You know, lately I’ve gotten into the habit of looking up the ingredients before I consume anything. Partly it’s to avoid processed food at all costs. If it looks like a Sushi menu and has more than 5 or 6 ingredients, I shy away from it. Running has a lot to do with it and it’s also the realization that I’ve been eating crap all this time. Here we are worried about obesity, hyper tension, heart disease, diabetes and this is what my kids get after a practice game at the on-field snack shop. For free might I add. I asked my kids to read the ingredients and after the first two, they gave my that shy smile and said, ‘Dad, just a little ok? We’ll save the rest for later’. But I can’t believe we are feeding kids junk food like this.

Kids Junk Food

Here’s what the ingredients look like. Leave a comment with your guess as to what this kids junk food is (nope, it’s not deep fried twinkies) and I’ll send you a free copy of my running book! Hint, it starts with a  … Uh, no, not going to make it that easy!

Photo courtesy cambodia4kidsorg

• Sugar
• Corn Syrup
• Maltodextrin
• Dextrose
• Modified Food Starch (Corn)
• Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil
• Contains less than 2% of the following:
• Citric Acid
• Water
• Artificial Flavors
• Artificial Colors
• Red 40
• Blue 1
• Yellow 5
• Yellow 6

What exactly is in this kids junk food? Pretty serious junk of course. I found this lovely quote about Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil:

Consuming partially hydrogenated oils is like inhaling cigarette smoke. They will kill you — slowly, over time, but as surely as you breathe. And in the meantime, they will make you fat!

Very nice. I’m learning more about nutrition (the what not to eat list is getting longer), but partial hydrogenation is taking oil, passing hydrogen bubbles through them to make it more dense. Apparently it’s to increase shelf life and also a low cost way of making a butter substitute. This is trans fat as in Calvin’s transmogrification. Only problem with the trans fat is that it’s stuff that the human body hasn’t seen in a million years and has absolutely no clue what to do with it. And that’s what we are feeding children now? Eric Orton, Born to Run coach, recently posted a picture of all the companies that would go bankrupt if the entire U.S. population ate healthy. Interesting perspective on the junk food market.

According to the Wiki (makes this blog legit, doesn’t it?), Blue 1 is “poorly absorbed from the gastro-intestinal tract”. It ain’t fiber for sure. There’s more: “It also reacts with certain bile pigments to form green feces“. Nice. Good way to check if your kids ate junk food is to look before you flush. You know the really sad part? I never paid any attention to what I ate until this past year. Never too late right? Now, where’s that Chia Fresca?