I sent Andy to the shop to get some cream for some soup the other day, and he came back with this:

Now, we tend to be pretty picky about what we buy, avoid processed food anything with too much junk in it etc, so I was quite surprised when he came back with this. Reading the ingredients: buttermilk (63%), hydrogenated vegetable oil (26%), vegetable oil (8.8%), buttermilk powder, lactose, emulsifiers, E435, E322 (from soya), stabilisers: E412, E410, Colour: E160a. IT’S NOT REAL FOOD!

Andy said, ‘I didn’t think, it was just in the fridge, with the milk, I didn’t realise’. Looking more carefully at the label you see it’s not actually called cream, just ‘Elmlea double’. They can’t even call it cream, yet it’s in the fridge fooling people into thinking it is. I wonder how many other people don’t realise they’re eating rubbish. I suppose you might get suspicious when you see the label with a best before date about three months away, but I doubt people really think about it, they’ll just think, ‘Great, I’ll get this buy one get one free offer, it lasts ages!’ Yeah, it last ages because it’s mutant food! It’s injected with chemicals and made of rubbish so it lasts an artificially long time, and you want to eat it?

It says in big letters on the front of the pot, “33% less fat than double cream”, leading people to think it is some how better for them. Apart from the fact that if a 33% reduction in the fat content of the cream you use would significantly effect your diet then you probably have a problem with your diet anyway, it’s 26% hydrogenated vegetable oil. Hydrogenated vegetable oil has been now banned in two European countries because of it’s danger to health. It’s much more dangerous for you than the animal fats it’s designed to replace, this from an article in the Independent, title “Deadly Fats”,

“Clinical researchers have discovered that ingesting just two grams a day of HVO – the amount contained in just one doughnut fried in this type of fat – increases an individual’s risk of heart disease by 23 per cent. This makes HVO much more dangerous to health than the saturated fats such as butter it often replaces. It distorts cholesterol levels, encourages obesity, causes inflammatory conditions, and can even be a cause of infertility.”

The packaging should carry a health warning! This kind of labeling is mis-leading and dangerous. In most supermarkets there is a section for organic and whole foods. It’s usually stuck at the back somewhere like a freaky little side show. I propose a new section for supermarkets called “Freak Food” for anything like this ‘alternative to cream’ and a ban on anything that looks like a health benefit claim being written on them. While they’re re-doing they’re signs they can also take organic off all the organic veg and put ‘chemically enhanced, contains pesticide residues’ onto anything non-organic. And on the meat aisles…..