Beauty, indeed, is only skin deep

India has an undeniable affinity towards all things shiny. If you don’t believe me, check the quantum of revenue generated by gold jewelry in India or the fact that the fairness creams were the only recession proof products in India. Have you noticed how, even when you shop for groceries, you automatically move towards polished and uniform looking products?

As a result all pulses shine, all grains shine, all fruits shine, even vegetables, you guessed it, shine. But that is not how Nature designed it. Pick anything fresh from the field and it will not dazzle your eyes with polished awesomeness. But beauty, indeed, is only skin deep. Today we pick one such unfortunate basket that lost its sheen to the race of superficial beauty – unpolished wheat products.

It is sad that only well-heeled Indians switch to unpolished food when they are on a diet. Few realize that, apart from the lower fat content, there are many compelling reasons to eat this way. Quoting from a story published in The Hindu, a doctor once asked his students, “What was the single most important factor for the health of the nation at the beginning of World War II?” The answer, “Raising the amount of the grain used to make bread flour from 70% to 85%.” His next question was, “Who do you think made the most complaint about it?” The answer was, “The laxative companies.”

In 1880 the English flour mills began to produce a very fine white flour consisting purely of the endosperm of the grain, sans roughage, vitamins and minerals. The introduction of this very white flour and its very white bread was eagerly taken to by the masses of the country, as it was only the well-to-do who had white bread heretofore, it being very expensive to sieve out through fine muslin.

In 1900s, some twenty years after the introduction of this special white flour, there was this interesting new illness, coronary thrombosis, along with constipation, gastric ulcers, diverticulitis, varicose veins, gall-bladder problems and general ill-health. The one section of the community who knew something has changed was the grannies of English society who could not understand why they were now constipated. So worried were they that colonic washout clubs were formed to deal with the problem.

The other wonder product from the family is brown rice. Brown rice basically refers to unmilled and unpolished rice that we used to eat before rice started coming packed almost to our doorstep. Only the outermost layer, the hull, is removed to produce brown rice. This makes the rice retain all the natural nutrients. The most important benefit is that it prevents heart diseases because it tackles obesity, diabetes and cholesterol. Since the bran is never removed, it is also rich in essential oils and also helps maintain insulin levels.

Coming to the laxative properties, it prevents food from just sitting in your gut and letting the poisons and toxins to be produced by unhealthy anaerobic bowel bacteria. If you allow that to happen it can cause illnesses from acute appendicitis to bowel cancer especially of the large intestine and rectum.

Off late we also see a lot of effort to add the leached original goodness back to the products and sell them under “fortified” or “added fibre” categories. But that is, and can never be, as good as the real thing.

Coming back to beauty being skin deep, brown is rice is great for the skin. It is rich in vitamin E and the bran layer contains zinc and magnesium which can make the skin glow. Oh boy, I love irony.

Pop goes the myth

Few things really capture the heart and soul of the movie theater experience like a stranger patting your back every time the hero cracks a joke. In the same ballpark is movie theater popcorn. It's an iconic snack associated with the film-going experience and, when chewing gum are not available, it's the next best thing to buy at a 900 percent markup to keep your hands and mouth busy for the next two hours, provided you're not in that back-patting crowd.

Aah, who needs snow!

Since theaters make the majority of their profits off the concession stand, it's no wonder they need to keep costs down as much as possible, which is why most employees seem to have flies buzzing around their heads, and it's also why butter was long ago sacrificed to the gods of conning.

Lately, most places have taken to calling what they put on popcorn "topping" after word got out that butter hadn't seen the inside of a theater since Citizen Kane. The popcorn is often popped in coconut oil and then bathed in hydrogenated soy bean oil, much the way we imagine any super model’s legs right before the ramp walk.

The new mixture, while packing all that delicious butter flavor, also packs your arteries with heart stopping awfulness, so the cost benefit analysis worked more in favor of the theaters than you, supposing you were planning on staving off a heart attack. A large popcorn with this pseudo-butter has as much saturated fat as eight Big Macs.

Take a good look at what you might lose anytime

If you eat too much microwave popcorn, you can wind up in the hospital with popcorn lung. That's right, the popcorn spilled out of his stomach and filled his lungs.

No, just kidding. The truth is much weirder. The "totally not butter" flavoring in microwave popcorn contains the chemical diacetyl, which creates poisonous fumes that can almost totally kill you if you breathe too much of it.

The effects are mostly seen in popcorn factory workers. In fairness, the man who got it from eating popcorn was eating two bags of microwave popcorn a day, so it seemed inevitable some debilitating illness finally caught up with him.

Do you have the freedom of choice?

Buying "free range" eggs is one of the easiest ways to feel good as a consumer -- they are at least as readily available as "normal," mass produced eggs from those horrible giant chicken prisons. Hell, they even cost pretty much the same. There's literally no reason not to buy free range.

According to law, the definition of "free range" is that chickens raised for their meat "have access to the outside." OK ... so that's not quite as free as we assumed, and it appears to only apply to chickens raised for their meat. But at least they still have some freedom, what with the outside and all that.

Words have power, and "free range" in its original sense means unfenced and unrestrained. That makes it a powerful phrase that, no matter how smart we are, conjures subconscious images of freedom hens, riding tiny little freedom horses out on the plains, wearing hen-sized cowboy hats and leaving a happy little trail of delicious freedom eggs in their wake. There may be mandolin music.

But the reality is there are absolutely no regulations whatsoever for the use of the term "free range" on anything other than chickens raised for their meat. The bar of chocolate in your hand could be free range for all the government cares.

Freedom redefined

The industry knows this full well and happily makes us lap up the free range myth, even though in reality a free range hen lives in pretty much the same prison as battery cage hen - except its whole life takes place in a prison shower, rather than a cell.

Awareness of the free range myth is slowly increasing, but although a manufacturer that has been pushing his luck a bit too much does get it back from animal rights every once in a while, that doesn't do much to the overall phenomenon. In fact, Europe is set to ban egg production in cage systems come 2012. Shall we too?

And that’s how the cookie crumbles

Imagine a blueberry muffin.

Even with your freshly gained knowledge that there may or may not be wood pulp in the cake mix, it's pretty impossible not to start salivating at the thought, right? This is largely because of the berries themselves. What's better -- they're so very, very healthy that it's almost wrong for them to taste so good.

Everything is better with blueberries -- that's why they put them in so many foods, cakes, cookies, muffins, you name it. Now that we think of it, there sure seems to be a lot of blueberries in a lot of products. You'd think we'd see more blueberry fields around ...

The Horror:

... not that it would do any good, as the number of blueberries you've eaten within the last year, that have actually come from such a field, is likely pretty close to zero.

I can hear it mocking us

Studies of products that supposedly contain blueberries indicate that many of them didn't originate in nature. All those dangly and chewy and juicy bits of berry are completely artificial, made with different combinations of corn syrup and a little chemist's set worth of food colorings and other chemicals with a whole bunch of numbers and letters in their names.

They do a damn good job of faking it, too -- you need a chemist's set of your own to be able to call the con. You can sort of tell them from the ingredient lists, too, if you know what to look for, although the manufacturers tend to camouflage them under nonesense terms like "blueberry flakes" or "blueberry crunchlets."

There are a number of major differences between the real thing and the Abomination Blueberry: The fake blueberries have the advantages of a longer shelf life and, of course, being cheaper to produce. But they have absolutely none of the health benefits and nutrients of the real thing. This, of course, doesn't stop the manufacturers from riding the Blueberry Health Train all the way to the bank, sticking pictures of fresh berries and other misleading cues all over the product packaging.

And how do they dodge officials? A bunch of products actually contain an unspecified amount of real berries. This way they can legally advertise natural flavors while substituting the vast majority of berries with the artificial ones.

So next time you choose blueberry cheesecake over carrot cake, think again…till of course we find out that the carrot is actually redwood shavings…

How the creative juices flow

Quick, name the healthiest drink your nearest store has to offer. You said orange juice, didn't you? It's what everybody makes you drink when you get sick. Hell, that thing must be like medicine or something. And the labels are always about health benefits -- the cartons scream "100 percent natural!", "Not from concentrate!" and "No added sugar!"

Bottled divinity

And why not believe them? When it comes to making the stuff, orange juice isn't sausage. You take oranges, you squeeze oranges, you put the result in a carton, with or without pulp. End of story, beginning of deliciousness.

But what if we told you that "freshly squeezed" juice of yours can very well be a year old, and has been subjected to stuff?

The Horror:

Ever wonder why every carton of natural, healthy, 100 percent, not-from-concentrate orange juice manages to taste exactly the same, yet ever so slightly different depending on the brand, despite containing no additives or preservatives whatsoever?

The process indeed starts with the oranges being squeezed, but that's the first and last normal step in the process. The juice is then immediately sealed in giant holding tanks and all the oxygen is removed. That allows the liquid to keep without spoiling for up to a year. That's why they can distribute it year-round, even when oranges aren't in season.

There is just one downside to the process (from the manufacturers' point of view, that is) -- it removes all the taste from the liquid. So, now they're stuck with vats of extremely vintage watery fruit muck that tastes of paper and little else. What's a poor giant beverage company to do? Why, they re-flavor with a carefully constructed mix of chemicals called a flavor pack, which are manufactured by the same fragrance companies that formulate CK One and other perfumes. Then they bottle the orange scented paper water and sell it to you.

And you thought one gulp of this would make your breakfast complete…Sigh.