Over the weekend while out with a buddy we stopped in a local convenience store in an attempt to find a healthy snack (tall order, I know). While I made my way over to where the pistachios and other nuts were, he reached inside the frozen food case and pulled out a Skinny Cow vanilla ice cream sandwich made by Nestle®.
“Hey this is healthy”, he said. “It’s only got 140 calories, 1.5 grams of fat and 3 grams of fiber. It says it right here on the label.”
However, upon further review of the back of the label (there was a convenient fold covering up all of the unflattering nutrition information) this small ice cream sandwich is STUFFED with chemicals I call obesity additives.
Here are the whopping 33 ingredients and my comments after some of them: 1.Skim milk
2.Bleached wheat flour (acts like sugar in the body)
3.Sugar (the main cause of belly fat)
4.Caramel color (the same junk they color soft drinks with)
5.Dextrose (sugar)
6.Palm oil
7.Corn flour (most likely from genentically modified [GMO] corn)
8.High fructose corn syrup (causes extreme cravings; most likely GMO)
9.Corn syrup (ditto)
10.Baking soda
11.Modified corn starch (most likely GMO)
12.Mono and diglycerides
13.Soy lecithin
14.Cocoa
15.Sugar (again)
16.Corn syrup (again)
17.Polydextrose (sugar)
18.Whey protein
19.Cream
20.Calcium carbonate
21.Inulin
22.Natural flavor (this is a joke considering all the unnatural flavors)
23.Propylene glycol monostearate (ugh… more on this below)
24.Microcrystalline cellulose
25.Sodium carboxymethylcellulose (that’s a mouthful)
26.Guar gum
27.Monoglycerides
28.Sorbitol (a sugar alcohol)
29.Carob bean gum
30.Citric acid
31.Vitamin A palmitate
32.Carrageenan (a seaweed extract)
33.Salt
So as you can see, this may be a low fat ice cream sandwich, but don’t think for a second that this “Skinny Cow” is a healthy food choice that’s going to help you or your family lose flab. This is a nutrient dead “Frankenfood.” By this I mean that it’s not even a real food, it’s just a chemically-altered food-like substance.
They should call it “dead meat” instead of “skinny cow”. Really, really, bad.
And it gets worse: Propylene Glycol Monostearate (ingredient #23) is found…
•As a working fluid in hydraulic presses
•As a coolant in liquid cooling systems
•To regulate humidity in a cigar humidor
•As the killing and preserving agent in pitfall traps, usually used to capture ground beetles
•As an additive to pipe tobacco to prevent dehydration
•To treat livestock ketosis
•As the main ingredient in deodorant sticks
•As a solvent used in mixing photographic chemicals, such as film developers
•As an ingredient in the production of paintballs
The College of Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State says this about propylene glycol monostearate: “Slightly more toxic than propylene glycol in animals, and in large doses produces central nervous system depression and kidney injury.”
Yumbo!
So while my friend wolfed down this artificial piece of toxic waste, I stuck with all natural pistachios.
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