Fast food and packaged, processed foods have had a bad reputation and deservedly so. They are high in fats, sugars, preservatives and artificial additives. However sometimes, the bad press that these foods receive takes on a life of its own. A lot of misinformation and alarmist theories become attached to these and to other foods that we eat:
There are all sorts of theories about KFC floating around: it isn’t really chicken but other animal meat they serve. It’s mutant chicken they serve. Its specially bred chicken with six legs! Happily none of this is true. Kentucky Fried Chicken may be unhealthy, but it is legally unhealthy.
No it isn’t. However, it is true that Coca Cola can make quite an effective toilet cleaner. While drinking the sweet, fizzy drink is not the same as drinking Harpic, it isn’t very good for you either.
I personally think chicken nuggets are fairly disgusting, but my kids like them. So when I heard they are made from pink slime, I was horrified. Turns out, there is no ‘pink slime’ as WhatsApp University would have us believe, however, the liquidised raw material is ghastly looking. Chicken nuggets are nutritionally quite poor, may contain fat and skin and may taste like cardboard (that last bit is only my opinion).
They left a burger out in the open and showed us how it did not rot, supposedly because it was so laden with chemicals. Well something similar would happen to a homemade burger as well. It’s just that fried items don’t have a lot of moisture and lose even more moisture when left out in the open.
Maggi contains lead, pig fat, wax, MSG and all sorts of other toxic things, depending upon where the message emanates. However, these claims are mostly false and have been categorically denied by Nestle. That said, Maggi consists of refined carbs and fat and salt. So it isn’t a particularly healthy or nutritious thing to eat either.
They tell you chocolate is very good for health because of antioxidant claims and cite ‘studies’ to substantiate the claim. They even claim chocolate makes us happier and smarter. All those claims are about cacao beans not the sugary bars we consume. So any such claims are to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Not so. Samosas, pakodas, pani puri are all far from healthy. They are mostly fried carbs, with lots of salt. Small amounts of veggies in them don’t really make them healthier.
Brown eggs are priced higher than white eggs and we are told this is because they are healthier. The only difference between brown and white eggs is brown hens produce brown eggs, white feathered hens produce white eggs.
They tell us brown sugar is healthier than white sugar because it contains certain minerals and again charge us more. Not so. Brown sugar is white sugar with some molasses added to it; that is all.
Tea again makes the ‘healthy’ claim because of its supposed antioxidant content. However to imagine that the tea we usually have – sweet, milky, with all sorts of flavourings and boiled to within an inch of its life – is healthy is rather difficult to believe. So while many of us may collectively love tea and enjoy it as a way to bond socially, let’s not tell ourselves that we drink it for the betterment of our health!
Do you have something interesting you would like to share? Write to us at [email protected]
