Cheese & crackers just got lazier

“It’s perfect on a cracker. Almost too perfect. Explore the secrets of one of the world’s most unnatural foods”, says Patrick Di Justo of Wired.

It’s squirt-on cheese from Kraft, called Easy Cheese. No kidding. Who needs a knife and a cutting block when you can squirt on cheese?

Read the short article which outlines its major ingredients, including “twice the sodium of typical organic cheddar.” Oh, and it’s an “excellent source of calcium,” too, but only because they added calcium phosphate… to make up for the effects of sodium phosphate.

From Kraftfoods.com:

Ingredients: MILK, WATER, WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, WHEY, CANOLA OIL, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF SALT, SODIUM CITRATE, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, LACTIC ACID, SORBIC ACID AS A PRESERVATIVE, SODIUM ALGINATE, APOCAROTENAL (COLOR), ANNATTO (COLOR), CHEESE CULTURE, ENZYMES.

By the way, annatto, a common food additive that produces a yellow colour, “often produces allergic symptoms like skin rashes and large wheals on the skin. In one patient written up in the Annals of Allergy, his morning breakfast of Fiber One cereal with milk produced these symptoms, plus severe low blood pressure. Annatto is also known to cause blood-sugar levels to rise precipitously, producing damage to the energy-production sites in the liver and pancreas.” [From The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Brains and Harming Our Children, by Carol Simontacchi.] The source she sites is from 10 years ago. Annatto is “extracted from the seeds of the tree Bixa orellana…” a reminder that not everything from a natural source is good for you.

Surprise, surprise, the squeezable junk doesn’t contain any trans fat, according to the label*, but in a 32 gram serving (there are about 7 servings in the 8 oz container) there are:

• 6 grams of fat

• 20mg of cholesterol

• 410mg of salt

• 2g of carbohydrate, 0 of which is fiber and 1 of which is sugar

• 5g of protein.

Not so bad, you say? Of the 90 calories in a serving, 60 of the calories are from fat.

And in the 32 gram serving, the percentages applied to the 4 included vitamins/minerals are:

• Vitamin A 4%

• Vitamin C 0%

• Calcium 20% (but it’s added)

• Iron 0%

So what are you really getting? A tiny bit of vitamin A, a little bit of calcium, and lots of stuff you should really be getting from fish and vegetables instead. Would you feed this to your kids? Does it even taste like cheese? And why does it have food colouring in it? Is it to make it fun? If so, why not make it blue? or red? Why not make it in multiple colours then mix it like paint?

*”Where a product contains less than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving, the FDA requires that the content be listed in the package’s Nutrition Facts box as “0g”. That same definition applies on this website. When a label shows 0 grams trans fat per serving and lists a “partially hydrogenated” vegetable oil (such as soybean or cottonseed, among others) in the ingredients, the product may contain up to 0.49 grams of trans fat per serving. Keep in mind that ingredients and formulations change. The information shown here may vary from the content and label information of products currently in stores.” — Kraftfoods.com