Palm Olein Oil? WTF is that???

August 9, 2007 4:52 AM

Please point me in the direction of a website that explains in simple terms exactly what food labels are talking about.

I've recently gotten interested in exactly what it is that is going into my food. To this end, I've been preparing my own food a lot more, but I still also eat some ready made, prepackaged food. I'd like to find a website(s) that explains

a] what each different ingredient is (garlic is pretty obvious, but what is Sodium Hexacyanoferrate, exactly?) and why it's there.

b] explains how to do things like read food labels and extract the necessary information.

c] discusses optimal levels of nutrition, and how to achieve them, with the focus being on "whole" foods like veg/fish, with details of what levels of nutrition are in 80g of french beans for example.

I'm not interested in sites where I have to input everything I eat during the day, and then it tells me how well I'm doing. I don't want to be a body builder. I don't want advice on changing my diet (eat more veg, drink less coffee/soft drinks, take more exercise, etc) because I already know all this stuff. I just want to be more concious about the food I eat, and more reliant on myself to make the changes. I want to be able to walk into a supermarket, pick up a carton of whatever, and think "Ick, $ingredient! No thanks".

I'm in the UK, if that makes any difference (I presume USA food labels are slightly different?).

posted by Solomon to Health & Fitness (6 answers total)

I suggest the book Twinkie Deconstructed which examines the ingredients of the Twinkie and might be a good start to understanding what you find in processed foods. You can listen to an interview with the author.
posted by exhilaration at 6:38 AM on August 9, 2007

Best answer: For many ingredients in processed food, you might pop into a library and look them up in a Merck Index. The entries will have a lot of stuff you probably don't care about, but usually give a little blurb about the various uses for the particular compound or mixture. The Merck does include data on materials that most non-chemists probably don't think of as "chemicals" including things like carageenan and guar gum and other plant-derived products.

Oh! and to make it all less intimidating, there is a name index in the back that will help you find the correct entry based on the name on the food package.
posted by janell at 8:58 AM on August 9, 2007

There is an amazing web site called Google, where you can type in the name of any food ingredient and receive lots of information about it from different sources. Try it on sodium hexacyanoferrate or palm olein oil, it works great.
posted by grouse at 9:45 AM on August 9, 2007

Best answer: Of course, googling the ingredients will work, as grouse suggests. On the other hand, much of the "information" one finds when searching for chemical-related information is filled with dubiously-informed hysteria especially in the area of food science.

You might also look in Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. The older edition had some of the information you're after, in story form, and I think the new edition expands upon that section.
posted by janell at 11:22 AM on August 9, 2007

Best answer: I would recommend the book "What to Eat" by Marion Nestle.
The goes into all the details about where the ingredients on the nutrition label come from, and what they do in your body. She also covers the differences between food labels in different countries and the politics around what the daily recommended values of different items are.

Since you are interested in internet sources, the author has a blog on the same topic, here.
posted by paddingtonb at 11:30 AM on August 9, 2007

This looks pretty good.
posted by catseatcheese at 5:41 AM on August 11, 2007