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FOOD - an explanation
Milk & Ocean Water
A strange heading? We need to consume plenty of water, but you wouldn't drink ocean water because it would kill you. However, when you remove all the salts and impurities, the clean water is ideal. You don't say "its ocean derived, therefore I can't drink it"! It is real H20 and necessary for life.
Although milk contains many good things, the undesirable parts should be removed first ie., fat, cholesterol, toxins from the cow etc. and this is what happens in the whey making process. All the undesirables are removed (to make cheese) and the remaining whey is ideal for humans. It is interesting that human milk is 80% whey and it is identical to the whey in cows milk. Cows milk is only 20% whey, the rest is designed for calves, not people.
Additives
Food arouses not only the appetite but also the emotions, and in eating we need to feel satisfied, not only nutritionally but psychologically. The origin of food is all important in this: the attitude "put it down, you don't know where it's been", learnt in childhood, is deeply ingrained in most people's consciousness.
In recent years, many have become anxious about where their food has been, to the extent that words like "additive", "processed", "chemical", "emulsifier", "antioxidant", and the various additive code numbers have become the best appetite suppressants since cod liver oil. People only half know where their food comes from, and it sounds menacing.
Learn a little more and the picture is more reassuring.
The Chemical Lunch.
Do you fancy sitting down to a plateful of denatured proteins, polypeptides, amino acids, mono-di- and polysaccharides, cellulose, cholesterol, linolenic, arachidonic, lactic, propionic and butyric acids, oleic and palmitic triglycerides, ascorbic acid, p-isopropylbenzaldehyde, capsaicin and cinnamaldehyde?
Hardly mouth- watering, but try this instead: a spicy dish of peppers, courgettes, onion and tomatoes, bound with eggs and cheese and flavoured with cumin, cinnamon and cayenne, served with a cool, minted cucumber and yoghurt salad. These chemical and culinary recipes are the same dish.
Chemical names may sound forbidding, but they are just a way of naming and classifying the huge numbers of known chemical substances. Everything that exists is a chemical. One of the great triumphs of human achievement has been the discovery of the chemical nature of the world, even, in recent years, of the basis of life itself: the structure of DNA. Natural foodstuffs differ from the laboratory chemicals mainly in the bewildering mixtures of substances they contain: 42 chemical substances have been identified in oil extracted from orange peel, including 12 alcohols, 9 aldehydes, 2 esters and 14 hydrocarbons. There is nothing sinister in the chemical names on the labels of foodstuffs: ascorbic acid is natural vitamin C.
There is no clear dividing line between additives and ingredients. By far the greatest number of additives are flavourings, and these are often similar to the herbs and spices added to food in the kitchen (many are pure extracts from those herbs and spices). Other substances are added to food to prevent contamination by bacteria, and to enhance its texture and aesthetic appeal. Click here to view the additives used in Wheylite Products.
Chemical Warfare
It is often believed that if no chemicals were added to food it would be perfectly safe to eat. This is not true: In our foods, God has designed chemical warfare on a massive scale, and poisonous chemicals are used by plants and animals as a means of defence. Many of these poisons have become useful medicinal drugs.
Your Kitchen
Cookery is essentially an additive process, and the additives often have a chemical purpose. If, for example, if you add lemon juice to a fresh-fruit salad, you are not only adding a flavouring, but also an antioxidant: vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and the juice prevents the browning (a chemical process called oxidation) of cut apples. The juice from pineapple slices placed on steaks tenderises the meat by breaking down some of the proteins: chemists have isolated the enzyme in the juice responsible for this and it is now widely used as a meat tenderiser.
Processed Food
"Processed" food generally has a bad name, but all food is processed at some point before we eat it - bread is by definition a processed food, whether brown or white. An elaborate dish that has gone through a cycle of blending, homogenisation, emulsification, and cooking in the kitchen, is more highly processed than a can of supermarket peas .
Preservatives
Preservatives are perhaps the most important food additive. Food can be colonised by bacteria and fungi which can produce deadly poisons. There are 47 preservatives with numbers allocated to them. They are mostly very simple chemicals, often mild acids, and many are natural chemicals or simple derivatives of natural chemicals, for example vinegar (acetic acid, 260) and sorbic acid (200) which is found naturally in some fruits but is usually made synthetically. Ironically, some fruits contain higher levels of "natural" preservatives than would be permitted if added during manufacture.
Antioxidants
It is not often realised that the oxygen we breathe is a highly powerful (and to some organisms, toxic) chemical. Because it is the source of life and energy for us, we forget what a corrosive agent it is - look what it does to iron (rust). Without antioxidants, fats and oils quickly go rancid, and the products of rancidity are harmful, as well as foul tasting. There are 14 permitted antioxidants, including vitamin C and 3 of its derivatives, and vitamin E and 4 of its derivatives.
Emulsifiers and Stabilizers
Oil and water do not mix, yet many foodstuffs contain both oil and water. Mayonnaise, most sauces and milk products - are supplied as smooth, homogenous products. This is made possible by adding emulsifiers and stabilizers.
Without emulsifiers, ice cream would consist of chunks of ice embedded in cream. Emulsifiers also perform other functions. In breadmaking they react with wheat gluten to give more uniform baking.
Many emulsifiers and thickeners are derived from natural products, such as alginates from seaweed, guar gum from a plant of the pea family and lecithin, present in all living cells. Pectin, the gelling agent used in jam making, is present in many fruits.
Colours
If food doesn't look right it doesn't taste right. There are only four basic flavours - sweet, sour, salt and bitter - and our appreciation of flavour is mostly due to smell and to visual appearance. Thus colours are added to food to enhance natural colours and in the case of canned foods, such as strawberries and peas, to replace the colour lost in the process. Without added colour, canned strawberries would be dull brown and peas khaki.
Flavouring Agents
Although none as yet have been assigned an additive number, flavourings constitute the largest number of additives. There are so many flavouring that this has led to the misleading claims that most additives are not controlled by law. A natural flavour may be a single chemical or it may be a complex blend (the example of orange oil, with 42 different chemicals, was quoted earlier).
Flavour chemists create blends from the vast range of natural essences and synthetic chemicals to create flavours, very much as a master chef does in choosing spices for a new dish. Flavourings are closely related to herbs and spices - the latter are added during cooking, flavouring is added during manufacture.
Vital Ingredients
It is often felt that goodness of foods resides in their "wholeness" but in fact goodness resides in the specific chemicals in food. The body cannot distinguish between the same chemical obtained naturally or synthesized in the laboratory, and there is no way that diet which lacks vital chemicals, however natural and "whole" it might seem can sustain health. Those whose diets lack iodine, for example, will suffer thyroid disease, goitre. What we should fear is not a diet full of chemicals, but one that lacks certain vital ones.
Unnecessary ?
"Unnecessary" is an adjective often applied to food additives. There is no justification for this. The reasons for their use are clear: they help to provide a balanced and safe diet of great variety, available all the year round.
Thanks to additives, modern foods keep well, are attractive in appearance, and reasonably priced. Without these, there would be less choice, more wastage and higher prices. They are no less safe than the foods to which they're added and at the same time take nothing away from their nutritional value.
Dose and Danger
Almost any substance can be harmful if consumed in excessive quantities. Many fruits and vegetables contain poisons, (e.g. stone fruits contain cyanide) yet they are essential for the body to combat diseases. Another example is salt (sodium chloride) beneficial in small amounts but a tablespoon of salt would kill you. Unfortunately, people see some ingredient in a product and reject that product without realising that the amount is the issue, not the ingredient alone. No manufacturer is going to deliberately harm his customers!
Vegetable Fat
The vegetable fat used in Wheylite foods is from various sources including only the best parts from Palm Oil which comes from the palm tree fruit. This ingredient is used throughout the world in food manufacture. It is a good source of vitamin E and contains high levels of Carotene (oil extracted from the pulp of palm kernels). Both Vitamin E and Carotene have been shown to have anti-carcinogenic properties.
Unfortunately, much misunderstanding about Palm Oil arose in the past because it was inappropriately grouped as a saturated fat and suffered from over-generalisation of the rule that all saturated fats raise blood cholesterol and promote atherosclerosis and thrombosis. This is true when oils are hydrogenated for commercial purposes. (Hydrogenation is a process whereby the liquid oil is treated with hydrogen which results in a more solid form and a higher saturated fatty acid content. Most margarines and cooking oils are hydrogenated).
Nutritionists are often unaware that the palm oil used by Wheylite is in a powdered dehydrated form - mixed with maltodextrins and gently air dried. This form of palm oil contains more unsaturated fats than saturated. Of these unsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats represent approximately 78%.
Wheylite Australia trusts that this information will help you have a more balanced understanding of the world in which we eat and live!
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