Will what's acceptable to eat today still be acceptable to eat tomorrow?

Friday, August 6, 2004
Spectrum Maturity
Terri Andersen
Senior Moments
Will what's acceptable to eat today still be acceptable to eat tomorrow?
How is a person supposed to know what's good to eat or what's not, when someone in the food police business changes the rules from one week to the next? I remember back in the 1960s when just before Thanksgiving the consumer was told to stay away from cranberries. Most of us couldn't imagine a turkey dinner without cranberry sauce, but I didn't want to take any chances on poisoning anybody, so I was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice and forego cranberry sauce that year when the relatives were all coming to my house for dinner. My father, however, had a different idea. He figured the cranberry warning referred only to the canned variety, and he showed up on Thanksgiving Day with a bag of fresh cranberries to be cooked. Since I had always used canned cranberries, I had no idea how to cook fresh ones, so my father decided to take over. As the cranberries on the stove popped away during cooking, my kitchen walls, floor and ceiling were suddenly embellished with red dots. Did that bother my father? Not at all. So what if the kitchen didn't look spotless? He figured everyone would just be grateful to have cranberry sauce with their turkey. A few weeks later, as I was still finding a few red spots here and there, the food industry decided there was no reason to avoid cranberries after all. It seems that scenario of “good for you... bad for you... good for you” has been repeated a lot over the years. I remember my mother telling us that in her youth tomatoes were considered poisonous, then in later years the tomato was proclaimed perfectly safe and even good for you. Another food that got a bad rap recently was eggs. Stay away from them, we were told, since they're bad for your cholesterol levels. But in a fairly short time eggs were back in favor, as long as we didn't eat too many. Even the diet experts can't agree on which foods are best for us. - One says eat lots of protein and avoid carbohydrates; another says you need carbohydrates but don't eat too much protein. One says stay away from all fats; another says your body needs some fat to function properly. Who's right and who's wrong? Another problem today seems to be all the extra ingredients put into the foods we eat. They say it's to preserve the shelf life and won't do any harm, but how is the average consumer supposed to know if a particular ingredient will adversely affect him or not? Just recently, I read an article warning people about high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and as my husband and I started reading more ingredients labels, we were amazed to see how many products contain it. It's the second listed ingredient in most sodas, juices and iced tea, and it appears in cookies, pies, jellies, ketchup, soups, baked beans, and who knows what else. We even found it in one brand of ice cream, which we wouldn't have bought if we suspected HFCS would be an ingredient. According to the article I read in an AARP Bulletin and the further research we did on the Internet, high fructose corn syrup is not metabolized well by the body and can contribute to obesity and other health problems. Of course, the producers of HFCS will deny those claims, because it costs them less than sugar and has a longer shelf life, but I hope more research is done to protect the eating public before it's too late, if the harm hasn't been done already. (Incidentally, regular corn syrup doesn't seem to be causing any problems, just the high fructose type.) Which brings up another question in my mind. How come the problems are always discovered after a product is on the market instead of before? Granted, it's noble of the food industry to list all ingredients in a product, but some have so many added chemicals the average consumer gets bleary-eyed trying to read them. Besides, the print is often so small one needs a magnifying glass to see it. What happened to ordinary flour, sugar, milk and eggs as ingredients for waffles or other baked goods? Supposedly we need at least 50 other ingredients to make today's food palatable. I find that kind of scary. - Just for the fun of it (or to prove a point?) I counted 75 ingredients on a well-known brand of soup, 57 on a can of “homestyle” soup, and 19 on a small can of chicken gravy. Where do they find all these chemicals for us to ingest? Does the average consumer have any idea what sodium erythorbate, inosinate, guanylate, pyridoxine, hydrochloride, niacinamide, and all those other unpronounceable ingredients do to us or why we need them? I suppose as long as we remember the motto “everything in moderation,” we'll survive. Then again, there's always some old geezer who brags how he ate all the wrong foods, drank booze whenever he felt like, smoked cigars all his life, and manages to live to be 100.  Maybe he lived so long because he never worried about what he ate or drank. We all know worry is not good for us.
Terri Andersen is a resident of New Milford.