How do well-loved food products measure up in terms of health and nutrition?
I wanted to find out because, honestly, I'm asked about this all the time.
You see, as I continue to study whole foods, I want to share what I learn. As I do, I'm asked to reassure friends and family that their particular food choices are as healthy as they believe them to be. And to be honest, I can't always give them the reassurance they want.
There are a lot of foods which aren't very nutritious at all. And many of the things people eat are downright harmful. Of course, there are many more food products which are both. That is, many so-called "foods" are:
- lacking in nutrition, and...
- contain ingredients which are harmful.
So I've decided to write a series of blog posts, called Food Study Fridays, all about some of these questionable foods. Foods that fall into the two categories listed in bullets above and that are well-loved and thought to be good choices by many (including people I personally know).
I'm starting the Food Study Fridays series with an old favorite: canned chicken noodle soup.
As you can see from the picture above, this is a well-known brand of canned soup. It's packaging states on the front that it contains: "delicious egg noodles made FRESH each batch". And on the back, it says (among other things): "No artificial colours or flavours".
Also on the back, is the nutrition facts label (NFL). Please notice that the serving size is only 250ml (1 cup) of prepared soup. That means that the whole can of soup, when mixed correctly with "one full can of water" makes 2 servings.
Do you see the amount of sodium in each 250ml (1 cup) serving? It's 800mg, 33% of the daily recommended amount of sodium!
And what if you were to eat the whole can of prepared soup? Well then you'd be ingesting 1,600mg, 66% of your daily recommended amount of sodium. Yikes!
But that's not all. Not by a long shot. A picture of the ingredients list is shown below and to the right:
The picture is a little fuzzy, I know. So here are the listed ingredients in this particular canned chicken noodle soup:
- chicken broth (water, chicken stock)
- egg noodles (wheat flour, whole eggs)
- seasoned chicken (soy)
- salt
- chicken fat
- cornstarch
- monosodium glutamate
- flavour
- onion powder
- yeast extract
- spice
- beta carotene
- dehydrated garlic
Out of the 13 ingredients labeled, 5 are very questionable.
The first question I have is this: When the company lists "seasoned chicken (soy)", do they mean that the seasoned chicken is actually made of soy? Or do they mean that they seasoned their chicken with soy?
I'm not sure. But even if we assume that they made the soup with real chicken seasoned with soy, there is still more to worry about here.
"Monosodium glutamate" and "yeast extract" are both excitotoxic flavor enhancers. On top of that, "flavour" and "spice" are likely to be excitotoxins as well. (To learn more about excitotoxins, click here.)
That means we have at least two excitotoxins in this soup, and possibly even four! And did you know that excitotoxins are more easily absorbed into your body when in a liquid--like soup?
So here's the bottom line: What the company claims on the front of the label of this particular product may be true. This soup very well may contain "delicious egg noodles made FRESH each batch".
If that's the main reason you eat chicken noodle soup, okay. You may not be bothered by the high sodium, or the chicken seasoned with soy (or is it just soy seasoned to taste like chicken?), or the 2-4 separate excitotoxic flavor enhancers.
Or maybe it does bother you...