It's food Jim, but not as we know it...

Before I start, if you picked up on the Star Trek quote (Spock says to Captain Kirk "it's life Jim, but not as we know it...") I'm not a trekkie. Just wanted to clarify that. I don't think I've even seen a full episode. I think I actually picked it up from the "Star Trekkin" song. You know the one. Just sing it to yourself for a bit. HAH! Now it's stuck in YOUR head. Welcome to my pain, that bastard song has been looping in my head all morning.

But I'm already off topic before I've even started.

My sister put up a new blog on her page last nite (http://adventuresofsez.blogspot.com). Regarding the amount of crapola in the food that we eat these days. It's quite a coincidence that she did, as this morning one of the girls at work was talking about how paranoid she is about eating anything with trans fats in it.

It seems that these trans fats are the new scare. They've been around for donkey's years, but it seems that the Today Tonight show was low on ideas for a story, so they brought up the old "is your food killing you?" chestnut. But more on trans fats later.

As Sarah pointed out in her blog, it's actually VERY hard to find any "food" these days that hasn't been "enhanced" chemically.

Processed foods are ubiquitous. A McDonalds, KFC, Hungry Jacks, Red Rooster in every suburb, sometimes two. On the super-market shelves there's 2 minutes noodles, easy mac, lean quisine, pies & sausage rolls, instant mashed potato, instant coffee, SPAM, canned brasied steak and onions, tinned spaghetti.

Ok, so you want to avoid nasty chemicals in your diet, just don't eat the instant crap, right? Well, apparently wrong.

You look at the ingredients on any box you pick up, from cereal to stock cubes, and chances are you'll find a list of ingredients that include a variety of numbers. Now I'm not sure about you, but I don't grow a shrub of "colour agent 704" in the vegie patch out in the back yard. Probably because you have to "grow" such an ingredient in the lab.

Ok, so nothing with numbers in the ingredients. How about a can of tuna? Wait, we've polluted the oceans with various shi*t, including heavy metals. When an organism consumes mercury, it becomes an accumulative substance in the body. Shrimp pick up mercury in the food they eat, small fish that eat the shrimp then carry it, and so on up the food chain. Now since tuna is a predatory fish close to the top of the food chain, the buck stops there. Well almost. I love tuna.

How about bread & water only? Nope, you're screwed there too. Of course we all know about the "quality" of the drinking water in our major cities. But bread's pretty innocent right? Of course it's not. Otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up. Do you remember 15 years ago, a loaf of bread would last 2-3 days on the kitchen bench before the mould would start to form? I bought a loaf of bread from Coles 11 days ago, and the remaining slices still look as fresh as the day I bought them. It's amazing how well those preservatives work. So if you spend a few extra minutes looking for a loaf that doesn't have these preservatives, you better look at the level of trans fats as well.

The FDA made it mandatory, as of January 1st 2006, for all food companies in the US to seperately list the level of trans fats in any product. It turns out this stuff is bad for you. No word yet on whether Australia's food watchdog will enforce a similar policy. Oh and by the way, now you have another reason to not eat margarine, not only does it taste terrible, but it's packed full of lovely trans fats.
(If you're interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat)

So how can you avoid all the nasty chemicals in your diet?

Start a farm, control all water and fertiliser that you are using so that it contains no chemicals. Don't forget to check the soil for chemicals the previous land owner may have used, some of them never break down. Spend hours a day picking bugs off your crop because you can't use pesticides. No eating meat or dairy products, cause it turns out there are naturally occuring levels of trans fats in them too.

Or you could just stop eating.

Niether of these options sound very appealing to me. Looks like my food will kill me.

But hang on, people have been eating this sort of stuff (and worse) for decades. In America at 1901 the life expectancy was 49 years. At the end of the century it was 77 years, an increase of 57%. Not a bad rise considering all the crap they eat.

Yes I know there have been advances in medicine. But the numbers don't lie. A nation of people that eat the most processed garbage on earth, and the average Joe lives to 77 years old.

Ugg the Neanderthal was lucky if he made 21 years old, and I don't think there was any monosodium glutamate (MSG) in the mammoth stir fry.

The moral to the story is, everything we eat is bad for us. But if you eat it (and you live in a first world country) you can still live to a ripe old age.
Just take it easy on the double bacon, triple cheese, extra mayo, two grease pattie whopper, unless you have a super-size fries cooked in a hydrogenated vegetable oil on the side for good measure.