#204: Mel Weinstein - What Are You REALLY Eating?! Fast Food Secret Ingredients Revealed
Today, we dive deep into the world of fast food ingredients and their impact on health. Our guest for today is Mel Weinstein, a former food chemist who has spent decades studying industrial foods and additives.
Mel and Rip discuss a variety of eye-opening topics related to fast food ingredients, how they end up in our food system, and the impacts they have on our health.
You'll learn about:
Mel’s personal journey to food chemistry, vegetarianism, and eventually veganism
All cornfields are not the same! How field corn, or dent corn, differs from the sweet corn we buy at grocery stores.
How this dent corn is grown and processed to create various products and components like starch, oil, protein, and fiber.
The government's role in regulating the food industry and how this later influenced the creation of dietary guidelines.
What the food manufacturing companies did to resist these recommendations and drastically alter the food industry (and our health).
The rise of fat-free products loaded with sugar and the unintended consequences of Olestra, an indigestible fat-like substance, as a response to the government's push to reduce fat in foods.
Why it’s difficult for consumers to know what they are eating when dining out in restaurants.
The ridiculous amount of ingredients found in common meals at places like Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut.
Mel’s Processed Food Index (PFI) and what makes something lightly processed vs. extremely processed, or industrialized.
What are some of these “Ingredients” commonly found in food products, such as azodicarbonamide, natural flavors, hydrogenated soybean oil, methylcellulose, pea protein isolates, and soy protein isolates, and do they get the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” from Mel?
What about carrageenan, alternatives like xanthan gum and enzymes, wheat gluten, and the industrialization of citric acid?
Should we "fear our food?!"
We know fast food is, for the most part, crap, but what we didn’t realize is just how bad some of it really is. Not surprisingly, the food industry doesn’t want us to know what’s really in that fried chicken or juicy burger, but thanks to Mel we’re inspired and educated to drive right on past that drive-thru.
About Mel Weinstein
Mel Weinstein is a retired chemist living in Central Illinois. In his professional career, he taught chemistry for 10 years at the community college level, worked as an analytical chemist for over 20 years in a research center for a multinational food ingredients company, and studied food science at the graduate level. Since his early 20's, he has had a fascination with the constituents of industrial foods, exploring the purpose of additives and their impact on health. In 2016, he started an online podcast called "Food Labels Revealed" to share with consumers his knowledge of food ingredients, their history, and potential problems associated with diets high in hyper-processed foods.
In studying the myriad additives found in commercial foods, he eventually posed the question, "Do fast foods contain the same additives as found in packaged foods on grocery store shelves?" To answer this question, he researched menu items in various fast-food restaurants. The results of the research led to the writing of this book, Fast Food Ingredients Revealed. Mr. Weinstein sincerely hopes that in reading this book consumers will gain a better understanding of what they are eating when they are lured into fast food restaurants promising fantastic smells, tastes, and textures invented by very creative food scientists and engineers.
Episode Resources
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Food Labels Revealed Podcast
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Full Audio Transcript
Rip Esselstyn [00:00:00]:
If there's one request that we've gotten more than any other at PLANTSTRONG Foods, it's been to make products that are certified gluten free. Well, my cruciferous cousins, today is your lucky day. Our three just launched all new pancake and waffle mixes are here, and I am thrilled to announce that one of them is not only gluten free, but still holds up to our best in class nutritional standards. It's made with whole oat, buckwheat sorghum, and cassava flowers with a whisper. A slight kiss of dates for sweetness. This light, fluffy, deliciously bready mix is great for people of all ages and dietary preferences. You're going to be getting 19 grams of whole grains, and it's never been easier or more delicious. Just visit Plantstrongfoods.com and check out the home style gluten free pancake and Waffle mix.
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. The mission at PLANTSTRONG is to further the advancement of all things within the plant based movement. We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your plan strong journey, and I hope that you enjoy the show. Several months ago, I came across a book with a title that I just couldn't ignore. It's called fast food ingredients revealed. What are you eating? I think we all know that fast food is, for the most part, crap, right? It's just calorie rich and processed crap. But what I didn't realize is just how bad some of it really is. I mean, we're talking preservatives coloring agents, additives and sweeteners made with actual catch this, actual chemical warfare agents, just to name a few of the things that should scare all of us right out of the drive through line. Not surprisingly, the food industry doesn't want us to know what's really in that box of fried chicken or that juicy burger, because it goes well beyond inhumanely raised animals. But luckily, author Mel Weinstein does know what's in this food because he spent decades studying it as a food chemist. Mel worked as an analytical chemist for over 20 years in a research center for a multinational food ingredients company, and he studied food science at the graduate level as well. He also taught chemistry at the community college level for ten years. So it has been a true passion of his for decades to study industrial foods and explore the purpose of additives and their impact on health. It's no surprise that the long term impacts are not good, so it's his hope to educate people on what's really inside that taco shell, besides the beans and a few sprinkles of lettuce. Enjoy this eye opening dive into food ingredients with mel. Weinstein. Hey, Mel Weinstein. How are you doing?
Mel Weinstein [00:03:42]:
I'm doing great. It's good to be on your show, Rip.
Rip Esselstyn [00:03:47]:
Yeah, it's great to have you on it.
Mel Weinstein [00:03:49]:
Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I've listened to it for several years, and I enjoy the diversity of your podcast, of Plant Strong podcast, all the different people you have on and the different things that they share, lots of different topics. So I really appreciate that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:04:09]:
Yeah, well, thank you very much. And I'm really excited to dive into what is your expertise, which I'm not going to say quite yet.
Mel Weinstein [00:04:19]:
Okay.
Rip Esselstyn [00:04:20]:
Because before we talk about, I think what you have really drilled into in a really phenomenal way is I'd like to know a little bit more about Mel. So tell me, where am I talking to you from?
Mel Weinstein [00:04:35]:
I am in central Illinois right now in the city of Decatur.
Rip Esselstyn [00:04:40]:
All right. Have you been there long?
Mel Weinstein [00:04:43]:
I actually have. A lot longer than I ever thought I would be. Yeah. I moved here in 1980.
Rip Esselstyn [00:04:51]:
1980, okay. Well, that's about as long as I've been in Austin, Texas.
Mel Weinstein [00:04:57]:
Okay.
Rip Esselstyn [00:04:58]:
Yeah, I came here to go to school in 82. So you've been there, what, 43 years? Is that right?
Mel Weinstein [00:05:06]:
Yeah. Putting it like that sounds like a lifetime.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:11]:
Yeah. And why did you go there in 1980?
Mel Weinstein [00:05:15]:
Well, it was for a job, and I had gotten interested in education, and I started to search around for a place I could teach. I had a master's degree in chemistry. Made me eligible to teach in smaller schools like community colleges. And so an opportunity came along to take a job at a community college in Decatur where they were adding chemistry as a new curriculum. And so I got hired to create the chemistry department and set up the curriculum and facilities and all that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:05:58]:
Nice. So was that the Chemistry for the Consumer course?
Mel Weinstein [00:06:03]:
Actually, that came earlier. After I graduated from college, I was kind of bumming around, looking for something that I would enjoy doing for work, and I wound up getting a job at another community college, which was in Dayton, Ohio. And they gave me an opportunity to start teaching part time. And after I started doing that, I came across this book called Chemistry for the Consumer. And I thought, well, a lot of people have to take science classes, and these science classes might scare the heck out of them. And chemistry had one of those reputations along with physics in terms of intimidating people who were not geared towards science or mathematics. So I thought, well, it'd be really wonderful to be able to teach chemistry, not only get the basic concepts across, but teach the practical aspects of it. So when I came across this book called Chemistry for the Consumer, I thought, well, why not use that book as a basis of a course for non science majors? People like nursing, people going into nursing and other areas where science was going to be a peripheral part of their education. And so maybe that wouldn't be as intimidating, maybe even more enjoyable, and they could learn some useful things like chemistry having to do with food, having to do with cooking, household products and things like that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:07:40]:
So what was it about chemistry that fascinated you?
Mel Weinstein [00:07:45]:
Well, that's an interesting question, because when I got to college, I was one of those people who had no idea what I wanted to study, what would be the kind of career I would get into. And so it took me a year to kind of land on chemistry, basically by eliminating everything I knew I didn't want to do. And so what was left was, like, science and math, and I looked at my grades in high school and I thought, well, I did pretty good in that. So that's how I arrived at chemistry. It wasn't any kind of burning desire I'd had since I was five years old.
Rip Esselstyn [00:08:25]:
Right. And you started your eating as a vegetarian in 1995, is that correct?
Mel Weinstein [00:08:37]:
Around then, yes.
Rip Esselstyn [00:08:39]:
And what pushed you in that direction back then?
Mel Weinstein [00:08:45]:
Well, it wasn't the first time I had got introduced to vegetarianism. I I got exposed to it in the mid 1970s, rather by accident, because I I wound up getting a job at a small university that had spiritual basis to their teaching. And they were again like this, like the community college. They were starting up a chemistry program. And so I was involved with that organization back then, and an opening came up, and I got invited to go out there and help set up their chemistry classes. And everybody who attended and who worked at that university ate vegetarian. Room and board was provided. And if you wanted to eat on campus, you ate vegetarian.
Rip Esselstyn [00:09:44]:
Was it 7th day Adventist?
Mel Weinstein [00:09:46]:
No, it wasn't. It was associated with the Transcendental Meditation organization.
Rip Esselstyn [00:09:58]:
Yeah.
Mel Weinstein [00:09:58]:
And they had purchased a campus in Iowa, used to be Parsons College or something like that, and they renamed it and refitted it and hired a lot of people to teach there.
Rip Esselstyn [00:10:13]:
Right. Your journey from vegetarian to vegan happened when and why?
Mel Weinstein [00:10:21]:
Well, there was a long gap. Okay. So I worked for that organization for about a year and a half. Like I said, I knew nothing about vegetarianism before I went there. I never had met a vegetarian before. It was all new to me. And sometimes I would find myself escaping from campus and going to a fast food restaurant in town. So it took some getting used to, but then when I cut ties with that organization, like about a year and a half later, I slowly lost my newly acquired interest in vegetarianism because I had no friends, no relatives. And of course, back in the 70s, there wasn't a whole lot of support in terms of eating that way. So it took another roughly 1920 years before I came back to it. And that was because I met my wife, who was a vegetarian, and it's not like I had lost all interest in it, but I had gone back to eating meat and a little bit of dairy products as much as I could tolerate, and she gave me this book one day. Of course, everybody, probably who listens to this podcast knows about this book, Diet for a Small Planet, and read through that book. And by the end, I said to her, well, I think I'm ready to now I've got the knowledge and the understanding. I'm ready to switch over.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:00]:
Yeah, that was Francis Moore Lepe wrote that. Actually, I think it was in the wait a second.
Mel Weinstein [00:12:06]:
I gave you the wrong diet for a New America.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:09]:
Oh, yeah. Now. That was John Robbins.
Mel Weinstein [00:12:10]:
That was John Robbins? Yes. I read both of them, actually. But it was a Robbins book. It was the first one.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:16]:
Got it. That one has sold over, like, 2 million copies. John has done remarkably well with that and influenced so many people. Okay, so you mentioned in there fast food and how you used to be a self proclaimed fast food addict. Is that correct?
Mel Weinstein [00:12:40]:
I would say junk food addict.
Rip Esselstyn [00:12:42]:
Okay.
Mel Weinstein [00:12:43]:
Fast food was part of that, of course, but back when I was growing up, there were very few fast food restaurants, particularly where I was living. I just got into junk food. It's sort of surprising, when I look back to those days, how little restrictions were placed upon me as far as eating candy, cakes, things of sugar in them, very sweet things. And I don't remember getting lectures from my parents. I don't recall anything in my education that warned me about eating those kinds of foods. And actually, it wasn't until I was in my mid 20s when I came across a book called Sugar Blues, which you may have heard of. It's one of the first books to really come down on sugar in the diet. And so I read that, and I thought, whoa, maybe I shouldn't be eating this way. I didn't have a very good beginnings as far as diet was concerned. You name the junk food, the candy bars, the cakes, all the different kinds of baked goods, the sodas, the sweetened drinks, all of that. I was pretty much liked most of it.
Rip Esselstyn [00:14:05]:
Yeah, well, most of America does.
Mel Weinstein [00:14:08]:
Yeah. And so it took a long time. I mean, I was in my 30s. Even after I read Sugar Blues, it took me a long time to really start cutting down and paying attention to what I was eating.
Rip Esselstyn [00:14:22]:
Yeah. Well, I think this is an appropriate time for me to just mention. So what I'd love to talk to you about today, Mel, and dive into is this book that you wrote called Fast Food Ingredients Revealed what Are You Eating? And in reading through this mel, I am just stunned and amazed at the breadth of your knowledge on this subject area and how much wonderful research and effort you've put into this book. So congrats on that.
Mel Weinstein [00:15:07]:
Thank you. Yeah, it's pretty dense. It's got a lot of information in it.
Rip Esselstyn [00:15:12]:
Yeah, it's dense, and it's also very intense, and that's good. So in the book you mentioned, there's, like, two types of corn. I think the manufacturers use field corn and sweet corn. What's the difference between the two?
Mel Weinstein [00:15:28]:
And what you see growing in the fields around where I live and many other midwestern states is what is known as field corn. It's also called dent corn dent. And it's not what we buy in the grocery stores as the corn on the cob. That's sweet corn. So very few of the farms in Illinois are going to be growing sweet corn. Okay. That only has one purpose. That's to eat it. It's a whole food. It's wonderful, but it's not what the American economy runs on.
Rip Esselstyn [00:16:06]:
Is the field corn grown for, like, livestock?
Mel Weinstein [00:16:10]:
Partly. There's hundreds of products that could be derived from that corn. So essentially, it gets harvested. All the kernels get knocked off of it. It gets shipped to silos where it's stored and eventually winds up at the company I worked at, tate and mile and grain elevators. And that corn gets broken down into its component parts. And those parts are I'm sure most people are familiar with them it gets broken down into starch or cornstarch gets broken down into oil. And then there is protonaceous or protein and fiber. Portions of that comes from the corn kernels. The corn starch can get broken down and turned into many, many different things. And then, of course, the oil gets sold as vegetable oil, and what is left over the cheap stuff is what becomes animal feed, ultimately. And that comes in two forms corn gluten meal and corn gluten feed. So after the really valuable parts of the corn are removed and processed in the other things, then the remainder is what gets sold to livestock.
Rip Esselstyn [00:17:39]:
You use the word gluten in there. So does corn have gluten in it? I thought gluten was kind of a wheat kind of ingredient.
Mel Weinstein [00:17:50]:
Yeah, it's a different kind of gluten, but, yeah, it's found in both crops. Most people have allergies to wheat gluten.
Rip Esselstyn [00:18:00]:
Right. All right, I want to take a little departure from corn I want to ask you about. So, like, in 1977, there was something pretty important that happened, and that was with George McGovern, and they were trying to figure out what was it? Some senate meetings, conferences about what to do to make the American diet healthier. Is that correct?
Mel Weinstein [00:18:25]:
Right. Yeah. George McGovern was instrumental in promoting an investigation into the food system in the United States. I got wind of the fact that even though America is one of the richest countries in the world, hunger was still a problem. In addition to hunger also, he realized that there wasn't good information about nutrition. So even if you're not hungry, and you have all the food you can eat, you can still get sick. Right. Be in a bad way. So he put together a Senate subcommittee to investigate the conditions in the United States. And that was called the I'm looking up here to get it right. US. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. And so this occurred around 1970, and it took a long time. And this committee met over and over again. They had lots of meetings and discussions, and it took about seven years for them to publish their results. And this was around 1977, and they put out what is called the Dietary Goals for the United States. Dietary Goals.
Rip Esselstyn [00:19:52]:
And these goals were kind of headed in the right direction, right?
Mel Weinstein [00:19:56]:
Yeah, they are. What spurred, a few years later, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which put out very formal recommendations on what Americans should be eating to maintain good nutrition. And that got established so that every five years, they reexamined the goals and put out a new book, essentially, on what Americans should be eating.
Rip Esselstyn [00:20:26]:
Yeah, but those Dietary Goals back in 1977, if I'm not mistaken, it recommended, like, a 20% increase in the consumption of complex carbohydrates like Bravo there, and naturally occurring sugars and fruits, a 45% reduction in refined sugars, and a 40% reduction in fat consumption. But somehow or another, my understanding is the food companies, they took that and they ran with it, and they somehow outfoxed us with all these fat free products that were loaded with crap.
Mel Weinstein [00:21:07]:
Yeah, essentially. I mean, they were way ahead of their time as far as what they recommended. And if everything they'd recommended got adopted, we'd be one healthier population today. But you're right about the food manufacturing companies. They did not like those recommendations because it would cut in to their bottom line and into their profits. So they fought hard to dilute those recommendations or eliminate those recommendations and make the less healthy foods more the center of the plate than what McGovern's committee was recommending.
Rip Esselstyn [00:21:49]:
Yeah. I mean, you talk about an ingredient that I think came out of that, which was the olene or olestra. Right. Which it kind of what is an undigestible type of fat, and it basically goes right through you, if I'm not mistaken.
Mel Weinstein [00:22:08]:
Yeah, that's an interesting piece of food history there. Yeah. This was in the 1990s, and the government health agencies were coming down on fat. Okay. Fat was the boogeyman during that time. And so they recommended that the food manufacturers start cutting back significantly on the amount of fat in their products. So the food manufacturers responded because what was their choice? If the government was telling the population, stop eating foods high in fat, then the food manufacturers would lose a lot of money again. So the race was on to create substitutes for fat, not just remove fat from processed foods, because that could ruin the taste, mouth feel, texture, and all of that of the foods. Fat plays a significant role in that respect. But if they could come up with other products that would provide all of the properties of fat, or most of the properties, then that would be a suitable solution. So you mentioned olene or olestra, and that was proctor and Gamble originated that ingredient and surprisingly, it was made from sugar. I'm certainly not going to go into details of that, but there's all kinds of things you can do with chemistry to convert one food product into another and radically change it. So the smart food chemists and food scientists determined that you could modify sugar to create a fat like substance. And not only was it fat like and could replace the typical fats and oils and foods, but it was indigestible, it was non caloric. I mean, it sounded like a miracle at the time. And not only could you eat it and not gain any weight, but you could use it to fry foods so you could heat it up to high enough temperatures, you could make French fries in it. And they thought they had a tremendous blockbuster of an ingredient here. But when they started making products with it and putting it out into the marketplace, they found something that they didn't expect to happen. I guess they didn't do their thorough research. But as people started eating more and more products with this illustrate in it, or I should say olene, because you think about that word, that's a very smart moniker to have on a product. Olen. Skinny. Right. People were getting severe indigestion. All the things associated with severe indigestion, which I don't need to go into.
Rip Esselstyn [00:25:29]:
Well, but I know you don't want to go into it, but I'm going to say it because there was a warning, I think, on the label of some of these foods that said, warning may cause anal leakage.
Mel Weinstein [00:25:39]:
That was one of the severe symptoms. Yeah. So as the governmental agencies started getting reports back from consumers like USDA, FDA, that these products were making them sick, then the government had to act. They did not tell the food companies to stop manufacturing these foods because they had been approved by the FDA. But the food manufacturers realized that with all this bad publicity, it was going downhill. One of the companies that used Olen was FritoLay.
Rip Esselstyn [00:26:21]:
Yeah.
Mel Weinstein [00:26:22]:
And they made these chips. I don't know if people in your audience are old enough to remember, wow chips. Wow. With an exclamation point. They were like the perfect snack because you weren't getting the calories from fat. You could lose weight eating these things. But then eventually people started making fun of them, like, wow, these chips are making me sick. So they stopped producing those eventually.
Rip Esselstyn [00:26:53]:
I'm sure they did. Now let's get into fast food, which is probably where you feel super comfortable. Is that accurate?
Mel Weinstein [00:27:04]:
Well, that's what the book is mainly about.
Rip Esselstyn [00:27:07]:
Exactly. And you talk about how most consumers really have no clue what they're eating. They know what the menu items are, but in the basic components, for example, like lettuce, bacon, mayonnaise in the BLT, but they have absolutely no idea what's in the food. And that was really the purpose of your book.
Mel Weinstein [00:27:35]:
And do you know why we don't know much about the ingredients in fast foods?
Rip Esselstyn [00:27:42]:
No. You have to tell me.
Mel Weinstein [00:27:43]:
Okay, I sure will. Well, back in the let me get my year right. It was 1966. There was the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. Okay. And it's one of those gifts from our government where that for the first time, food manufacturers were required to list the ingredients on their packaging. Okay? And when you think about it, that wasn't that long ago, not 66 to now. Prior to that, it was voluntary. Food companies could share the information about what was in their foods or not. But now there was this requirement where you didn't have a choice anymore. You had to list the ingredients. And they got listed from the one that was present in the largest amount by weight all the way to the last one, which was the lowest amount by weight. Well, that was a lot of information provided to the American consumer if they wanted to take advantage of it. Now, years later, this is 1990, there was the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which is another small gift to Americans, where in order for a food company to make any kind of claim, like a health claim, like low fat or good for your heart or prevents cancer, whatever, they had to justify that claim. They couldn't just make it and put it on their wrappers or cans or whatever. And then the one that I interested the most about is the law called 1999. Actually, it doesn't have its own name. It's part of the earlier law. But that was the first time Nutrition Facts labels appeared, peered on food products. So that was 1994. Again, not that long ago, maybe 30 years ago. And here the government says not only do you get to know what's in your food if it's a packaged food, but you also get to know all this nutritious nutritional information about it. And the Nutrition Facts label is packed for anybody who wants to really delve into it. There's just loads and loads and loads of information that might benefit you in terms of what you eat and how good it is for you. And it was standardized. The food companies didn't have any choice. They had this format they had to follow. So every single can, packaged food, frozen food that you pick up, you'll see the layout of the Nutrition Facts label to be exactly the same. So once you learn how to use one label, you know how to use them all and get information from them. But let's go back to what I mentioned about the requirement of food companies to reveal what ingredients are in their products that did not apply to restaurants, period. So we Americans are very trusting when it comes to the food we eat. And we like to think that okay. If we're cooking at home, we pretty much know exactly what's going into our foods. We have some confidence about the ingredients. If we buy packaged foods, yeah, we got information there. But if we go out to a restaurant or we go to somebody else's house to eat dinner or lunch or we go to a cookout or a picnic, we're very trusting. We don't ask questions about what's in those foods that we're eating. And the restaurants with no requirement to tell us what the ingredients are in their foods, they have a choice. They can do it, or they cannot do it. So I have this podcast called Two Labels revealed that I started in 2016, and over the years, I was doing mainly shows about what was in the manufactured foods that showed up in grocery stores, big box stores, convenience stores. But then I started thinking, well, what does show up in fast food? And I started poking around on the Internet saying, okay, can I get that information? Is it published somewhere? And what I found out, there was a small, select group of restaurants, fast food restaurants that did publish that information at their websites. And we're talking maybe a dozen restaurants here out of the hundreds of restaurants out in the world. So started looking more closely, okay, what did they reveal? Did they give all the menu items? Did they tell us all the ingredients in each of these menu items? And so I did find there was a considerable amount of information out there. So certain restaurants I'll name the three that I talk about in my book McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. There were others. As I said, there's maybe a dozen or so. But I chose those three to write about because they're kind of representative. McDonald's, all American food, pizza Hut, obviously, italian cuisine, sort of. And then had Taco Bell got the.
Rip Esselstyn [00:33:41]:
Mexican food make a run for the border?
Mel Weinstein [00:33:44]:
Yeah, I thought that kind of run the gamut pretty well. It didn't cover everything. But I thought, if I look at these three, maybe they're representative of most fast food restaurants. And the other question I wanted to answer with the research was, do they use the same fast food ingredients as the foods you find in the grocery stores? Yeah. So, for, oh, gosh, a year or so, I just mined these websites, wrote down every single menu item for each of those three restaurants. I wrote all the ingredients for each menu item, and then I began to mel.
Rip Esselstyn [00:34:33]:
So those three restaurants McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut they all were transparent as far as you can go online and see what the ingredients were, some more than others.
Mel Weinstein [00:34:43]:
McDonald's, I think was the most upfront about it. The other restaurants, I would say probably 90%, plus what they had on their menus. The problem I ran into is that they have regional menus and they have national menus, so I wouldn't always find the ingredients that were in the regional foods.
Rip Esselstyn [00:35:04]:
Okay. Sorry to interrupt. Sure.
Mel Weinstein [00:35:09]:
Anyway, so I did a lot of collating and categorizing of these ingredients, and basically I decided that I want to be able to come up with a way of describing a particular food item in these three fast food restaurants as being somewhat processed. Very processed? Extremely processed. I want to be able to put a number on it. So if somebody was looking at it and they wanted to compare one menu item against another, they could say, well, if I'm interested in my health, maybe I should choose the less processed item over the one that was extremely processed. So without going all the details, I do go into it in my book. I've got a whole section in the appendix on how I calculated what I call the processed food index, using that processed food index.
Rip Esselstyn [00:36:13]:
So the PFI and then you can sign a food a number based yeah.
Mel Weinstein [00:36:20]:
It range from zero to 100. And of course, there is essentially nothing that calculated zero, and there's nothing you can calculate as 100. So there's nothing perfectly so pure that it's not processed. And there's nothing so processed.
Rip Esselstyn [00:36:39]:
So help me out here, Mel. If it was a one, was it like, not processed at all, like an apple? And if it was 100, was it highly processed or 99?
Mel Weinstein [00:36:49]:
Yeah, like I said, there was nothing that was 100. So let me give you the ranges. The ranges started, of course, at zero, and then the next range was one to ten. And one to ten I was calling lightly industrialized. I stopped using the word process because process has such a diluted definition these days. It can be good, it could be in the middle, it could be bad. So I started using the word industrialized at this point. So one to ten was lightly industrialized. Then eleven to 40 was moderately industrialized, and then 41 to 70 was highly industrialized, and then 71 to 100 was extremely industrialized.
Rip Esselstyn [00:37:36]:
Can you give me an example of a food that was extremely industrialized?
Mel Weinstein [00:37:43]:
Yeah, I got several examples. Let's take and I'm going to ask.
Rip Esselstyn [00:37:48]:
You I want to ask you a bunch of questions about different ingredients, so you don't have to rattle off some, but just give me one right now, just for kicks and grins.
Mel Weinstein [00:37:57]:
Okay, well, do you want me to start with the menu item or with the ingredient? Might be easy with the menu item.
Rip Esselstyn [00:38:04]:
Sure, absolutely.
Mel Weinstein [00:38:05]:
Start with yeah, let's start with a Pizza Hut. I do have an example for each restaurant, if you're interested and have time for this. The restaurant menu item is crispy chicken Caesar salad. Crispy. Chicken seasoned salad, caesar salad. And at first, if you're looking at the menu of the restaurant and you see the word salad right. And you're thinking, whoa, that's probably a lot better for me than other items in the menu. Well, you could be very wrong about this. This salad has, in terms of calories, 830 calories. Okay. Now, oftentimes you hear that the average American should be eating around 2000 calories a day. If you're eating a salad that's got 830 calories in it, you're three, four of the way to your daily requirement. So this is not a salary. You want to eat to lose weight.
Rip Esselstyn [00:39:16]:
Not quite a half. Not quite a half to your daily.
Mel Weinstein [00:39:20]:
What did I say?
Rip Esselstyn [00:39:21]:
Three quarters?
Mel Weinstein [00:39:22]:
Yeah, I'm sorry. Not quite a half. Yeah, thanks for correcting me there.
Rip Esselstyn [00:39:26]:
And what percent of those 800 plus calories are coming from fat? Do you know? Do you have it up there?
Mel Weinstein [00:39:35]:
No, I don't. What I have down here is that if you count all the ingredients in the salad, there's 114.
Rip Esselstyn [00:39:44]:
Wow.
Mel Weinstein [00:39:48]:
Now, if you eliminate all the replicates, then you're looking at 73 unique ingredients. So just imagine somebody's at home and they'd say to themselves, hey, I'd like to make this crispy chicken Caesar salad. They'd have to find 73 different ingredients wow. To put this thing together. All right, so that's one of the astounding things. Several astounding things. How many ingredients wind up in fast foods? How many of those are unique? And then I calculated the PFI processed food index, and I got a number of 52.
Rip Esselstyn [00:40:31]:
52 for that chicken. 52% chicken Caesar salad.
Mel Weinstein [00:40:37]:
Yeah. So that put it in the highly industrialized category.
Rip Esselstyn [00:40:42]:
How is something that has 71 ingredients not an extremely industrialized PFI?
Mel Weinstein [00:40:50]:
Well, you will find examples of foods that are made up of natural ingredients, so it's possible. That's a pretty high number to find that many. But I have come across products with 2030 ingredients on them that would have very low PFIs. They're not very industrialized.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:09]:
Right. Like a Pop Tart.
Mel Weinstein [00:41:11]:
Like a Pop Tart. No, Pop Tart would not be a good example of that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:15]:
I know.
Mel Weinstein [00:41:18]:
But sometimes organic foods have very low PFI values. All right, anyway yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:28]:
Hit us with another example.
Mel Weinstein [00:41:32]:
Um, okay, let me give you one of the ingredients in that example, because you were asking about specific ingredients.
Rip Esselstyn [00:41:42]:
Yeah. I got a bunch I'm going to throw at you.
Mel Weinstein [00:41:44]:
Yeah. Okay. One of them is called and only a chemist could love this name. It's called azodicarbon. I can't even remember dicarbonamus.
Rip Esselstyn [00:42:01]:
Yeah.
Mel Weinstein [00:42:01]:
I can't even say this. I've been in chemistry for all these years, and so this is what you see on a label or you see at the website for Pizza Hut. And just think about the average person in our society. Are they going to even be able to say that? They even going to know why that's there in this food product? No, they're not going to have probably a clue. Very small percentage of our population would know what to do with that name. Right. So where does this show up? Where is it in the salad? It's in the croutons. And then if you dig a little deeper, why is it there in the croutons? Well, every ingredient has a purpose and has a function, or it would not be in that menu item. Food companies are not going to waste money on ingredients that don't pay off in some way. And so it's in the crouton because what are croutons made of? Mostly bread. Bread, which is flour. Right. So the flour that is used is, of course, the worst kind of flour that we should be eating. It's white flour. It's not a whole food. It doesn't come from whole wheat flour. It's flour that has been manipulated, treated to be made very white. And a little bit of history behind that is back in the 18 hundreds, the only people that could afford to eat bread products made from white flour were the affluent rich people and the poor people. They were left with the whole wheat flour, which they did not like. It didn't last as long, it went bad on them. And so it's the refined flour that people wanted to buy. And so eventually, technology caught up with the bread industry and using the right machines and the right processing techniques, it became cheap to make white flour. So once it became cheap, the masses started to buy it and eventually the whole wheat flowers, people lost interest in them.
Rip Esselstyn [00:44:30]:
That sounds very similar to in China with the brown rice and the white rice.
Mel Weinstein [00:44:35]:
Yeah, exactly.
Rip Esselstyn [00:44:36]:
Same phenomenon.
Mel Weinstein [00:44:37]:
Yeah. Good analogy. Where does this additive come in? Well, this additive is a Bleaching agent, literally a Bleaching agent, and helps to make the white flower whiter and therefore the white bread whiter and the croutons whiter or whatever.
Rip Esselstyn [00:44:57]:
Wow.
Mel Weinstein [00:44:59]:
Another interesting note about it is that it has gotten a bad reputation in some places. I think in Europe. I think it may be banned in Europe. And there are actually several fast food restaurants in the United States that have told the companies making the flour to stop using it or they were going to buy it.
Rip Esselstyn [00:45:22]:
Do you know why that is? Does it have some sort of deleterious effects on us?
Mel Weinstein [00:45:29]:
Asthma. I think asthma is the primary thing.
Rip Esselstyn [00:45:32]:
Yeah. Well, we all like to breathe.
Mel Weinstein [00:45:36]:
Yeah. That's important.
Rip Esselstyn [00:45:38]:
Yeah. Nice smooth breath. So can I ask you some ingredients and what your thoughts are on them?
Mel Weinstein [00:45:46]:
You can. There are over 9000 additives used in the food industry, so I'm not going to be on top of all of those. So you can go ahead and ask me. And I do have my book here I can refer to. It has a glossary in the back.
Rip Esselstyn [00:46:02]:
Yeah. And the reason why I've picked these is you mentioned them either when you're talking about McDonald's, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. So you actually highlight these ingredients that are in different meals at these restaurants. But also they're kind of familiar to me because they also appear in a lot of food products, package box and canned food products. So I think that it might be helpful for our listeners to hear your thoughts on some of these widely used additives and if they get kind of the thumbs up or the thumbs down or a neutral from Mel Weinstein.
Mel Weinstein [00:46:38]:
Okay, well, that's putting a lot of authority on me.
Rip Esselstyn [00:46:41]:
I know you can handle it. Natural flavors. What are your thought of natural flavors?
Mel Weinstein [00:46:46]:
Okay, I have certain pet peeves when it comes to ingredients, and that's one of them. Natural flavors almost means nothing on a label. Very little information provided. So it's a thumbs down. And it's one of those freebies that the Food and Drug Administration gave to food manufacturers where they where they made exceptions. They said, well, if you're using natural flavors in your foods, you don't have to tell the consumers what they are. You can just simply use this generic term, either natural flavor or natural flavors and not reveal what they are. So if somebody should happen to have a food allergy and a flavor is made from that particular food, they may not be alerted to it unless it was underneath the allergen disclosure on the label.
Rip Esselstyn [00:47:45]:
So they're not really playing ball. It's kind of a little slippery ball that they're playing where they can disguise and slip in really whatever they want under the guise of natural flavors.
Mel Weinstein [00:47:56]:
Yeah. Now, there's natural flavors, and there are artificial flavors. Two very different things. The natural flavors at least have to be derived from natural foods fruits, vegetables, meat, mushrooms, whatever. Now, can you consider them healthy? Not necessarily. Whenever people see the word natural and that's what food manufacturers kind of rely on, they kind of think maybe to themselves, it's natural. It's got to be good for me. Right? But that's not true. A natural flavor can be derived from a food using physical and chemical processes, because what they're doing is they're breaking down that food, extracting out a particular component of it, the flavor, and then packaging that and selling it to food manufacturers.
Rip Esselstyn [00:48:57]:
Is it fair to say that one of the things that people can hide it under natural flavors is MSG?
Mel Weinstein [00:49:05]:
No. MSG is a flavor enhancer. It's not considered a natural flavor. So that has to be revealed.
Rip Esselstyn [00:49:15]:
Got you.
Mel Weinstein [00:49:15]:
And MSG. You mentioned something important that I talk about in the book, and that's acronyms. So in food labels, you often see acronyms that, again, if you're not a chemist, even if you are a chemist, you may not even know what they represent.
Rip Esselstyn [00:49:32]:
What about hydrogenated soybean oil? What are your thoughts on that?
Mel Weinstein [00:49:40]:
Okay, well, hydrogenated soybean oil was created in order to make solid fats, something that could mimic, say, a butter. And that's a whole bunch of chemistry there to take soybean oil. I mean, it takes a bunch of processing steps just to get the soybean oil. But if you want to harden it, it's called hardening. You have to react it with hydrogen gas and a catalyst, platinum or palladium. And that causes a chemical reaction in the oil to turn it into a fat.
Rip Esselstyn [00:50:24]:
Is that a trans fat?
Mel Weinstein [00:50:25]:
Well, it can be. So there are two different kinds of hydrogenation. There's partial hydrogenation and there's complete hydrogenation. It's the partial hydrogenation that creates what are called trans fats. And those are what the FDA decided in, I guess, was 1990s, were bad for our health. They were used to make margarine for years, decades. I mean, I grew up with partially hydrogenated fats, and here, much later, the government decides these aren't healthy for us anymore. They cause heart issues.
Rip Esselstyn [00:51:03]:
I think you wrote about with this hydrogenated soybean oil, it has to go through this hexane process. That sounds kind of spooky to me.
Mel Weinstein [00:51:13]:
Yeah, that's not the hydrogenation process. That's the actual isolating the oil from the soybeans.
Rip Esselstyn [00:51:20]:
Exactly. But doesn't that happen with yeah. Can you explain that? Hexane is what is it, like a gasoline type process?
Mel Weinstein [00:51:33]:
It's a gasoline related chemical, yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:51:36]:
And what does it do? Does it strip?
Mel Weinstein [00:51:39]:
It's a solvent. It's a solvent. So not just soybean oil, but any food oils and fats would be soluble in what's called a non polar solvent.
Rip Esselstyn [00:51:57]:
If these products are being processed using a form of gasoline, is that gasoline, then somehow that hexane in the food we're eating, or is it somehow removed in the processing?
Mel Weinstein [00:52:12]:
It's actually removed because they want to reuse it. So it's recycled. So it's evaporated off of the soybean material where the oil was extracted from.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:23]:
Really? It's completely, somehow dehydrated.
Mel Weinstein [00:52:30]:
I didn't say 100%. I'm sure there'll be traces of it, but according to the FDA, not considered to be toxic.
Rip Esselstyn [00:52:40]:
All right, I got a bunch that I want to ask you about, so let's keep this train moving. What about mono and diglycerides? I see them all over the place in food packages.
Mel Weinstein [00:52:50]:
Yeah, those are emulsifying agents, and they help to keep the oily and watery parts of a food product from separate.
Rip Esselstyn [00:53:02]:
They have your thumbs up or thumbs down? What's?
Mel Weinstein [00:53:05]:
Thumbs up. They're fairly natural, although to isolate them requires some technology.
Rip Esselstyn [00:53:14]:
You mentioned that I mentioned natural flavors. You also said the flip side of that is artificial flavors. What are your thoughts on artificial flavors?
Mel Weinstein [00:53:22]:
Even worse than natural flavors.
Rip Esselstyn [00:53:25]:
That gets the weinstein thumbs down, then.
Mel Weinstein [00:53:28]:
Yeah. If I was king of the food industry yeah. I would ban them for today.
Rip Esselstyn [00:53:36]:
I would like to crown you that.
Mel Weinstein [00:53:38]:
Okay. And the reason I would ban them is is that they're synthetic. You know, they they they are chemicals that are intentionally synthesized and create a particular flavor that a food manufacturer wants or if you mix these things together, a combination that gives a certain flavor. Have you ever bought microwave popcorn?
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:07]:
Well, we make one of our own with no added oils and no added sugar. Yeah.
Mel Weinstein [00:54:13]:
Okay, well, say you buy one in the supermarket, a commercial brand, and you look at the package, and it says butter flavored popcorn. Okay, well, the butter flavoring, chances are it's not coming from butter. It's coming from an artificial flavor.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:35]:
Got it. Yeah. How about and this has been the bad boy for a long time, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. High fructose corn syrup.
Mel Weinstein [00:54:45]:
That's a whole nother show right there.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:50]:
Okay.
Mel Weinstein [00:54:51]:
I was an analytical chemist, and I did a lot of testing on high fructose corn syrup, so I'm quite familiar with it.
Rip Esselstyn [00:54:59]:
All right. Not a fan, right.
Mel Weinstein [00:55:02]:
Or yes, I was at the time, but no, after I left that company, I just decided I didn't want to eat anything with high fructose corn syrup. Now, I have broken that rule from time to time, so I'm not perfect at it, but I do look at labels. If it says HFCs on there, I try to avoid it.
Rip Esselstyn [00:55:23]:
Right. What about gelatin?
Mel Weinstein [00:55:27]:
Well, as a vegetarian, that was an automatic. So if you're vegetarian or vegan, you don't want to be eaten. Gelatin, because it's based upon animal products.
Rip Esselstyn [00:55:37]:
Well, isn't it animal hooves?
Mel Weinstein [00:55:41]:
It can come from hooves and other cartilage areas of an animal. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn [00:55:46]:
How about Xanthum Gum? I see that in a lot of different products. A lot of hummuses, a lot of milk, stuff like that.
Mel Weinstein [00:55:54]:
I would give it a Hesitatingly plus. Thumbs up.
Rip Esselstyn [00:56:02]:
Why the hesitancy?
Mel Weinstein [00:56:05]:
I think you can find xanthem gum naturally, but the vast amount of it is going to be made in labs and factories and it's made using genetic engineering, and it comes from changing the DNA of yeast so that they preferentially generate this zanthan and gum and separated and packaged, and it turns out to be a white powder. And that's what food manufacturers buy.
Rip Esselstyn [00:56:40]:
Okay, what about cellulose? See, that a lot, too.
Mel Weinstein [00:56:47]:
Cellulose is a natural product. Obviously, all plants have cellulose in them, and that's a structural feature of plants. And so I guess I'd give it a thumbs up. It's not as bad as other things you could eat.
Rip Esselstyn [00:57:06]:
Is methyl cellulose basically the same thing as cellulose?
Mel Weinstein [00:57:10]:
That's a more processed formed that's definitely a synthetic product, and it's a bulking agent or a gum, and it adds texture to food products. I mean, it's not awful, but if you're trying to stay away from additives, I would put that on the list.
Rip Esselstyn [00:57:33]:
Okay. How about pea protein isolates or concentrates? Because we see those in so many veggie burgers, veggie dogs, veggie nuggets. These days, they're just ubiquitous.
Mel Weinstein [00:57:44]:
Yeah, that's a little problematic. They kind of follow the history of texturized soy, because all kinds of products were made by texturizing processing of soy. Into soy proteins, plant protein, hydrolyzed plant protein. There's not much information about that. I mean, I got curious about it as well. I want to find out, is it made similar to the soy products or some other processes used? And it's kind of secretive. I searched the Internet, and I could not find any articles about how that's made. It's made from yellow peas if I did find that out. But in terms of the details, exactly how the protein is separated from the rest of the pea, I just found very not very good details about how.
Rip Esselstyn [00:58:50]:
It'S got you so pretty sparse when it came to that. So based upon that, would you give it a thumbs up or thumbs down?
Mel Weinstein [00:58:59]:
I would eat it before I would eat the soy products.
Rip Esselstyn [00:59:04]:
Okay, so you do pea protein isolates and concentrates before you do the soy protein isolates and gas.
Mel Weinstein [00:59:10]:
But it kind of depends. There's actually three different kinds of isolates you can get from soy. One is better than another. So you need to do a little bit of research.
Rip Esselstyn [00:59:22]:
Is that something that the food manufacturers have to put on the label? There's three different types, no?
Mel Weinstein [00:59:28]:
Well, you will see the three different types. Okay. But you won't get information about the health benefits of them. What are the three different types? Some are more processed than others.
Rip Esselstyn [00:59:40]:
Do you know the three different types off the top of your head?
Mel Weinstein [00:59:43]:
I knew you're going to ask me that.
Rip Esselstyn [00:59:45]:
No. If you don't, don't worry about it. Let's keep moving. Let's keep moving. I don't want to get stuck. Sucralose. That's 320 times sweeter than table sugar. What is that? And are you a fan of it?
Mel Weinstein [00:59:57]:
No, that's another ingredient I try not to consume. Okay. Yeah. It was actually invented by the company I worked for, Tayton Lyle. It was discovered in London, England, back in, I think, the 60s or seventy s. And it was an accident. They were working with sugar, modifying in different ways, chlorinating the molecules, which I won't go into, but trying to find new molecules to work with for food ingredients and other purposes. So they did this one experiment, and one of the chemists working on it was telling this other chemist of, this is a new material that he came up with. And the coworker said, well, why don't you test it to see what it is, I guess? And the guy who was talking about this substance said, thought, thought his coworkers said, taste it. So he tasted it, and he had this, like, reaction. Wow, man, this is sweet. And that's launched sucralose.
Rip Esselstyn [01:01:10]:
Wow. Isn't that something?
Mel Weinstein [01:01:13]:
Yeah. Serendipity.
Rip Esselstyn [01:01:19]:
Is it not good for our health?
Mel Weinstein [01:01:25]:
It was approved by the FDA. Well, like I said, I don't eat food stuffs with sucralose in them. I would put sucralose as the number one industrialized food ingredient in the world.
Rip Esselstyn [01:01:43]:
Wow.
Mel Weinstein [01:01:44]:
In order to make it, it goes through multiple steps using very unsafe chemicals. And by the time you get to the end of the process, you get a white powder. Now, chemistry processes are really good that they can be cleaned up, and all the bad stuff that was used to make this product can be essentially eliminated or down to really low levels, like parts per billion, very low parts per million. And so you're never going to get rid of every single nasty thing in either a regular food or a synthetic food, but you get it down low enough where it's not considered a health hazard for humans. And that's the case for Sucralose. I used to analyze this stuff. I know it's pretty pure, but knowing where it came from is the issue for me.
Rip Esselstyn [01:02:40]:
What about Sunflower Lecithin? Because I see that in a lot of different food packaging packages.
Mel Weinstein [01:02:46]:
Yeah, there's different kinds of Lecithin. So, yeah, you can have soy Lecithin as well. Lecithin is a natural product. We have Lecithin in our body even if we didn't eat junk food or fat.
Rip Esselstyn [01:03:00]:
Is it a type of fat?
Mel Weinstein [01:03:01]:
What is it? Yeah, it's fat. Like, it falls in the classification of Lipids. Lipids are the general name given to non polar products that can dissolve a non polar solvents. Like, we were talking about soybean oil before. And so fats and oils are considered Lipids. Lecithin is in another class of Lipids. Every cell in our body has LECIN in it. Our brain has quite a bit in it, so it's an essential biochemical for survival.
Rip Esselstyn [01:03:38]:
Got you. All right, I got a couple more for you. All right. You hanging in there? Are you doing all right?
Mel Weinstein [01:03:44]:
No, I'm doing fine.
Rip Esselstyn [01:03:46]:
Okay, good. You look great. So what about Carraghinin? Because that is something that I think we used to have that actually in one of our engine, two almond milks. And then we heard such an outcry from the public that we actually removed it. And I'll go on my little kind of tangent here. We did our research and it was determined that Keraghenin was safe and, you know, came comes from a, you know, CMOS. But the one that was really problematic was the polyghenin, which was a close cousin to Carraghenin. And I think that some of these activist groups confused the two. But I'd like to check in with you on that. Carraghin?
Mel Weinstein [01:04:31]:
Yeah, I've looked into that and I think the verdict is still out. I mean, I just like you. I kind of read different reports on whether it's safe or not for human consumption. So it's not on my bad list, but I'm seeing it used less and less. Are you?
Rip Esselstyn [01:04:52]:
No, absolutely. Yeah. It's just something that, like I said, the public has a certain perception about Keragan and it just doesn't make sense. If you can use something else, why not?
Mel Weinstein [01:05:06]:
It's a gum. And a gum is a thickener, so it makes food products more viscous. And as you say there's all kinds of other choices out there for gums. I mean, you mentioned Xanthin gum earlier. That's another one.
Rip Esselstyn [01:05:21]:
Yeah, enzymes. Enzymes are something that appear sometimes on labels. And it sounds to me, tell me if I'm close to the mark here. Kind of like natural flavors. I'm not sure what it is, what it does, but it's just enzymes.
Mel Weinstein [01:05:40]:
It's on the pet peeve list.
Rip Esselstyn [01:05:42]:
It's on the Mel pet peeve list. Love it.
Mel Weinstein [01:05:46]:
Enzyme. That word is generic. I mean, every chemist knows what an enzyme is, but when you say the word enzyme, it's not referring to any specific chemical. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of enzymes that are in our body that are used for making foods. So it's just too generic. It doesn't give you any information.
Rip Esselstyn [01:06:09]:
Got it.
Mel Weinstein [01:06:09]:
Other than the fact if you look up enzymes, you'll find that they are nature's catalysts, so they help speed up chemical reactions. So instead of a chemical reaction taking days or weeks to occur, an enzyme might speed it up in a few seconds or a few minutes. So they're very valuable and very useful. But as far as food labels go, nah, it's telling you hardly anything.
Rip Esselstyn [01:06:35]:
Good to know. What about citric acid? That's another one that we see a.
Mel Weinstein [01:06:39]:
Lot of natural product. You do find citric acid in different foods, in nature, but the citric acid that you'll find on food labels is not going to be natural. It's going to be industrialized. It's going to be made with a very complicated process. And you can almost consider it synthetic. Not quite. But there are yeast that can be engineered to make citric acid. And so that part is sort of natural if you take the bioengineering out of it. But then to get the citric acid, there's a whole bunch of complicated steps that it has to go to to become a nice white powder that people would buy. You could buy it at Amazon or food manufacturers could buy it for their products.
Rip Esselstyn [01:07:37]:
This is great mel, great. Vital wheat gluten that you refer to as the boogeyman for celiacs.
Mel Weinstein [01:07:46]:
Well, yeah, if you're a celiac, you want to stay as far away from vital wheat gluten as possible, because celiac disease is something to take very seriously. If you see that on a label and you have that disease, or maybe you have a protein allergy, a wheat protein allergy, you should think twice about eating anything with that in it.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:12]:
Right. So for those that are gluten sensitivity or something like that yeah.
Mel Weinstein [01:08:19]:
Now for vegans and vegetarians who are into Satan, great choice if they don't have those health issues.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:26]:
Got it. This is my last one for you. And then we're going to wind this down, Mel. And I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right. Trehalos.
Mel Weinstein [01:08:36]:
I want to talk about trelos tree halos. Yeah, let me check my notes on that.
Rip Esselstyn [01:08:43]:
Yeah, bring it.
Mel Weinstein [01:08:45]:
It is found in the Taco Bell menu item, which is Taco Bell grande nacho steak. Taco Bell grande nacho steak. Okay. What's that?
Rip Esselstyn [01:09:04]:
No, I'm just saying yes.
Mel Weinstein [01:09:07]:
In that menu item, they use refried beans. And so this tree halos shows up in the refried beans. For what reason, I have no idea, because it's a really bizarre ingredient. I'd never seen it anywhere else in any other products that I've looked at, either in the store or in fast food restaurants. And so what it is, it's sourced from the cocoons of the larynus mac masculate beetle. It comes from a beetle. And these are found in turkey. And these beetles make cocoons. And it's from these cocoons that this material is extracted from. And it has some interesting properties. It can be found in plants, it can be found in animals, specifically insects, such insects as grasshoppers and locusts and butterflies. And it has an interesting property. It's a sweetener. Okay.
Rip Esselstyn [01:10:25]:
Yeah.
Mel Weinstein [01:10:26]:
And it's a substitute, essentially, for blood sugar. So instead of blood sugar being in the blood of certain insects, this tree halos is present and it keeps the insect, or the plant for that matter, from losing moisture from dehydrating. And there's an actual plant called the resurrection plant that it can lose a huge percentage of its moisture, I think. I don't know if it's 90%, I can't remember now but a huge percentage of its moisture, and it will continue to live because of this tree halos chemical in itself. So as far as food is concerned, this material is harvested from the cocoons. And unfortunately, when it's being harvested, a lot of the insects get harvested at the same time. So it's pretty much impossible to not get insect parts in with the tree halos that's used as a food additive. So if somebody's really a strict, very strict vegetarian or vegan and they don't want to eat anything with animals in it, then they want to avoid any products with tree halos.
Rip Esselstyn [01:11:46]:
Right. And that Taco Bell dish you just described.
Mel Weinstein [01:11:50]:
Yeah, well, true.
Rip Esselstyn [01:11:53]:
Although I wonder if that dish, if you're going to go out in the desert for a while, maybe that dish could help you from dehydrating too prematurely.
Mel Weinstein [01:12:01]:
Well, you're better off buying a large amount of refried beans. You get a lot more of it that way.
Rip Esselstyn [01:12:08]:
Yeah, it's funny, mel, I was just talking to a gentleman the other day who said he's like a 30 year vegan and he doesn't eat figs because he claimed that the fig has to be basically it's made by a wasp, and every fig kills a wasp. So I don't know if you've heard.
Mel Weinstein [01:12:33]:
That or not, but no, never heard that one. Yeah, you don't come across figs in food products very often, though. It's probably why I've never looked into it.
Rip Esselstyn [01:12:41]:
Yeah, well, the Fig Newton.
Mel Weinstein [01:12:43]:
Fig Newton? Yes. Can you name others?
Rip Esselstyn [01:12:48]:
Not too many. Good point, Mel. I got to say that this has been an absolute blast and I really appreciate your expertise and your book Fast Food Ingredients Revealed. I'd like to actually close Mel by reading the last paragraph of your book, if you don't mind. Okay.
Mel Weinstein [01:13:15]:
No, I'd like to hear it. I haven't read it in quite a while.
Rip Esselstyn [01:13:18]:
Okay, good. So you say, given the incidences of chronic diseases, the health system is in crisis. Given the incredible advances in medical and nutritional science, it's an absolute shame that people are still killing themselves with their forks. The powerful influence of junk food and fast food companies through the production of addictive industrial foods and the persistent and relentless marketing of their products, particularly to children, needs to be curtailed and regulated. There should be a ban on advertising of dangerous fad products similar to the controls imposed on the tobacco and alcohol industries. All commercial foods should have PFIs, which we talked about PFIs on their labels alongside the nutritional data. More stringent laws could require food taxes on unhealthy foods to help pay for future health expenses. Without governmental intervention to improve public health, this trend is likely to continue until crisis levels of health care are reached. And then you close with this quote from the Food Labels Revealed podcast. Remember this eat foods mainly from natural plants, not manufacturing plants. Well said, Mel.
Mel Weinstein [01:14:37]:
Thanks.
Rip Esselstyn [01:14:38]:
So, any last words that you'd like to say before we say goodbye today?
Mel Weinstein [01:14:45]:
Yeah, I'll add a couple of things. The second half of my book is devoted to the research into foods that contain a lot of ultra processed ingredients. So I talk about some current research and there's a lot going on. And I talk about what are called food scoring systems, which unfortunately the United States does not have yet. Apparently they're working on it, but would help people who are buying foods in grocery stores pick out the ones that would be the healthiest for them, not just nutrition. It's talking about the processed element of the ingredients in those foods. And then I guess, lastly, if you're not looking at food labels, nutrition labels, I highly recommend you start doing it. Avoid foods that have these super long lists of ingredients. I'd say once you get over 20 beware and then look to see what is maybe what you call I don't like to use the word natural, but look for those food products that have a lot of synthetic or highly manipulated, highly processed ingredients and try to avoid this.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:05]:
Right on. Hey, Mel, hit me with a little plan strong fist bump. Okay, you keep it. Plantstrong, my friend, plant strong.
Mel Weinstein [01:16:15]:
Thanks a lot.
Rip Esselstyn [01:16:17]:
See you next time. I hope you'll support Mel and pick up a copy of Fast Food Ingredients Revealed. He also has a podcast called Food Labels Revealed with some of his research as well, and we'll be sure to link to both in the show notes. I don't know about you, but I sincerely appreciate Mel's candor. And transparency when it comes to educating us on these chemicals and food additives that are in our foods. Remember, keep it fresh, keep it whole, and always keep it plant Strong thank you for listening to the Plant Strong podcast. You can support the show by taking a quick minute to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Leaving us a positive review and sharing the show with your network is another great way to help us reach as many people as possible with the exciting news about plants. Thank you in advance for your support. It means everything. The Plants Drawn podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Lori Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth, most notably my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
