Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Book Club - Unprocessed by Megan Kimble


This book took me a long time to read - nearly 3 months - but there is 
so much interesting and sometimes surprising information
it felt like a book to read slowly.
 
Some good bits - 
 
"According to a study by Local First, if 
you spend $100 at a local business, $73 of it will stay in your 
community.... spend that money at a national corporation and only $43 
sticks around."
 
"Only about 10% of the salt in the American diet 
comes from salt added at the table; the other 90% is already added to 
processed foods." 
 
"Salt is perfect for processed foods... It is 
cheap...Even better, it binds water and makes foods weigh more, so you 
pay more for heavier packages."
 
"Salt is one of the most common 
of the 10,000 chemicals added to our foods. Of these 10,000, 1,480 have 
been approved by the FDA; 3,600 more have been deemed GRAS, or generally
 recognized as safe. A thousand more have never been tested by the FDA 
and a further 3,800 are "indirect additives" and so are totally 
unregulated." 
 
"....on average, 91 cents of every dollar American 
consumers spend on food goes to middlemen- to suppliers, marketers, 
producers."
 
"Over the past 50 years sugar consumption has tripled worldwide..."