can buy the block yourself and then you can grate it as you go. And here's one example of what you can find in these graded, pre-graded Parmesan powders. Number two is imitation crab meat. And if you buy real crab, then that's all there is. There's crab meat, that's it. However, with the imitation crab, there is usually 0% crab in there. They call it crab meat, but it has nothing to do with that. Instead, they use some cheap white fish, often pollock, and they grind it, they wash it, they bleach it, and then again they have to create some sort of consistency with this. So they add starches and sugar, sorbitol, egg whites, and then they finish it off with crab flavoring and MSG and yeast extracts. And then very often they paint it on the outside with red coloring so that people will get the idea that it has something to do with crab because this color imitates the crab shell. And just like with the chicken nuggets, people think of this as fish or as the protein part of the meal, but it has a lot less protein because they have mixed in other things with carbohydrates. So you're not getting the nutritional value either of real crab. And again, here is an example of a typical ingredient list for imitation crab meat and you have to ask yourself if nature made something with one ingredient that tastes wonderful then why do we need these? And number one is honey and real honey is going to be made by bees of course. The raw material is nectar from flowers and then the bees have their own processes where they turn that into honey. Now even when honey is natural the main component is going to be glucose and fructose and a lot of honeys are going to be close to 50-50 but a lot of honey will have a little bit more on the fructose side. But it also contains things that can be beneficial such as enzymes and polyphenols and antioxidants. And humans have traditionally consumed honey in small amounts for health benefits. And it has been studied and it has been shown that it does have some health benefits. Honey has antimicrobial properties, which can help your body as a natural defense. And a lot of people have noticed that it can soothe a cough. But we still want to point out that it's still mostly sugar, so we want to be very moderate in our consumption. Now it's kind of rare, but there is fake honey out there, and there are people who adulterate it and are fraudulent in their marketing, and they add sugary syrups such as corn syrup, rice syrup, cane syrup, or beet sugar syrups. Now the good news is that when the FDA tested, out of 102 different kinds of honey, which is just mind-blowing how many there are, only four of them were shown to be adulterated where they had put other forms of syrup and things in there that aren't supposed to be there. So in a couple of generations, we have gone from cultures around the world that have eaten like our grandparents ate to cultures that eat mostly ultra-processed foods. And I want to think of this as the boiling frog syndrome. So the story goes that if you put a frog in lukewarm water and you put a fire underneath, then the frog is not going to notice the changes because they happen so gradually. Whereas if you put a frog into hot water, it's going to jump out immediately. But if it's lukewarm and it rises slowly, it's not going to notice and it's going to die because once the water gets too hot, the frog never really paid attention. And I want to compare that mechanism to how our food world is changing. So when we have gradual change, then we don't really notice. They're small, consistent changes so that each generation accepts a new normal. Things that your grandparents would never have accepted, just because it's gradual and it becomes our new norm, we have generations that grow up and never knew anything different. So we have gone from real food to processed to ultra processed. And this is still going to be around, but I just want to challenge you to eat 90% real food and eat less of the processed than ultra processed. But the sad part is that the ultra processed is more than half. It's somewhere around 60% of all the calories consumed today. And when we have this happen, when we accept this as a norm, when we don't know any better, now our taste buds adapt and our expectations adapt. So pretty soon we have forgotten what real food tastes like. So every time I make a video where I talk about the health problems facing the world and how the food is mostly responsible, so there are certain foods that we should avoid, I always get several comments where people say, well, what else is there? And that just proves the point I just made that with each new generation accepting a new standard, they don't really even know of anything else. So awareness is the first step to realize that there is a natural wonderful flavor to food and you can enhance it tremendously with marinades and cooking with wine and spices and herbs and you can make incredible things. So I would challenge you to make one new recipe make a gourmet meal a new one every week so that you build up your repertoire and that you under you learn how to cook and you understand what real food is supposed to taste like if you enjoy this video you're gonna love that one and if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.