Conscious Choice: Health Food Junk Food

June 2000

Health Food Junk Food

by Rebecca Ephraim, RD, LD

It’s the rare person who doesn’t crave something sweet, salty, fatty, or doughy once in a while. Even the most health conscious among us — so-called "health nuts" — are apt to depart from our whole foods regimen occasionally. After years of playing junk food deprivation games with myself (if it’s not in the house I won’t crave it or eat it — hah!), I’ve come to anticipate my desire for treats. During a craving frenzy, I would much rather have something within reach that approximates healthful food than rummage around for those rotgut cookies that Aunt Edna bought during her visit last year. In that regard, I firmly believe as a nutritionist that there is such a thing as "health food" junk food.

Thank goodness there are some healthful alternatives for snack time. These varieties, still found mostly in health food stores, are a far cry from the ordinary chips and cookies loaded with partially hydrogenated oils, artificial colors, refined white flour, aluminum baking soda, and preservatives such as sulfur dioxide and the carcinogenic polysorbate 60.

Caveat Emptor

As always, the old Latin warning caveat emptor or "let the buyer beware" rings true, even in the relatively enlightened aisles of natural food stores. Generally, it’s recognized that companies selling through health food stores should be held to a higher standard. In our survey of health food snacks, cookie and chipmakers generally adhere to that guiding principle. In a casual survey of "health food" cookies and chips, I found myself knee-deep in labels that shouted, "Organic," "Reduced Fat," "Cholesterol Free," "No Hydrogenated Oils" and "No Refined Sweeteners." But I discovered that one stills needs to be a rigorous reader of ingredient labels.

Frookie’s Dream Creams offer a glaring example. Delicious Brands, Inc., the Des Plaines company that makes Frookie, calls it the "Good For You Cookie." Yet Frookie Dream Creams (yogurt cream wafers whose label proclaims: "No Cholesterol," "Sweetened with Fructose and Fruit Juice" and "Low Sodium") contain as their second ingredient partially hydrogenated soybean oil shortening. These are the artery clogging trans fats that according to the Textbook of Natural Medicine (Pizzorno & Murray, 1999), "not only raise LDL (bad) cholesterol, they also lower the protective HDL (good) cholesterol level, interfere with essential fatty acid metabolism, and are suspected of being causes of certain cancers, such as breast cancer."

Partially hydrogenated oils are ubiquitous in mainstream refined products. In fact, if you stroll through a regular grocery store and read labels from the thousands of processed foods, it’s hard to find items that do not have partially hydrogenated oils of some sort in them. The reason for this, according to Udo Erasmus, Ph.D., an authority on fats and oils, is that partial hydrogenation "allows cheap oils to be turned into semi-liquid, plastic, or solid fats with specific‘mouth feel,’ texture, spreadability, and shelf life." The biggest advantage to manufacturers for using these oils is that products can sit on grocery shelves or in warehouses for months without going rancid.

Since Frookie is nationally distributed, it may seem to make good economic sense for the company to formulate the Dream Creams with an oil that extends shelf life. However, many cookie companies — including Frookie — manage to keep other cookies fresh without resorting to unwholesome ingredients. The company boasts that it supports its customers’ dietary concerns, yet Frookie abdicates its responsibility toward educated consumers when it makes use of ingredients like partially hydrogenated oil.

Where are the Hippies?

Like Frookie, the dozens of other snack brands that line the shelves of health food stores are mostly Big Business. Delicious Brands, Inc., maker of Frookie, is the fifth largest branded cookie company in the U.S. Its stock is traded on the NASDAQ and financier Carl Icahn owns a piece of it. Its other lines, such as Salerno and Mama’s are well known in the mainstream market. Most other health store cookie and chip brands also are owned by large national companies or are "co-packed."

When a company co-packs, it puts its money into doing everything but actually making the snacks. That job is contracted to an industrial bakery. Thus, co-packed products take advantage of exisiting infrastructures, but they maintain their own ingredients and standards. Mike Bielenberg, the owner of Mrs. Denson’s cookies, out of Ukiah, California, explains, "For most people who make cookies for the health food industry there’s not enough volume to support their own bakery. It takes a lot of cookies to pay the bills, the freight, and the advertising."

Mrs. Denson’s, which has been in Bielenberg’s family for thirty-four years, got its start, not in health food cookies but in food service and co-packing. Today, Mrs. Denson’s sells a couple dozen different varieties of oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies in health food stores. But much of the company’s business is making cookies for other brand labels with ingredients that would not fit in health food stores. White flour, white sugar, and partially-hydrogenated oil are the main ingredients in cookies that he makes for his biggest co-pack client (whom he wouldn’t name). "They’re the kind of cookies," Bielenberg jokes, "that natural food people would eat on a binge."

Back in the natural foods field, competition among companies has made it a race to formulate products that are not only "clean food" but also have taste that rivals anything on conventional supermarket shelves. Newman’s Own and Barbara’s are famous high-quality brands that are co-packed. Country Choice, based in Minneapolis, is a lesser known but equally good co-packed product line. The company’s president, Chuck Enderson, emphasizes that Country Choice develops the recipes, monitors formulation, and does all the marketing.

Country Choice was created three years ago, according to Enderson, as a result of surveying the market and finding there was a need for a snack line made of all organic ingredients. The company, he says, is privately owned by private investors. "We felt it was a good move," he says. "It looked like an opportunity."

This is a far cry from the nostalgic stories of conscientious hippies baking wholesome cookies in their tiny start-up kitchens and hand-delivering them to local mom-and-pop health food stores. And, in fact, the small boutique bakeries that sell their natural products regionally are a dying breed. They lost their grip when the corner health food stores lost theirs. The evolution and growth of the health food segment gave life to the national chains of natural food stores such as Whole Foods and Wild Oats. In turn, large companies — some with roots in the natural foods industry — saw the huge potential for a market niche and responded to the stores’ needs for national distribution of products.

Hain, for example, has done it in a big way. The Hain Food Group, also publicly traded, is now comprised of twenty-three different natural food brands and has carved out 38 percent of the entire snack market. In the cookie aisle, Westbrae Natural and Health Valley carry the Hain line forward; on the chips shelf, Garden of Eatin’, Terra Chips, Bearitos, Little Bear, Harry’s, and Boston’s all are sold under the Hain umbrella.

Snack Attack: What would you rather have in your home? You’ll find these in the natural food store:

Frookie All Natural Animal Frackers
Entire list of ingredients: Unbleached wheat flour, whole wheat flour, concentrated grape juice, soybean oil, baking soda, cinnamon, salt

Newman’s Own Tortilla Chips
Entire list of ingredients: Organic yellow corn masa, organic expeller pressed high oleic sunflower oil and/or organic safflower oil and sea salt

You’ll find these in the regular grocery store:

Keebler Frosted Animal Cookies
Partial list of selected ingredients: Sugar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, polysorbate 60, carnauba wax, sorbitan monostearate, red 40 lake, red 3, red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6, blue 1, natural and artificial flavoring.

Frito-Lay Doritos 3-Ds
Partial list of selected ingredients: Partially hydrogenated oil, monosodium glutamate, artificial colors, yellow 5 lake, yellow 6 lake, red 40, blue 1, yellow 5, red 40 lake, blue lake 1, disodium inosinate.

Defining the potential health problems associated with these ingredients is beyond the scope of this article. I recommend every conscientious consumer be armed with a copy of A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives by R. Winters, fifth edition, 1999.

Altruistic Bent

Some of these large companies, such as Newman’s Own and Delicious Brand, have created programs to "give back." The star in this arena is non-profit Newman’s, founded by actor Paul Newman and extended by daughter Nell Newman to include organics. Newman’s Own donates 100 percent of after-tax profits to educational and charitable purposes. Delicious Brands, a for-profit company, donates portions of its profit to foundations dedicated to "bring about an end to diabetes" (in the meantime, it sells diabetic cookies), "the protection or preservation of animal well-being," and "Celiac" organizations (it also sells wheat and gluten-free cookies).

Hain Food Group, the giant health food conglomerate, has yet to step forward publicly with a donation policy. Its business strategy, not unique in the health food business, is "to enhance revenues by strategic introductions of new product lines that complement existing products." In plain words: it is driven by the profit motive. Perhaps the only thing to do (and the world’s best excuse for buying cookies and chips) is to buy their cleanest products — and motivate them and other companies to check their unclean junk food at the door.

Rebecca Ephraim is a Registered Dietitian and a nutrition reporter specializing in integrative medicine issues. Copyright © 2000 Rebecca Ephraim. All rights reserved.

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