How much sugar in "All Gold" Tomato Sauce? 36 spoons!

All Gold Tomato Sauce has been a family favourite for years. They claim there are 36 tomatoes in every bottle, but that's just advertising lies. Only recently have I asked the question: how much sugar is in the sauce?
Today I obtained the answer: 21.3g of sugar for every 100g (or was it ml?). So that means that a 700ml bottle has 150g of cane sugar, i.e. 35.5 teaspoons of sugar (4.2g). Ouch! Not so healthy after all, even though there are no preservatives. Still, it's better than "ketchup" which has all kinds of other nasties.
They have a version with artificial sweetener instead, but I think the health risks of that concoction must be pretty toxic. One has to ask why they need to put so much sugar in the product. To counteract the taste of the vinegar? The mind boggles. I mean, there's a teaspoon of sugar for every tomato in the bottle! I guess they had to "work hard to cram them all in".

Update: According to the label (which uses a very small font) there are 27g of carbs per 100g serving. That means that in a bottle there are 40g of carbs not comprising cane sugar. Divide that by 36, and you get some very small tomatoes, unlike the giant ones shown in the TV ad below. According to Answers.com: "One medium, whole, red, ripe, raw tomato, 2 3/5 inches in diameter and weighing 123 grams contains 5 grams of carbohydrates, on a year-round average." That means there would be 8 tomatoes in a bottle of tomato sauce, not 36. Since they actually use "reconstituted tomato paste", the ad agency claims about tomatoes have been all lies from the beginning, whichever way you look at it. I don't understand why food companies think it is OK to mislead the public like this.

Why We Get Fat

This book could not have come at a better time for me. Because of my cholesterol levels, I was told in November to cut down my fat intake and eat a more healthy diet. What I wasn't told was that most "low fat" foods replace the fat with sugar or other processed carbohydrates, which are more fattening that the fat itself.
Gary Taubes explains this in his latest book, "Why We Get Fat", which draws from research over the last 100 years, and debunks many popular myths about healthy eating. It's available from Audible. I wish the narrator would not replace the word "causal" with "casual" or "causality" with "casualty" (they mean different things and aren't wrong in the original text) but apart from that the audio book is very readable and accessible, and I have ordered the hardcover book which should arrive next week sometime. I may even lend it to my doctor. Once I have lost or gained weight as a result of changing my eating habits, I'll report back. I have decided not to have any sugar in tea or coffee, and not to eat any bread until my weight goes down to a healthy level.

If you need any motivation to cut down on junk food, sugar, carbohydrates and so on, you could always watch the movie "Supersize Me". Scary.

"Red" Espresso gets a green light

It came as a bit of a shock when my doctor and my cardiologist told me to stop drinking coffee, unless it was decaf. A morning pot of coffee to help me wake up has been a ritual for years. In the last two years I have taken to drinking my coffee black, with minimal sugar. What now?

I have recently experimented with Laager "Rooibos Cappuccino", a mixture of Rooibos tea and frothy milk powder, that makes an enjoyable drink pretty close to instant Cappuccino, which is a special treat. So when I visited my local supermarket, the packaging of Red Espresso caught my eye, and I decided to try it.

It's refreshing, with or without milk. So now my morning pot of coffee has been replaced with a morning pot of Red Espresso. There is no caffeine at all, but plenty of anti-oxidants instead, which I'm told is good for me. If I get the urge for coffee, I can always have decaf, but I must say I'm enjoying the Red Espresso just as much. I found more information about it on the marTea site, and there is a web site where you can buy it in several countries. Even Amazon.com sells it. It is available at most supermarkets in South Africa and online from Pick 'n Pay.

Update: It seems that their "patent" is one of those dodgy ones. See Noseweek #134, or check out a competing product at www.teaspresso.com. I can't understand how anyone would try to patent a natural product like tea.

'Bad fats' ban in NYC restaurants

"New York City's Board of Health has voted to ban artery-clogging trans-fats from the city's restaurants.
The city's health officials have for years warned that the fats can cause obesity and lead to heart disease.
Trans-fats go into partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is commonly used for frying and baking.
The unanimous vote makes the city the first in the US to ban the fats, although the original strict deadline to comply has been lengthened.
Restaurants will be banned from using most frying oils containing trans-fats from 1 July, and will have to eliminate the fats from all foods by 1 July 2008."

BBC NEWS: 'Bad fats' ban in NYC restaurants | Food facts web site | Trans Fat Food Nightmare

Trans Fat Food Nightmare

Here is an extract from "The Abs Diet", a book I've been listening to from audible.com. In the print version this can be found on page 61:
"You won't find trans fatty acids listed on most food labels, even though there are more than 40 000 packaged foods that contain this type of fat. You won't find it listed because it's so bad for you that food manufacturers have fought for years to keep it off ingredient labels. In 2003, the US Food and Drug Administration finally adopted regulations requiring manufacturers to include trans fat content on their packaging, but the regulations will be phased in over the next few years. For now, you have to be a smart food consumer to spot where the danger lies.
"Trans fats were invented by grocery manufacturers in the 1950s as a way of appealing to our natural cravings for fatty foods. But there's nothing natural about trans fats - they're cholesterol-raising, heart-weakening, diabetes-causing, belly-building chemicals that, for the most part, didn't even exist until the middle of the last century, and some studies have linked them to an estimated 30 000 premature deaths in the USA every year. In one Harvard study, researchers found that getting just 3 percent of your daily calories from trans fats increased your risk of heart disease by 50 percent. Three perfect of your daily calories equals about 7 grams of trans fats - that's roughly the amount in a single order of fries. Americans eat an average of btween 3 and 10 grams of trans fats every day.
"Since these trans fats don't exist in nature, your body has a hell of a time processing them. Once consumed, trans fats are free to cause all sorts of mischief inside you. They raise the number of LDL (bad) cholesterol particles in your bloodstram and lower your HDL (good) cholesterol. They also raise blood levels of other lipoproteins; the more lipoproteins you have in your bloodstream, the greater your risk of heart disease. Increased consumption of trans fats has also been linked to increased risk of diabetes and cancer.
"Yst trans fats are added to a shocking number of foods. They appear on food labels as PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL - usually vegetable or palm oil."

I wonder how many food store owners know about this? And I wonder if the Beth Din and the Muslim Food Council would be so happy about adding their seal of approval to these foods if they knew what they contain? I intend to find out.

Let Them Eat ePap

It seems like ePap is Africa's best kept secret. It's nutritious, cheap, gives me energy, and keeps my immune system strong. Yet very few people even know of its existence. A church friend tried supplying it to soup kitchens and charities, and very few of them were interested. But at around R20 per 500g bag, it's the cheapest meal you can probably buy. Some charieties and NGOs have embraced it, however.
Penny and I have been having it daily for breakfast for months, and neither of us has caught colds or flu. Compared to last year that in itself is a saving of hundreds of Rands. And we're healthy, affluent people, even by Gauteng standards. The impact for people on the poverty line must be enormous.
I think part of the problem is the preparation. But it's so simple: take a large jam jar, put 2 tablespoons in the bottom, half fill the bottle with cold water, put the lid on and shake vigorously until all the powder is well mixed and there are no lumps. Drink it as is, with no milk or sugar added.
The contact number is 011-726-5634

ePap Information Page | Nutritional Information
| ePap Evaluation | News Article | 29 times the nutritional value of refined maize