The War Between Shelf Life and Health

Let’s say there’s a guy in your neighborhood who’s a real troublemaker.  Anytime something goes wrong, he’s right in the middle of it.  Now you have two choices.  You and the gang can banish him, send him away forever and forbid him to come around.  Or you can get him to mend his ways and change.  This is the story of fats and oils in manufactured, processed, food-like items.  

From the point of view of the food processing industry, fats, or oils (you may use the terms interchangeably), are troublemakers.  They are fragile.  They break down easily.  Oxygen in the air causes them to become oxidized, which gives them a nasty taste.  When this happens, we say that a product has gone “rancid.”  The food industry will do anything to keep a product from going rancid.  Rancidity is the enemy of shelf life.  Oxygen is the enemy of shelf life.  But you may have noticed that oxygen is everywhere.  So the food industry needs to employ some pretty drastic measures to keep it away from fats.

You know that strange, “off” smell that old whole-grain crackers get?  That smell develops when the oil in the germ of the grain becomes oxidized and turns rancid.  So the first innovation involved learning to remove the oil-rich germ from whole grains to make “white,” or “refined” flour.  To refine means to remove the coarse impurities.  It’s advertising spin, pure and simple.  

The bad guy was simply banished.  No germ means no oil; any product without the germ is going to have a substantially longer shelf life.  Longer shelf life, of course, translates into more reliable profits.  Which wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that it isn’t an even swap.  We have paid the ultimate price — our health.  But luckily it’s reversible, so you don’t have to worry.

The second technological innovation was to figure out how to convert fats to a form that made them more chemically stable, and less susceptible to the degradative effects of oxygen.  This is like the case of the bad guy who changed his ways and stuck around.  As a result of this chemical transformation, the shelf life of products made with converted fat  increased markedly.  Think Twinkies, or Ho-Hos, or fast-food french fries that still look great six months after they come out of the deep fat fryer.

I make it a policy not to eat anything that won’t go bad relatively soon.  To my way of thinking, if the bugs won’t eat it, it’s not food.

Take a stick of margarine, for example, and toss it up on top of the refrigerator for a few months.  It might get a little dusty, but otherwise it should be good to go.   That can’t be a good sign.

Have you, yourself, ever had a jar of Crisco go bad?  Think about that…
 
The explosion of the 20th century food industry would not have been possible without these two technological innovations.   I hesitate to call them advances, because although they may have seemed beneficial at first, in hindsight they are not.  It took time, close to a century, to realize that manufactured calories aren’t an improvement over the real thing.

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If you’ve never been on “Your Health is on Your Plate” before, and you’re not sure where to start, visit Let’s Start at the Very Beginning to get a jumpstart on preventing diabetes and obesity in yourself and the ones you love!!

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