We set ourselves a challenge here at nutritional anarchy to find the highest list of ingredients in a single item of food, for the lowest price.
The reason for doing this is to show you how low nutrition, poor quality food, stuffed full of rubbish, is available cheaply. That means people on low incomes eat it, and it means that the poorest in our societies are getting the lowest nutritional value while being filled full of horrendous excess ingredients which can have long-term health impacts.
What we found was 172 ingredients for just 48 cents in a single item. Let’s talk you through that right now as you can see just how horrendous, and normal, this has become.
Let’s Talk About What We Found Here
Eating highly industrialized, process, food, stuffed full of additives is not the way to go. It creates cancer, poor health, food addiction, and its nutritional value is poor. That means your body doesn’t have what it needs to do what it needs and to fight off illness.
Worse than that, is the fact that you can’t research the ingredients. We found 172 ingredients in a single item. How on earth is anyone into research if those ingredients are good for them, or not?
What’s even scarier as all these ingredients are in a lot of foods, but not all of them stuffed into food in the way this has been as an example. However, what’s worse is that a lot of these ingredients and the industries producing them are government-subsidized, so it’s literally being forced into people’s stomachs by the government.
I’m not actually going to tell you what the product was, but it’s a frozen TV dinner dish. It was on ½ price offer, which means you could literally fill up your trolley with this rubbish for $20.
It’s highly industrialized, process, and dirt cheap to buy. And it has 172 ingredients, 90% of them not naturally made.
Highlights (or lowlights) of this disgusting mess that we found are as follows:
- The product contained several corn and soy derivatives. GMO derivatives at that.
- Nothing on the product packaging was listed as organic or non-GMO.
- Synthetic artificial color dyes yellow #5 and #6, both of which are synthetic petroleum derivatives made from coal tar and banned in many countries
- monosodium glutamate (MSG) both named and hidden amongst other ingredients
- synthetic chemical additives and preservatives
- sodium nitrate, which has been strongly linked since the 1970s to the stomach and intestinal tumor growth
- sodium erythorbate was also included, despite it having been proven to cause side effects in children, and in high enough quantities it has the ability to rupture red blood vessels
That’s just some of the added ingredients. It was meat-based, and the meat was stuffed full of these ingredients. Plus, where on earth did the meat come from?
Growing Disparities In Wealth And Education Are Crucial Here
As you can see, this is a horrendous concoction. Literally, 172 ingredients stuffed into one TV frozen dinner.
Convenience and cheapness at the cost of nutrition and health. That’s literally what you are trading in by eating this mess.
The observed links between income, social background, and obesity are clear and have been proven in many studies, and this purchase just confirms them.
They are also related to dietary energy and dietary density versus energy cost. Poor people are more likely to eat high-calorie density, poor quality foods that are stuffed full of the rubbish we’ve just talked about.
Because they are inexpensive, taste okay, and are convenient, they are tolerated without too much personal investigation.
Plus, it’s also been proven that people with lower levels of IQ, lower levels of educational standards, tend to also gravitate towards this type of food. So providing such rubbish with so little regulation literally means that the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society are drawn in and dragged down even further.
This means in later life as well; these people suffer more problems with their health. Digestive problems, cancers, and ongoing side effects, that are never linked to this poor lifestyle diet.
These people than a burden on the health services, but they are also the people in the USA who can’t afford health insurance, or at least decent health insurance.
So providing this awful food means that later down the line these people will suffer all over again, with an increasing health burden that they simply do not have the means to deal with. And because they never linked it to the food they eat, they keep on taking the poison.
Where Else Can We Find These Disparities?
I want to finish here by just giving you a statistic. The USA spends 18% of its gross domestic product every single year on healthcare and health insurance.
But it sits 42nd in the world for life expectancy.
Think about that. Why do you think that is? It’s simply because half the population is eating food which is making them ill in the long run. Because they don’t have the money to sort it out, that burden in later life grows ever taller.
These disparities are also in other consumable products. I looked at sporting supplements, things like bodybuilding supplements and nutritional health supplements.
The same disparity existed there. If you buy the budget product, they are stuffed full of the worst types of ingredients.
When you spend more money, you get better quality ingredients, natural ingredients linked to providing the health and exercise benefits stated.
So this inequality exists across all areas of our life in the USA, from food, through to sporting supplements, through to everything we put into our bodies.
It’s an inequality that has to stop. How can a country so rich and powerful as the USA have such poor food, and allow half its population to be literally poisoning themselves and putting a future burden on our healthcare system, in the way that it currently does?
Surely, somewhere, sometimes, the people have to turn round and stop this economic juggernaut that makes a few people lots of money, while it kills 50% of everybody else?