processed food

Drinking a lot of diet soda is linked to depression

Here's another excuse to stay the hell away from diet soda.

Processed red meat: The worst of two worlds

Eating red meat regularly is hard enough on the body, but recent science says that when that meat is processed it could raise one's chances of deadly disease significantly.

Trans fats linked to acting like a jerk

When New York City banned trans fats from local restaurants in 2006, it was trying to make its citizens healthier. Trans fatty acids — which, you’ll recall, are a type of unsaturated fat almost exclusively found in processed food — have a number of proven health effects, including raising bad cholesterol and lowering good cholesterol simultaneously. […]

Confessions of a former Big Food executive

Photo: Casey V. PhotographyA few weeks ago, I learned of a relatively new blog about food industry deception, but with an interesting twist. The blog’s author is Bruce Bradley, who spent over 15 years as a food marketer at companies like General Mills, Pillsbury, and Nabisco. He has since, in his words, “become more educated […]

Beauty and the Beastly BPA-Soaked Soup

Disney princess-mania can strike 3 to 5-year-old children at any time. That’s bad enough for kids (and mostly their parents), but now these bedazzled damsels are harming all children in a whole new way -- by enticing them to ingest high levels of BPA.

Campbell's has been using Disney princesses and other Disney characters to sell kid-targeted food. Cartoon labels and "cool shapes" -- i.e. noodles that are supposedly, though unidentifiably, made to look like kids’ favorite characters -- help entice "healthy kids" into eating chicken in salty chicken broth. And of all the soups tested for BPA in a recent study, the Disney Princess Cool Shapes soup scored the worst.

Low-fat ice cream, celery more or less the same food

Yes, that Mexican-flavored shredded cheese mix, found right next to the Kraft singles, makes awesome quesadillas. But little strands of cheese curds are not meant to remain so sedately separate from each other, even as they are tossed into plastic bags and shipped across the country. So how do big food companies keep shredded cheese […]

Ask Umbra Book Club: The history of ‘adulterated’ food and gross-food urban legends

Give us this day our daily bread, as long as we know what went into it.Photo: LaCheryl PorterDearest readers, Last week, we kicked off our discussion of Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life. You can catch up here. Let’s move our conversation into what is perhaps the heart of a house: […]

Mythbusting: Cheap food does not equal higher quality of life

Does our cheap food system bring us higher quality of life than other countries? A food industry flack believes so, but facts suggest otherwise. And I'm starting to think that we can't really reform the food system until we reform the economy.

The ‘American’ section of an ethnic food aisle

What with the Fourth of July holiday around the corner, I’m embracing all things Americana, such as this video of the U.S. food section in the ethnic aisle of a German grocery store. However, by the looks of it, almost the only things you’d be eating at your Independence Day picnic this weekend would be […]