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Posted by bilsbie 13 hours ago

Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists(twitter.com)
92 points | 97 commentspage 3
jjtheblunt 13 hours ago|
@dang : the title shortener seems to have semantically goofed via syntactically having goofed
dang 13 hours ago|
In this case it was the submitted title but I think we can fix it by shortening further.

(Submitted title was "scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed 1st". Software rewrote it to "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first". I've since changed it.)

jjtheblunt 12 hours ago||
thanks
diogenescynic 5 hours ago||
There's an entire industry of this--often operating under the term 'nutraceuticals' (i.e. food additives/preservatives) and other weird stuff. My friend works for one of these companies and was telling me to NEVER eat the Chinese sausages from Costco because they use a bunch of weird anti-fungal ingredients that they just label 'natural flavoring'. This is going on with literally everything sold at the grocery store. You can't even buy just Italian pasta and assume it's safe--Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate. If you want glyphosate free products, you have to actually buy specialty Italian pastas that use Italian wheat. It's insane how hard it is to just eat non-processed foods.
lostlogin 5 hours ago||
> It's insane how hard it is to just eat non-processed foods.

Convenience is killing us and the planet. But the alternative makes life much harder.

ragall 5 hours ago||
> Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate

False. The wheat sold into the EU is not treated with glyphosate, and is strictly verified to comply with EU regulations. Canadian farmers are happy to do that because they charge more for the EU-compliant wheat than the NA-compliant one, and Italians are happy to buy it.

hereme888 4 hours ago||
Most people make money ultimately by lying and deceiving/manipulating. Either works for a company whose income is based on the practice, or directly participates in them.

Of course at the expense of others. In this case, our health.

Is your resume any more truthful than these ingredient labels?

s0rce 13 hours ago|
I guess if you just look at the first ingredient but its both obvious there are multiple sources of sugar/simple carbs and that jam is typically very heavily sweetened; this is how it has a long shelf life.
autoexec 13 hours ago|
Jam is a pretty sweet product, but that doesn't mean I'd expect I'd expect more sweeteners than fruit. A basic recipe for strawberry jam might require a couple pounds of strawberries and a couple cups of sugar. That'd still have a shelf life of a year or more (unopened).
marky1991 13 hours ago|||
But sugar is literally added to jelly as the preservative, that's why jelly exists to begin with.

For example, the very first recipe for strawberry jelly from some horrible spam recipe site:

2 cups (16 ounces) pure strawberry juice (I used 3 1/2 pounds ripe, fresh strawberries to get this amount of juice) 3 1/3 cups (666 grams) granulated sugar

It's literally more sugar than strawberry juice.

ron_k 1 hour ago||
Sure, that’s why sugar is added, but it doesn’t have to be. The point is to remove free water (water that bacteria can use, I don’t know the English expression for that), and you can do that by:

1. adding more sugar

2. cooking it for a longer time

3. adding pectin (either store-bought or from natural sources)

Of course it depends on the kind of fruit, but it’s quite rare to have more sugar than fruit, even without pectin or longer cooking time.

cryptonector 12 hours ago|||
Or maybe you would expect more sweetener. What's wrong with honesty in labeling?