‘An Act of War’: Big Food Intentionally Addicting Kids to Toxic Foods
Big Food targets young consumers in the U.S. to get them addicted to unhealthy products — which frequently contain ingredients banned by other countries — according to two food safety and nutrition advocates interviewed on SiriusXM’s “Megyn Kelly Show.”
Big Food targets young consumers in the U.S. to get them addicted to unhealthy products — which frequently contain ingredients banned by other countries — according to two food safety and nutrition advocates interviewed on SiriusXM’s “Megyn Kelly Show.”
Vani Hari, an author and blogger known as the “Food Babe,” and Grace Price, an investigative journalist and filmmaker who produced “Cancer: A Food-Borne Illness,” are calling on U.S. food manufacturers to change their practices and produce foods with the same healthier ingredients the companies use in identical products they sell in other countries.
Last month, Hari and Price participated in a Senate roundtable on nutrition and the chronic disease epidemic in the U.S.
“We have an opportunity right now to let the American public know” about unsafe ingredients in foods sold in the U.S., Hari said during the interview. “We are under a massive experiment. If any other country was doing this to us, it would be considered an act of war … We’ve got to do something about it.”
Price, who is 18 years old, said American food manufacturers are using tactics that Big Tobacco pioneered to market harmful products to youth. “My generation is so clearly being targeted by these Big Food companies,” she said.
U.S. food companies ‘using toxic ingredients’ that are banned overseas
Hari told Kelly that American food manufacturers use thousands of ingredients they don’t include in identical products sold in other countries.
“Right now, American food companies are using toxic ingredients that [in other countries] are either banned or regulated differently, in the same exact products that they serve American citizens,” Hari said.
Hari cited McDonald’s French fries, which she said contain 11 ingredients in the U.S., but only three in other countries, and Skittles, “which uses 10 different artificial food dyes” in the U.S. — and titanium dioxide, which is “banned in Europe because it can cause DNA damage.”
Hari also singled out Kellogg’s for “targeting little children,” after pledging in 2015 to remove artificial food dyes from its cereal products by 2018.
“But they never did,” she said. They “lied about it and they started to create new cereals that were targeting the smallest of children, using the most popular toddler songs, like ‘Baby Shark’ and Disney’s ‘Little Mermaid.’”
Hari blamed lax food regulations in the U.S. “Almost every single major American food company is doing this because they’re using the lack of regulation in our U.S. food system to their advantage.” In 1958, there were only 800 food additives approved for use in the U.S., but today that number exceeds 10,000, she said.
By comparison, the number of approved food additives in the European Union is 400, Hari said.
“There are thousands of chemicals that have not even been reviewed by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] at all,” Hari said. “They’ve been literally just slid right into the food system without anybody knowing what the risks are, what the safety data looks like.”
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/health/an-act-of-war-big-food-intentionally-addicting-kids-to-toxic-foods