Reading ingredient labels has become a form of entertainment for me, weird I know, but I see a lot of ingredients I have never heard of, let alone can pronounce. I came across an ingredient so bizarre that it requires a hyphen: mono- and diglycerides. This food combination is considered one ingredient and can be found in beverages, ice cream, gum, whipped toppings, margarine, bread, and other Read more

If you eat processed foods, you eat food additives. There really is no way around that fact. Some additives are benign and might even be considered beneficial, while others you might just want to avoid. I recently came across the ingredients alpha tocopherol and wanted to know which side of the line it fell on. Here's what I learned. Alpha tocopherol is a form of vitamin E that is added to oils Read more

Another day of food shopping, another weird ingredient. What in the world is malic acid? I found it on the label of Dannon Fruit on the Bottom yogurt. It doesn't sound healthy to me, but I may just be thinking this because it also contains high-fructose corn syrup – an ingredient I don't like to find in my yogurt. To find out, just read more Read more

When I was checking out all the yogurts at the grocery store to do the yogurt breakdown, in the list of ingredients on many of the containers, I saw modified corn starch. Although it sounds super unappetizing and something I wouldn't want to eat anyway, I'm wondering, is it something that's unhealthy? To find out read more Read more

You know I love my Cascadian Farm Oats & Honey Granola. I trust this company, and know the food is organic, but what's with the maltodextrin in the list of ingredients? It doesn't sound very natural, so what is it? If you're curious to know then read more Read more

As I was researching ingredients for the yogurt breakdown, the word carmine was on a few containers. Any idea what this is? You may not want to know. It's actually a bright-red pigment that's obtained from female scaly insects such as the cochineal. It's used in food, artificial flowers, paints, makeup, and ink. Nice. Just what I wanted to be eating. I'm sorry, but last I checked, the Read more

If you're a label reader, and let me tell you I sure am, you might have noticed carrageenan listed as one of the ingredients. When I first saw it listed on a Ben and Jerry's pint (yes, ice cream is OK when eaten in moderation), it brought up a couple of questions for me – What exactly is carrageenan and is it something I should avoid? Carrageenan is actually extracted from red seaweed, and the Read more