07-05-2022, 10:47 PM
(07-05-2022, 08:59 PM)NightskyeB4Dawn Wrote: I would start by looking at the quality and the added chemical ingredients added to the products over the years. I am not just talking about high fructose corn syrup. The number of preservative has greatly increased because foods take longer to transport and they sit in the warehouses, and on the shelves longer.
I have noticed a great decline in the size and the quality of many products since COVID. Not just my imagination, because I had to change the dog food brand that I feed my dogs, because it started making them have diarrhea. One dog with diarrhea can be a problem, Four dogs with diarrhea is a nightmare. My cats just plain up will not eat some of the food that they once favored.
So yeah. Something has been going on with the food for a while, but I think it has gotten a lot worse.
By the way, did you know anyone that was gluten intolerant back when you growing up? Just asking.
https://naturallysavvy.com/eat/food-then...s-changed/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/hig...ular-sugar
Nope! As a matter of fact, I don't even think "gluten" was a word back when I was a kid (was it?). If it was a word, it was only known in cooking and baking circles; the rest of society had no idea what gluten was.
And, I completely agree with you on the added crap in foods today. I didn't want to write a novel (above), but I actually did do quite a bit of research on a variety of foods and ingredients the other day. You are spot on with the notion ingredient lists have increased dramatically, and the items added are mostly items only a Chemist would recognize. Food at the grocery store should not require a degree in Chemistry to create, and the simple fact that there are so many chemicals in things should be a red flag. I mean, I guess it is a red flag to many people, but there doesn't seem to be much being done about it.
Here's something I find odd also... As many here know, I spent several years working in SE Asia. As one would expect, there is a pretty sizeable Chinese food import industry all over SE Asia. What's weird though is, I didn't see all these long lists of chemicals in every food over there. Intuition would suggest you'd see even more, but this wasn't the case. My first reaction was the labeling requirements were less restrictive, but I'm not sure that explains it fully. One big difference I noticed there was almost all foods spoiled much faster there. Granted, the environment was perfect for spoilage (heat and high humidity), but even so that didn't explain it all. My conclusion was there are far less preservatives in many of the foods there. Now, don't get me wrong here...there is also some complete poisonous and toxic garbage passed off as "food" in that part of the world too, so I'm acutely aware of this, but that's not what I'm talking about.
It was because of the worry about toxic crap in foods that I actually paid attention to the ingredients in foods more carefully while there. It was from that experience that I just began to pay more attention in general to the things I was eating and what was in them, regardless of where I was.
I draw some distinctions between bacteria contaminated foods versus foods loaded up with chemicals for whatever reason. And, one thing I can say for sure is...virtually across the board, the foods that I ate while in SE Asia were almost always fresher than foods we are used to eating in this country. Now, I'm sure a lot of this has to do with location, what foods we're talking about and the distribution chains associated, but the point here is food was just fresher in general. I attribute much of this to the faster spoilage (which is likely due in part to less preservatives).