Feeding You Lies: How to Unravel the Food Industry’s Playbook and Reclaim Your Health

Big Food has been remarkably effective at convincing people that certain processed foods are good for us. The list of such foods is long: instant breakfast shakes, sports drinks, fiber bars, and countless other processed food products are marketed using the language of health and well-being. Oftentimes, people are eating toxic crap but are convinced these foods will make them feel better, perform better, and avoid illness.

Perhaps the best example of this con—tricking people into thinking junk food is good for us—has been the invention of breakfast cereal. In the 1890s, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, along with his younger brother Will, invented corn flakes by accident while trying to create a healthy cracker to serve Kellogg’s patients. While John Harvey resisted it, Will began coating corn flakes in sugar and pitched the processed food to the public as a healthy alternative to the typical American breakfast of eggs, bacon, and potatoes. Within a few years, Will K. Kellogg had purchased the rights to corn flakes from his older brother and formed the “Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company” (known today as Kellogg’s).¹ Eventually, Kellogg’s was spurred by new competition to abandon their health angle, and instead created cereals that focused on taste and convenience. The end result was processed wheat, corn, and oat products laced with increasing amounts of sugar. (It was like a sweetener arms race.) Kellogg’s Corn Flakes inspired Cheerios, which gave way to Honey Nut Cheerios. Froot Loops led to Lucky Charms, which led to Chocolate Lucky Charms and Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes. There are Cookie Crisp, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Trix, and countless other cereals that feature cartoon characters, dessert ingredients, and spoonfuls of sugar.

And, I’ve got a confession: I’ve always loved cereal. As a child, I ate bowl after bowl of sugary cereals. When I grew up, I ate Fiber One on top of my yogurt while sitting in my cubicle at work. I thought it was very healthy for my body (because all that fiber would help me lose weight) and just didn’t understand why I didn’t look and feel my best after eating it.

Now I understand why a big bowl of cereal made me feel crummy. That’s because most cereals are highly processed food products, chock full of questionable ingredients like BHT, artificial colors, cellulose, and GMO ingredients. In addition, they’re almost always full of sugar—typically one of the first ingredients—which can lead to a massive spike in blood sugar, followed by a crash soon after. This is especially true of cereals aimed at children.

On the one hand, it’s crazy that Big Food has convinced parents it’s okay to feed their children processed foods like this for breakfast. You’d never give your child a bowl of marshmallows or cookies for breakfast, so why would you give them a bowl of Lucky Charms or Cookie Crisp? It makes no sense.

How did Big Food persuade parents that sugary cereals are a suitable breakfast? One of their key marketing tricks was to fortify breakfast cereal with vitamins. Lucky Charms might have lots of sugary marshmallows, but it also has a slew of vitamins and minerals that are added artificially and highlighted on the box. As a result, parents give in when their children ask for the “magically delicious” cereal. Anything with 25 percent of your recommended daily allowance for all those vitamins can’t be that bad for you, can it?

This chapter is about how the fortification lie has been used to con us into thinking junk food is an acceptable meal. Because as you’ll soon see, the problems with fortification go way beyond breakfast cereal.

Imagine the following scenario: You’re on your weekly grocery shopping trip. You reach for an energy drink with a label that features, in a large font, “Now with ginkgo biloba.” You’re not sure exactly what gingko biloba is, but your best friend swears by its magical ability to improve memory. It’s a little pricey at $2.99 for 12 ounces, but you decide that it’s still a pretty cheap price to pay for brain health. You don’t give the purchase a second thought.

The truth is, you should. That drink is an example of a fortified food product, and they crowd grocery store shelves and confuse consumers.

Food makers pack products with vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other nutrients to try to make them seem healthier than they really are. This is called food fortification. It is designed to trick us into thinking a food is good for us because it has been fortified—but the idea that fortified food is automatically healthy is a lie.

For one thing, most fortified foods are processed, so fortified junk food is still junk food. The addition of vitamins and minerals to the food product does nothing to absolve these foods of their sins of added sugars, excess sodium, artificial flavorings, dyes, inflammatory fats, processed starches, and preservatives.

For perspective, fortification wasn’t always a food lie. The practice of fortifying foods started a long time ago—and with good and honorable intentions.

It was 1921. During an American Medical Association convention, two Akron, Ohio, doctors addressed a raging health problem in certain areas of the U.S., enlarged thyroid glands—a condition better known as goiter. In a clinical trial, the doctors discovered that iodine treatments prevented goiter in Akron schoolgirls.² When the body didn’t have enough iodine, it was unable to properly synthesize thyroid hormones. This can cause unsightly neck goiters. Iodine deficiency is generally found in regions where the iodine in soil has dwindled because of floods or heavy rainfall, or if the area was once covered by glaciers.³

Prior to the Akron study, research from Europe had also found an association between iodine deficiency and goiter. Public health officials in the U.S. were galvanized and eager to act. By May 1, 1924 the Morton Salt Company was distributing the “goiter cure” to households nationwide: iodized salt. It was the first time a vitamin or mineral deficiency was corrected through people’s food—a practice we now call food fortification.

Several major waves of food fortification followed: milk was fortified with vitamin D in the 1930s, wheat ﬂour became enriched specific nutrients (niacin, iron, thiamin, and riboflavin) in the 1940s; calcium was added to a several food products beginning in the 1980s,⁴ followed by the addition of folic acid in the 1990s to enriched grain products after several studies found that the nutrient could help reduce neural tube defects in newborns.⁵ Now, you find calcium-fortified juice, omega-3 fortified bread, and many other fortified food products lining the aisles of every major grocery store.

The upshot of all this is that foods are increasingly turning into dietary supplements, drugs, or something in between. Once we had orange juice. Now we have orange juice with added calcium. Once we had pea soup. Then we had pea soup with added St. John’s wort. Once we had bottled water. Then we had Vitaminwater. Now, we’ve even got bottled water with added protein. What’s going on with our food supply?

Profits, that’s what. Food manufacturers and marketers have identified herbs, minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients that come with potential benefits. And, for better or for worse, they are mining those ingredients to create and advertise more fortified foods and “functional foods.”

Although fortification may have started out with good intentions, today manufacturers use it to push their products and drive sales, sometimes using excessive amounts that aren’t particularly safe (especially for young children). Worst of all, fortification is often used to sell food that isn’t good for us.

In some cases, the benefits are welcome. If you don’t drink milk or eat dairy foods, orange juice fortified with calcium sounds like it’d be beneficial. If you’re ready to get pregnant, whole grains fortified with folic acid seem to make good sense.

But problems arise when the added substances haven’t been adequately tested to make sure they’re safe, or when the purported benefit is based on little or no evidence, or when only a trivial amount of a beneficial ingredient is added, or when you replace healthy foods like fruits and vegetables with fortified candy bars, chips, sodas, teas, and other junk foods. I maintain that this “value”-added grub, which is sometimes sold at a premium price, deceives and bilks you by dangling the promise of unproven health benefits made by companies interested in only boosting their profits at your expense.

And if you eat processed foods (especially bread, snack bars, cereals, wheat pasta, and nutritional shakes), it’s nearly impossible to avoid synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins are made in labs using raw materials such as coal tar, corn sugars, petroleum, or acetylene gas.⁶ During the processing, these materials are exposed to other chemicals and extremely high temperatures.

Furthermore, there’s suggestive evidence that the body absorbs these synthetic nutrients differently from natural nutrients. Studies have found, for instance, that naturally occurring vitamin E (such as is found in avocados, for instance) is absorbed by the body about twice as efficiently as synthetic vitamin E.⁷ It’s unclear why that might be, but one likely possibility is that whole foods also provide important enzymes, minerals, and cofactors that make it easier for us to metabolize vitamins.⁸

The science behind fortified and functional foods remains flimsy because it takes a lot of money and resources to prove that a nutrient or food ingredient really prevents or cures a disease.

Are Nutrition Facts Really “Facts”?

All food companies are required to have a Nutrition Facts label on their package—you know, the one that lists out how many calories, fat grams, and nutrients the product contains. The problem? These “facts” aren’t always telling the truth.

You see, government regulations allow a margin of error of 20 percent.⁹ So that product with 100 percent of the daily recommendation for vitamin A might really contain 120 percent. That 100-calorie pack of cookies could really be 120 calories. While this may seem minor, it could really add up for people who need to closely watch their consumption of certain nutrients, or sodium, for instance.

Conversely, some products may contain less of the nutrients than the Nutrition Facts label states. When the U.S. Government Accountability Office audited certain food products, they found that a third of them were inaccurate in regard to iron content and almost half of them had the wrong vitamin A content listed.¹⁰ This leaves open the possibility that companies could label their products as containing 15 percent of recommended iron (or another nutrient) when it truly doesn’t contain any, and still remain within the law.

The solution? Don’t bother relying on the Nutrition Facts panel to ensure you’re meeting nutrient needs. Instead, focus on eating whole, real food that doesn’t need a label saying it’s healthy.

Fortified foods are cleverly marketed to moms and dads who want to make sure their children are getting enough vitamins and minerals. But there’s a hitch. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit health research and advocacy group, analyzed the vitamin and mineral content of 1,550 brands of cereal. Out of those, they found that 114 of them were actually fortified with excessive amounts of vitamin A, zinc, or niacin. The guilty cereals include some that you may even have in your kitchen cabinets right now: Kellogg’s Krave, Total Raisin Bran, Smart Start, and Cocoa Krispies. Likewise, they evaluated 1,000 different snack bars and found 27 of them that are over-fortified. Some of the worst offenders were Balance, KIND, and Marathon bars.¹¹

This could easily become a problem if someone eats a few servings of fortified foods each day, as children often do in America. The EWG concluded that “up to half of young children get too much of vitamin A, zinc, and niacin” due to fortified foods. Overdosing on these nutrients over time can lead to some health issues, such as liver damage, skeletal abnormalities, osteoporosis, and impaired copper absorption. The EWG also advised that pregnant women especially monitor their intake of fortified foods, because they are commonly already taking prenatal vitamin supplements and too much vitamin A is associated with birth defects.

Along the same lines, calcium is being added to more and more foods; it’s more than possible to inadvertently get far more than the recommended 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams a day—especially if you also take a mineral supplement. High doses of supplemental calcium may increase the risk of kidney stones. On the other hand, foods naturally rich in calcium seem to protect against kidney stones. Crazy, right?

The moral of the story: it’s best to obtain your vitamins and minerals in a natural state—and that means from whole foods.

For This Nutrient:	Eat Naturally Occurring Sources:	Rather Than:
Thiamin (B₁)	Trout, lean pork, wholegrain bread, sunflower seeds, acorn squash, peas	White bread, processed cereals
Riboflavin (B₂)	Yogurt, mushrooms, spinach, almonds, lean meats	White bread, processed cereals
Niacin (B₃)	Yellowfin tuna, lean meats, peanuts, portobello mushrooms, sunflower seeds, peas, avocado	White bread, processed cereals
Folic Acid (B₉)	Black beans, lentils, spinach, asparagus, sunflower seeds, Romaine lettuce, broccoli, turnip greens, mango, peanuts, fresh squeezed orange juice, whole-grain bread	White bread, processed cereals
Vitamin C	Yellow bell peppers, guava, kale, kiwi, broccoli, citrus fruits, berries	Fortified orange juice
Vitamin D	Mushrooms, oily fish, tofu, eggs	Fortified cereals, milk, soy milk, orange juice, and cereals
Calcium	Dark leafy greens, mozzarella cheese, yogurt, bok choy, okra, broccoli, almonds	Fortified soy foods, tofu that is prepared with calcium sulfate, calcium-fortified orange juice, some bottled waters and energy bars
Iron	Squash, pumpkin seeds, shellfish, nuts, lean red meat, white beans, lentils, dark leafy greens	Fortified cereals

Omega-3 fatty acids—those super-healthy fats we get naturally from fish and some vegetables—are popping up in food and beverages like crazy. They’re being added to breads, spreads, cereals, baby formula, protein powers, frozen waffles, and even pasta and cheese.

We definitely need omega-3s in our diets. According to research, omega-3 fats can help numerous conditions: heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, inflammatory diseases, brain disorders, and vision problems.¹²

Fortifying foods with these fats may sound like a good idea, especially if you don’t eat fish. But is fortifying food with omega-3s versus obtaining it from natural sources the healthiest way to go?

I contend that it’s still best to get your omega-3s from whole foods, such as wild-caught fish. Let me tell you why:

Most fortified foods provide only a fraction of what’s recommended for potential benefits. A cup of fortified orange juice, for example, may have 50 milligrams of the two main omega-3s (EPA and DHA), which is virtually nothing compared to salmon. Fortified products often cost more too. That fortified orange juice is not much more than a marketing ploy to get you to buy it.

Omega-3 fortified products are not necessarily healthy. A cup of Horizon Organic Lowfat Chocolate Milk with DHA omega-3, for example, has 27 grams of sugar. Fortified granola bars may contain a lot of sugar too. They’re even adding omega-3s to sugary breakfast cereal, as if a smidgen of fortification can make up for the big dose of sugar and heavily processed ingredients.

That’s why I believe it’s always better to get your nutrients from whole food. As for omega-3s from natural sources, here are my top 10 picks:

Increasingly, food companies are fortifying their products with medicinal herbs. Is this bad? After all, herbs have been used by humans for thousands of years to maintain health and treat diseases—and in my experience, they offer a viable alternative to treatment with prescription drugs.

But it’s important to be clear-eyed about these medicinal herbs that are being used and abused by Big Food. In general, I see the fortification of food and beverages with herbs largely as a lure to get health-conscious consumers to spend more money. In other words, it’s yet another marketing ploy, meant to sway us into believing that processed food products are healthier than real foods, which they are not.

You find added herbs mostly in beverages. For instance, take PepsiCo’s line of fruity herb-fortified drinks SoBe, which are infused with a blend of guarana, ginseng, yerba mate, hibiscus, chamomile, and rose hips. That sounds healthy, right? What’s less obvious is that a 20-ounce bottle of SoBe also contains upward of 63 grams of sugar. In other words, the herbs provide a halo of health to an otherwise toxic product.

But even if you choose an herbal product that doesn’t contain lots of sugar, there are still some safety concerns and you could put yourself at risk for potential herb-drug interactions. Some herbs can affect the metabolism of drugs, increasing their action too much, or otherwise interfere with them.

Herb	Drugs	Interactions
Echinacea	Immunosuppressants and corticosteroids	The herb can stop these drugs from working properly because it stimulates the immune system.
Ephedra	MAO inhibitors (a class of antidepressants)	Increases the risk of high blood pressure, even coma.
Garlic	Blood thinners; diabetes medication	Garlic can increase abnormal bleeding and interfere with medication designed to lower blood sugar.
Gingko biloba	Blood-thinner agents; blood pressure medication	This combo may increase the risk of bleeding, and reduce the effectiveness of blood pressure drugs. (Gingko interacts with nearly 500 drugs.)
Ginseng	Diabetes medications; blood thinners	This combo may result in hypoglycemia (abnormally low blood sugar); may decrease the effectiveness of blood thinners, increasing the risk of clotting.
Kava kava	Anti-anxiety drugs	This can overly increase sedation.
Licorice	Prednisone	Increases the effects of steroid drugs.
St. John’s wort	Antidepressants; sedatives	Increases the risk of “serotonin syndrome,” a potentially fatal condition that occurs when drug or herb interactions cause the brain chemical serotonin to increase to dangerous levels.

Protect yourself from potential interactions if you take herbs, whether in food or beverages or as supplements. Always consult your pharmacist or physician before taking any herbs, especially if you are also on medications, if you are pregnant, or within two weeks of surgery.

When I was younger, I was plagued with stomach problems. I suffered from painful tummy aches half an hour or so after eating, leaving me feeling uncomfortable, crampy, and bloated. On a bad night I’d be kept awake until the wee hours with a bubbling, churning sensation in my stomach. I sometimes missed school because of how awful I felt. As a kid, this seemed to me like the end of the world.

What I didn’t know then was that my diet of Lunchables, microwaveable cheese sticks, fast food, and candy was destroying healthy bacteria in my gut. Those little bacterial warriors (probiotics) are super important to overall health. Among their long list of good deeds, beneficial bacteria in the gut help keep your immune and digestive systems strong. I was filling up on sugar, refined carbs, food additives, and junk foods—which were emptying my body of exactly what I needed to help with my digestive issues!

In order to foster healthy bacteria in the gut, you need to give them the perfect environment to thrive. And most of them don’t care for processed foods and junk foods; they prefer “prebiotics,” which are basically soluble fibers found in many natural foods such as the Jerusalem artichoke, garlic, rye, banana, and onion.

Without the right nutrition, the gut is damaged. There’s evidence that fats, salt, and refined sugar, consumed in excess, along with additives and toxins in processed foods, may lead to leaky gut syndrome—which creates tiny little holes in our digestive system organs that leak out the good bacteria we need to stay healthy and keep our immune system strong.¹³ A leaky gut puts you at risk¹⁴ for inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, food allergies, arthritis, celiac disease, and even cancer. An animal study conducted at Thomas Jefferson University identified a substance in the intestines that prevents cancer by acting as a tumor suppressor.¹⁵ Without it, the intestinal barrier weakens, allowing cancerous agents to “leak” into other parts of the body, which can lead to occurrences of cancer beyond the intestine (in the liver, lung, and lymph nodes).

All along, my childhood diet—high in sugar and fat and low in fiber—was making my intestines porous with a leaky lining. It wasn’t until I learned about the processed food industry and began eating real, nutritious food that these problems disappeared. I had no idea at the time—nobody did—but my processed food diet was causing inflammation and harming healthy gut bacteria. If only I knew then what I know now!

I bring this up because these days food companies are fortifying processed foods with probiotics. Yep, food products with these healthy bugs: non-fermented, probiotic-fortified tortilla chips, bread, and juice. It’s a huge trend: tons of new packaged foods are being marketed as probiotic powerhouses, with the ability to colonize your gut with the healthy bacteria shown in research studies to help you lose weight, fight infection, and prevent disease.

I realize this sounds good, but here’s the problem: When you scarf down a bowl of probiotic-fortified cereal that’s full of sugar, you are still eating a ton of sugar. That sugar is not good for your gut flora, and could very well be cancelling out any benefits you might glean from the small amount of probiotics in the cereal. To date, there are no properly controlled studies about whether these processed foods with added probiotics can do anything for you. White bread with a probiotic is still white bread. So why spend your money?

If you want to improve your gut health, do it naturally. Limit sugar, refined grains, and refined oils, and eat fermented foods that naturally contain probiotics (such as plain organic yogurt, miso paste, tempeh, kimchi, kefir, and kombucha), and possibly take a high-quality probiotic supplement. Ever since I started adding fermented foods to my diet, I’ve gotten sick much less often. My stomach problems are in the past.

Also important: If you heat probiotic food, it kills the active cultures, rendering them useless. So keep this in mind when you’re cooking with a probiotic-fortified food.

I know that, one day soon, my young daughter is going to ask me to buy one of those sugary cereals that line the cereal aisle. And I understand the temptation, both for children and parents. Healthy whole foods, after all, don’t get cartoon characters, brightly colored bites, and big advertising budgets. And when parents are rushing in the morning, trying to get everyone off to school and work, it can be tempting to just pour some Lucky Charms in a bowl and call it a meal.

But I want my daughter to understand why these Big Food products aren’t good for her, even if they’re fortified with vitamins. I want to show her that it’s possible to eat a healthy breakfast that’s also delicious and easy to prepare, whether it’s eggs and whole-grain toast; or oatmeal with fruit, nuts and a little maple syrup; or a yogurt parfait. These foods only take a few minutes to prepare and can often be prepped in advance, but I promise they’ll make you and your family feel far better during the day.

And if she really wants cereal, or if we just don’t have time for anything else in the morning, it’s good to know there are some healthy cereals. The key is to look for cereals that contain nutritious ingredients, such as seeds, nuts, and dried fruit, and that are minimally processed. A few of my favorite cereals are:

Two Moms in the Raw Cereal: This grain-free cereal is full of healthy fruit and nuts like almonds, walnuts, bananas, coconut, and dates.

Food for Life Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Grain Cereal: The grains in this cereal are whole and sprouted, so they are easier for your body to digest and won’t spike your blood sugar like flour-based cereal grains do. My favorite is their cinnamon raisin flavor.

One Degree Sprouted Brown Rice Crisps or Erewhon Crispy Brown Rice Cereal: Either of these makes an excellent replacement for Kellogg’s Rice Krispies.

Qi’a Superfood Cereals: I love these blends of whole ingredients like buckwheat groats, chia seeds, hemp seeds, dried cranberries, and almonds. This cereal is delicious mixed with organic yogurt and fruit.

Purely Elizabeth Ancient Grain Granola: Comes in four different flavors: original, cranberry pecan, pumpkin fig, and blueberry hemp, made with healthy ingredients like quinoa, amaranth, chia seeds, and raw virgin coconut oil.

Chiarezza Almighty Mango Goji Cereal: Made from organic chia, hemp seeds, mango, buckwheat, banana flakes, and goji berries. As there are chia seeds in this one, you can also make a yummy pudding by pouring nut milk over it and letting it sit in the fridge for about 25 minutes.

Given a choice, I will always choose real food that is endowed by nature with vitamins and minerals rather than nutrient-fortified junk food. While it is important in some cases to rely on fortified food, in other cases, it’s just another deceptive marketing tactic—or what Dr. David Katz calls “the nutritional equivalent of lipstick on a pig.”¹⁶