Foods That Are So Processed, They’re Not Even Real Food

Sadly, the gamut hardly stops at potassium sorbate in your what's really in those "healthy" egg white sandwich when it comes to the investigation of the ingredients in American convenience foods. According to The Huffington Post, your everyday "pasteurized cheese product" and "frozen dairy dessert" are really code names for Odyssey-length ingredient lists that contain everything from sodium alginate to vitamin A palmitate. Delicious.

Listen, it's not like we thought that "cheez" in a can was good for us or anything. What gets us riled up is the knowledge that most of us Americans have fallen prey to processed foods that are marketed as "light" or "healthy," only to realize that, at best, we're eating nutrition-devoid air, and, at worst, we're consuming chemicals that could potentially be disastrous for our health. And — lest you think that we here at R29 are being all high and mighty about our food choices — we admit that we ourselves have been duped by convenience foods (just yesterday, our assistant editor was aghast to discover all of the gnarly additives in her favorite busy-day egg-white wrap).

What's the answer? Well, barring a re-vamp of the entire American food industry, we consumers need to take responsibility for the foods we put in our bodies. Yes, this might mean some extra time reading ingredient labels — and getting up a bit earlier to scramble our own eggs — but we think that the peace of mind and body is more than worth it. Who's in? (The Huffington Post)