Swallow This (15 page)

You can certainly see why food manufacturers might want to get away from industrially refined oils. The process creates a contaminant, 3-MCPD, linked with infertility in rats, suppression of immune function and possible carcinogenicity. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as a ‘possible human carcinogen’. Nevertheless, the EU’s Scientific Committee on Food has established a ‘tolerable daily intake’ for 3-MCPD. So what if there’s another little dose of carcinogen in our food? The powers that be don’t seem to be bothered. And if you happen to be a higher than average consumer of deep-fried foods, that’s just your tough luck.

Whatever the oil of choice, the extreme heat and length of time required to fry certain popular foods creates another well-documented health hazard: acrylamide. This nerve poison causes cancer in animals and is classed by the US Environmental Protection Agency as a ‘probable carcinogen’ in humans. In 2014, the European Food Safety Authority eventually concluded that acrylamide poses a bigger cancer risk to humans – particularly children – than it had previously thought. Up until then, it had taken the line that there was insufficient evidence available to determine the actual risk.

Crisps and chips have been identified as the biggest source of acrylamide in the British diet. In 2013, Bradford-based researchers – part of an international team studying the diet of pregnant women and newborns – concluded that women who eat foods high in acrylamide during pregnancy are more likely to produce babies with lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences. These birth outcomes have been linked to subsequent health problems, such as delayed development of the brain and nervous system. British babies had the highest levels of acrylamide of all the five European centres studied, almost twice the level of Danish babies, largely because their mothers share the national fondness for deep-fried chips and crisps.

Obviously, food manufacturers and fast food chains can’t take all the blame for the UK’s high acrylamide intake. Many home cooks use their own deep-fat fryer, although the widespread availability of pre-fried oven chips makes that piece of equipment increasingly redundant. But although acrylamide is found in homemade foods, international scientists studying the toxin for the EU’s Heatox (Heat-Generated Food Toxicants) project, concluded that ‘a large proportion of acrylamide intake comes from industrially-prepared food’. They pointed out that the amount of acrylamide we eat in home-cooked food is ‘relatively small, when compared with industrially or restaurant-prepared foods’.

The sheer retail abundance of factory-fried products that few home cooks would ever attempt to make at home certainly spurs us on to eat more fried foods than we otherwise might, simply because they are so hassle-free. Frying crisps is not a core competence of the home cook, and why would you bother anyway, when crisps are probably the easiest food to buy in Britain? Where doesn’t sell crisps? It is food manufacturing that makes high intakes of deep-fried products, such as crisps, possible.

Only the most devoted home cooks will go to the effort of breading a chicken breast or a piece of fish, first coating it with flour, then dipping it in eggs and breadcrumbs, then frying it. Very few domestic cooks will go to the bother of making a batter from scratch. But it is seductively easy these days just to pop a pre-battered or breadcrumbed meal in the microwave.

In fact, breadcrumbs and batters are a big feature of many processed foods. No wonder. They bulk out the more expensive ingredients. You can call something a chicken nugget even if its greasy, starchy jacket vastly outweighs the meagre quantity of mulched chicken meat within. As for breaded or battered scampi, that was always a licence to print money, a strategy for selling derisory amounts of blitzed-up prawn padded out by oily cladding.

Food manufacturers also find batters and crumb coatings useful because they reduce one of their perennial technical issues: excessive oil ‘pick-up’. Here is the problem; when food is cooked in really fresh hot oil, the oil acts as a heat transfer agent, and there is no excessive absorption of oil into the food (pick-up). But as industrial food manufacturers use oils over and over again, the chemical and physical properties of the oil change, causing more oil to be absorbed. Never fazed, food manufacturers get round this challenge by creating an edible film around the food (turkey drummer, fish fillet, veggie burger, whatever) to bind in moisture. To do this job, they can turn to specially developed fish, meat and dairy proteins, sugar-based ‘gelators’, or hydrocolloids such as xanthan gum, konjac or HPMC ((hydroxypropyl)methyl cellulose). These gummy aids form a sticky barrier gel around the food and contribute greatly to its ‘freeze-thaw’ stability. In other words, the batter or crumb won’t appear soggy and start coming away from the food when it is defrosted. A ‘pre-dusting’ in a chemically modified starch will also act, in food manufacturing language, as a ‘texturiser’, sealing in moisture and reducing ‘blow-out’ (when the food bursts out of its coating).

Somehow, the more you learn about commercial-scale deep frying, the less you feel like eating the resulting products, and to give full credit to the public health establishment in this regard, you have been warned. Most of us have heard the message that too many deep-fried foods are bad for our health, even if we tend to believe that saturated fat is the reason for the objection. But when polyunsaturate-rich oils are used to make non-fried products, in industrial baking for example, they are presented as nutritional saviours. The smoothest and most oleaginous of ambassadors for this proposition is margarine, or to give it its more bewitching modern title, low-fat spread. Low-fat spread is the family pet of the UK nutrition establishment, head prefect and hero product, an Achilles in the vanguard of the healthy eating charge. Its healthfulness is enshrined in government eating advice. The NHS even helps to sell the stuff: ‘Butter is high in fat, so try to use it sparingly. Low-fat spreads can be used instead of butter’, it tells us with great authority.

Actually, you’d think that the dietetic establishment might by now have become more circumspect in the advice it dispenses, given that for half a century, it promoted margarine spreads stiff with trans fats, which we now know to be decisive life-shorteners. In 1993, for instance, the leading ‘heart-healthy’ margarine contained 21% trans fats and ‘normal’ margarines were one-third trans fats. It is only in the last decade that manufacturers have begun reformulating their spreads with allegedly less damaging alternatives. But don’t expect any mea culpa, no ‘sorry, we got it wrong’ statement from government nutrition gurus, or for that matter from the charities that become plump and lazy, recycling and disseminating tablets of nutritional wisdom dispensed from above. Instead, they have tried to bury that particular embarrassment.

While NHS guidelines now grudgingly acknowledge that ‘consuming a diet high in trans fats can lead to high cholesterol levels in the blood, which can lead to health conditions, such as heart attacks, strokes and heart disease’, a statement to minimise any alarm caused follows closely. ‘However, most people in the UK don’t eat a lot of trans fats. We eat about half the recommended maximum of trans fats on average, which is why the more commonly eaten saturated fat is considered a bigger health risk’. In other words, trans fats weren’t and aren’t a problem, but those deviant saturated fats devised by psychopathic Mother Nature are still the root of all evil. This continues to be the entrenched official nutrition gospel, even though in 2010, a major review of 21 scientific studies on fat stated that ‘there is no significant evidence for concluding that saturated fat causes heart disease’. By 2014, the British Heart Foundation was still adhering to its anti-saturated fat doctrine after a systematic, wide-ranging study, funded by the foundation itself, examined 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, and found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk.

For their part, manufacturers of spreads are keen to tell us, once again, that they are now using much healthier trans fat-free oils. Groundhog day. This time interesterified fats are presented as the heroes of the hour. But are they?

To make these interesterified fats, oil refiners rearrange the fatty acids in liquid oil at a high temperature, and under pressure, using enzymes or chemical catalysts. This changes the melting points and makes the resulting oils harder and more ‘plastic’ or malleable. Whether interesterified oils are any less lethal in health terms than the hydrogenated ones they are replacing remains to be seen, but already research studies are flagging up negative effects on blood glucose, insulin, immune function and liver enzymes in humans. As one group of researchers warns: ‘More research is warranted to determine the appropriateness of interesterified fat consumption, particularly before it becomes insidiously embedded in the food supply similar to TFA [Trans Fatty Acids] and intake levels are achieved that compromise long-term health.’ That sounds awfully like scientists saying: ‘We made a big mistake with trans fats. Let’s not make another one.’

Nevertheless, the dietetic establishment’s evangelical enthusiasm for spreads, now made with RBD oils that have been interesterified, goes on unchecked. For instance, in 2014 the UK government Change4Life campaign, which is meant to be about urging citizens to make healthier food choices, asked: ‘Why not swap butter in your mash for lower fat butters and spreads?’ Anticipating groans and ‘Do I have to?’ reactions, it added chirpily: ‘It will still be creamy and just as tasty.’

Really? Even margarine manufacturers never try to assert that spreads taste as good as butter. Wisely so: to do so is preposterous. Butter has an inimitable flavour, and is clean on the palate. Margarine spreads, on the other hand, leave a greasy coating on the roof of the mouth and taste of nothing pleasant. Yet switching from butter to margarine is a UK government-endorsed ‘Smart Swap’. That our public health advisers never miss an opportunity to champion such a thoroughly artificial and fake food concoction speaks volumes about their failure to grasp the essentials of good food. But it does highlight their queasily close embrace of industrial food manufacturing, and all its dubious products.

If you think about it, margarine is an edible construction that owes its very existence to technology. It is a forced marriage of two cheap substances that won’t naturally come together: oil – refined and processed out of all recognition – and water. This unwilling twosome is coerced into an alliance brokered by emulsifying additives. The resulting slippery sludge then needs to be coloured to be lifted out of murky greyness, flavoured to help us get it down our gullets, fortified with vitamins it lacks, and spiked with substances to stop it turning rancid. Is this
really
what we ought to be eating?

8

Flavoured

So accustomed are we to seeing that familiar word ‘flavouring’ on the ingredients lists of manufactured food, we have almost stopped noticing it. At one level, it is easily comprehensible: a substance that imparts flavour. At another level, the term is utterly opaque. What
is
flavouring actually? Is it animal, vegetable, mineral? How is it made? What is its composition? What does it look like? We swallow these mystery additives regularly in everything from crisps and drinks to ready meals and yogurts, yet most of us haven’t a clue about them.

Because flavourings always sit so far down on the ingredients listing, we can be forgiven for assuming that they are just trivial little extras. Like a few last-minute drops of truffle oil on a painstaking risotto, we want to think that they are merely rounding off well-made food. But that perception couldn’t be further from the truth. Although food manufacturers add flavourings to processed food in tiny quantities, they have a disproportionately transformative effect on them. In fact, they are the miraculous ‘X factor’ that makes countless manufactured foods possible. In the words of the flavouring company, Carotex: ‘It is difficult to imagine how certain products would taste without flavours added in their production.’ And why might that be? ‘The technological processes of mass food production often result in loss of flavour and mouthfeel. To compensate for this, products are enriched with supplementary flavours.’

This circumspect language does not convey the full extent of food manufacturers’ dependency on flavourings. Forget enrichment; that term implies that you are taking something that is well endowed with flavour in its own right, then improving it by adding something that further embellishes it. In the context of processed food, quite the opposite is the case. The hard fact of the matter is that the extreme temperatures and stress involved in industrial food manufacture do grievous bodily harm to natural ingredients, irrevocably damaging their intrinsic textures, flavours and aromas. Any casualties that aren’t dead on the pavement after the brutal assault are left clinging on to life in a shaky, weakened, scarred, never-the-same-again state. They need help, and so added flavourings step in to boost them, additives that make it possible to sell the otherwise unsellable by conning us into thinking that food and drink tastes of something that it does not.

Although hoodwinking our taste buds is the prime driver for adding flavourings, their pivotal importance in food processing doesn’t end there. Not only do they cover for a dearth of true taste, they also do the vital job of actively suppressing undesirable flavours and smells created by the manufacturing process. Carotex informs its manufacturer clients that its flavourings can be used ‘as masking agents to cover any unwanted odours’. Flaverco, a company selling dairy flavourings ‘with flavour strength up to 70 times that of cream and milk’, explains to prospective customers that they are ‘excellent at masking off flavours’. These ‘off’ tastes and smells are part and parcel of industrial food processing, a consequence of severe treatments that denature them – ultra-heat treatment, centrifugation, evaporation, deodorising, spray drying, sterilisation, pasteurisation, extrusion, for instance – or traces of chemical solvents and residual contaminants, such as heavy metals.