Criminal Masterminds and Nefarious Nutrition

When most people envision a crime scene, they imagine a place crawling with cops collecting and bagging possible evidence. Yellow caution tape haphazardly thrown around the scene wards off curious onlookers, and a chalk outline of a human being tells the mysterious story of missing persons and unanswered questions. As iconic as this crime scene is to most people, there's another image that pops into my mind when I think of crime. The image is that of my local grocery store, and the victims of the crime? You and me.

Food fraud is a term used to describe the food industry's practice of intentionally selling a product with false information on its packaging or with harmful ingredients in it that are not listed. Food industries do this because they can sell food cheaper or gain greater economic profits by using fake ingredients. One of the grossest examples of food adulteration is in alcohol. Industries sometimes add harmful chemicals such as antifreeze to alcohol to increase the intoxication effect. Antifreeze is highly poisonous when consumed, but because alcohol is known for its dangers to human health anyway, food industries get away with putting it in their products. Other commonly adulterated products include milk, honey, saffron, and coffee. Testing for adulteration in food is extremely difficult because there are so many different substances that food industries use in replace of  real food ingredients. In our crime scene, the FDA is our policing agency, but the ineffectiveness of food adulteration tests and the ineffectiveness of the FDA in general lets food industries get away with the serious crime of food fraud

Besides outright putting harmful ingredients in our food, food industries also pull the wool over consumers' eyes in more subtle ways. An example of this is the trans fat label. Years ago, the FDA began requiring nutritional facts labels to list the amount of trans fat in foods. Trans fat is an especially harmful fat that contributes to heart disease and has other adverse health effects. On the surface, the trans fat rule seemed like a heroic move on part of the FDA; however, the rule contains a loophole. Any foods with less than .5 grams of trans fat in them can be advertised as having "0 grams trans fat". Although this seems like a negligible amount of fat, repeatedly eating these types of foods adds up to a high consumption of trans fat.  

I return to the scene of the crimes, as previously discussed. It is March 10th, 6:48, aisle 3 of your local market. There's no yellow caution tape warning of danger, no food police searching for evidence of food adulteration, no criminal behind bars. You're on your own. And if something isn't done, if something isn't changed, the next victim will be you.