There is almost no more reliable indicator of the overall nutritional value of a food as whether the box or bag it is in contains a bold-text label to some healthy ingredient or lack of a harmful one. If a food package claims anywhere on it that it is healthy in some way you can bet that the overall product it contains is unhealthy. Perhaps not unhealthy for every single eater, maybe not even for the average eater, but it is unhealthy for many, and maybe you are in that number.

Vitamin Water. The claim is right there in the name. This water is ‘enhanced’ with VITAMIN. Everyone born and raised in America knows before grade school that vitamins are necessary for health. I don’t really need to say it, but if you put vitamins in poison it does not make the poison healthy. Putting vitamins in water is no different than putting them in your mouth and washing them down with water, or chewing them. This water also has 120 calories. Water normally has zero calories. Vitamins contain no calories. I wonder where the calories in vitamin water comes from. Here is a blurb about what this very Vitamin Water contains, from not Coca Cola:

So, it contains less than 0.5 percent of a whole list of stuff (none of which has anything to do with this particular flavor’s namesake fruit, the orange), and thus at least 99.5 percent water, crystalline fructose, and sugar. Crystalline fructose, it turns out, is an even more processed version of high-fructose corn syrup—it provides a pure jolt of fructose.

So, what is your opinion, is a bottle of vitamin-enhanced water better for you than a similarly sized bottle of Coca Cola? Coca Cola doesn’t claim to have any health benefits. Both products contain the exact same amount of sugar. Sugar is the ingredient in Coca Cola that we should be avoiding. Sugar is the ingredient in Vitamin Water that we should be avoiding like poison. Adding vitamins to poison does not make the poison good for you. There fore… you should be avoiding Vitamin Water like poison…despite the healthy sounding name.

This same logic also applies to things you think are healthy because of what they are not. Ages ago, when not as much was known about body chemistry as now, it was decided to let everyone know that diets that contained ‘saturated fats’ may lead to a death of heart disease. The “MAY” part of the warning was not trumpeted as loud as the rest. It turns out that natural saturated fats–butter, lard, tallow, coconut–are not leading to heart disease, and the warning led to all sorts of unintended consequences.

This from Fox News:

If you think that sugar is the unhealthiest thing you can eat, you’re wrong. Apparently, the Worst Food on the Planet Award should actually go to soybean oil, suggests new findings published in the journal PLoS One.

Guess what other oils are way worse for you than any saturated fat. All of the PROCESSED oils are more fattening, lead to fatty liver, just as though they were loaded with fructose–even worse than fructose itself.

Deol and her colleagues aren’t totally sure what makes soybean oil so horrible, but they guess that it could have something to do with the way the stuff influences genes that determine how the liver metabolizes fat. And other processed vegetable oils might not be much better.

“We’ve actually tested corn oil, and we found that it was also causing more obesity than coconut oil, but not as much as soybean oil. We haven’t tested canola yet,” she said.

I can hazard a guess as to why these oils have this unexpected result in dietary testing. Gut microbes are feasting on this mystery material, turning the food into something fructose-like, that only the liver can metabolize. That is the problem with fructose, it can only be turned by the liver into fat, it cannot be used by the cells of the body directly. Am I surprised that man-made cooking oils are actually bad for us? No, I am not.

I am going back to nature. Making my own lard from real pigs raised on real farms is not hard to do at all. I go to the processing locker that is 30 minutes from my home, I ask them for leaf lard fat, and they give me five pound bags of it. I cut that fat up into chunks, throw it in the crock pot, where it just fits, and I walk off while it slowly turns into lard. I ladle it out though a reusable coffee strainer into mason jars, wide mouth so I can get it out easily, and let it cool. It keeps forever on the shelf. It’s GOOD for me, because my body knows what to do with it.

Making Tallow is just as easy. Same locker has five pound bags of Suet, which is fat from cattle. These cattle were not fed hormones, antibiotics and corn until their slaughter, so this fat will not contain any products from any of that unnatural food. The resulting tallow will heat nicely to 375 or 400 without smoking, making it perfect for deep frying chicken, fish, potatoes…it’s what McDonald’s used to use before we all were convinced that partially hydrogenated soybean oil was better for us that REAL oil. Tallow keeps indefinitely at room temperature. I made 20 pounds of it, and bought a “Lard Can” to keep it in.

That’s why, even though more research is needed to unveil the nitty gritty details of how soybean oil wrecks our health, it makes sense to cut back where you can, Deol said.

So, avoid processed food that lists the stuff as an ingredient as much as possible. As for cutting it out altogether? It’s worth a shot, but good luck.

“It’s so prevalent in our food system. If something says vegetable oil, it’s most likely soybean oil, or soybean oil is a component,” warned Deol.

Actually, cutting out mysterious ingredients is easy. You don’t have to read labels to do it, either.

If the food needs a label, it’s not food. If it contains more than one ingredient, it’s processed and you should probably be eating something else.

Stick to whole vegetables, naturally raised meats, whole dairy products (nothing low-fat), farm eggs (not industrially raised) and you will be avoiding all of the man made problems with modern food. If you do this, you can actually start eating sweet treats for dessert and it won’t hurt you or make you fat. All this other BS in your diet is what is making you fat. The occasionally sweet scoop of ice cream is as benign as you wish it would be. The FrankenFoods that you ate just before the ice cream are the deadly poisons that you think the treats are.