As I've said in other related threads, the food (be it dairy, meat, wheat products, even soft drinks) overseas is different due to how we process things in the United States and the differing restrictions on things like additives, preservatives, liberal use of HCFS, etc...
Some other tips of advice from the author:
Look for 100% whole grain as the only ingredient. If it says "Enriched" don't buy it. If the ingredients include folate, iron, thiamine, etc. that also means it has been enriched.
Favor organically grown bread, pasta, flour. Organic wheat products have not been coated with Round -up just days before harvest. Even my local Food Lion has organically grown bread with 100% whole wheat in the bakery section.
Several brands of Italian pastas are grown organically and without any of the practices I mention in this article. Read the labels carefully. These pastas are about twice the price of regular enriched pasta but for me, the $3 vs the $1.50 for a box of pasta is well worth it for such a superior product.
Make your own bread or pasta. I have started buying King Arthur brand flour, which is not enriched, bleached, bromated or otherwise adulterated. I use my old bread machine to knead the dough then let it rise for a few hours and bake in a traditional bread pan. One loaf per week is great to have with dinner, for lunch sandwiches and even with some honey on top at breakfast.
Look for bakeries that make bread in the traditional manner, with 100% whole wheat and sourdough starter. They are few and far between but I have found a few in my area.
This. This is why people who can’t digest pasta here can go to Italy and digest theirs. They thought it was the gluten. It was the “enrichment” and pesticides we use.
Buy organic pasta and look for 0% iron. Then it’s not enriched. You want the least iron % on that package. Bake with only organic flour without enrichment. You can find both in most stores. Maybe you need a slight specialty store for the pasta. Try bristol farms or Whole Foods. Pasta is not that pricy. Eat food that won’t harm you.
“...Several brands of Italian pastas are grown organically...”
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I never grew any pasta.
What do pasta seeds look like?
Good info.
Bookmark for the grocery list.
No one uses Round Up on a field days before harvest. The author is an idiot.
Link does not work.
First off, this is not true. There have always been health issues. Farming grains was able to feed many more people than hunting and gathering, enabling the development of civilization. But there was a trade off in health. In era when the average life expectancy was very low anyway, long term health consequences were minimized. Even so, human health declined when we switched to agriculture.
Not sure about enrichments. Pure white flour has practically no nutritional value. There was a time when poor children on a diet of biscuits and white gravy were dying from malnutrition. Originally, enriched meant it was sprayed with vitamins, which saved these kids. Perhaps I have been misled here, but that has been my understanding. Pesticides and GMO I will admit are a problem, but that isn’t the same as enriched.
The bread in France tastes better because it is fresher.
If it sits uneaten, it tastes just like what you get for French bread here in the USA.
Ping to send to a friend later. :)
I get the good stuff... Organic hard red wheat. Grind our own flour. Fresh-ground flour makes AMAZING bread.
P4L
Our farmers sell our grain to China. The Chinese "process it" and ship it back to our bakeries here in the U.S. is the gist of it. What are the Chinese adding to the process that can't be added by our flour mills here?
Same with many meat products, including hamburger, seafood, etc. Makes me only want to shop from mom & pop bakeries, meat markets, and local farmers.
I’m from a family of naturalists who lived/live on a small ranch-we grew and raised our food, so processed and/or sugary food was not available to me until I came to a large city to go to college. Some people called my family “the health nuts” and thought they were weird because they thought processed food like bleached flour and rice, margarine, etc was like poison...
I ate dorm food and junk/fast food for a few months because it was cheap and everyone else ate it-I lost energy, gained fat for the only time in my life, felt sick a lot and messed up my digestion-on a weekend home, my mom scolded me, loaded my truck with grass fed meat from the freezer, veggies from the garden-and real butter.
I improved in a few days-and I’ve never eaten any garbage again-if it comes in a box, isn’t fresh, is processed or in a can it isn’t in my house-I stick to a paleo diet and it works great for me...
Look for 100% whole grain as the only ingredient. If it says “Enriched” don’t buy it. If the ingredients include folate, iron, thiamine, etc. that also means it has been enriched.
For anyone interested this paper has a decent synopsis of the history of food fortification regulations in the U.S.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208880/
WTH is totalresults.net link? Looks fishy to me.
A little known secret of the American honey industry is that much food-ingredient, industrial honey has traces of glyphosate and tylosin, an animal antibiotic
Buy local where you know where the Bees forage
Just buy non GMO grain, tastes better and does not make you sick. Its banned in Europe.