Wise up, Read Labels

Wise Up, Read Labels

When “gluten-free” and “all-natural” isn’t good enough

You’re a plant-eating warrior princess.

You avoid animal products chock-full of hormones, antibiotics and GMOs, but do you know what could be lurking in your vegan staples? If the words “vegan,” “gluten-free” or “all-natural” are good enough for you, you’ve got something else coming!

It's time to become an expert label-reader, babe.


Little local company? Nope, you’re actually supporting big business

Burt’s Bees? Owned by Clorox. Cascadian Farms’ organic cereals? Made by General Mills. Kashi? Nope – Kellogg’s. Odwalla juice? Brought to you by Coca Cola. Tom’s of Maine? Colgate-Palmolive. What about Boca Burgers? Sorry babe – they’re owned by Kraft.

Hershey’s brings you your organic Dagoba chocolate. Pepsi bought Naked Juice for $540 million in 2006, and we’re gonna talk a little more about this brand in a minute.

It says it’s “all natural?” Actually, it’s all ****

“All-natural” is not an FDA-regulated claim, so pay attention, sweetheart. We’ve spotted “all-natural” on boxes of gummy fishies, sodas, refined pastas and those fizzing mouth candies. A product having an “all-natural” label is no excuse to skip reading the ingredients. You’ve got to take responsibility for what goes in your pie-hole.

Naked Juice – going by the name alone, it should be – well, “naked,” right? Just juice? Just wrong! These days, Naked is actually clothed with zinc oxide (used topically to treat diaper rash and can cause a host of allergic reactions), ascorbic acid (aka lab-created vitamin C, also used to develop film and remove dissolved metal stains) and cyanocobalamin (chemically-made B vitamins that can cause hives, difficulty breathing and swelling of the face).

In fact, there’s a pretty big lawsuit going on right now, claiming that Naked Juice has violated California’s Unfair Business Practices Act. But if we’re going to sue every company that marks itself as “all-natural” when the ingredients are in fact synthetically created and processed, we’ll all be in court for a very, very long time. Read labels and stop worrying about it.

In your supplements

Often used as a lubricant to stop capsules/pills from sticking to the machines that make them, you’ll find magnesium stearate in almost all of your supplements. What your vitamin company fails to tell you is that mag stearate can reduce the absorption of the vitamins/minerals by 65 percent. Uh, what’s the point then?

Another con? Mag stearate is often formed with the use of hydrogenated oils – specifically cotton seed oil, aka the oil with the highest pesticide content of all commercially produced oils. So, let’s see – you think you’re taking your all-natural calcium supplement, but you’re actually getting a pill that’s only 35 percent absorbed, contains trans-fat and nasty pesticides. No thanks.

Uh, we’d rather just eat the gluten

Gluten-free products are all the rage now as more people are diagnosed with autoimmune diseases and complex food allergies. Alternatively, some people skip on gluten when adhering to a lower-carbohydrate diet, which has been shown to help with weight loss. But sometimes, it’d be better just to have the slice of toast, chickie – you may be getting just as many carbs (if not more!) in your gluten-free products, and there are other, um, not so appetizing issues as well (aka super-chemicals and animal products). Here are some creepy ingredients we found in “gluten-free” items on a recent trip to the grocery store:

-Beer (Vegan or not? who knows!)
-Disodium Wheatgermamido Peg-2 Sulfosuccinate (Mmm, tasty!)
-Edible films (what the heck are those?)
-Cellulose (Otherwise known as wood chips, often used to add fiber content.)
-Malted milk
-Stearyldimoniumhydroxypropyl (Your guess is as good as ours.)
-Potato/Rice/Tapioca Starch
-Clarifying Agents (What?)
-Fat-replacer
-Hydroxypropylated Starch
-Pregelatinized Starch
-Seafood analogs (Barf.)

Our advice? Go the Michael Pollan route

Our dude Michael Pollan says that you can have as much junk food as you want, as long as you make it yourself.

“One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make,” he famously said. “The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them. Try to make your own Twinkie. I don’t even know if you can. I imagine it would be pretty difficult. How do you get the cream in there?”

Good question, Mike.

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Jennifer St. Germain, Contributing Writer
A long-time health and fitness writer, Jennifer recently moved back to Los Angeles after spending two years writing and teaching English in Japan. She now writes for several publications on a variety of topics, but veganism and animal rights are her favorite subjects. When she isn't writing, you can find her drinking a little too much organic coffee, playing with her dogs or photographing her third favorite subject - jellyfish