You don't eat your friends, right, so you don't care what their bodies are made up of (only what's in their heart). Likewise, you don't expect your food to be there for you when times get rough.
But food labels are different than social labels. They're supposed to be limiting. They exist to inform in one specific area: ingredients. Food goes into your organs (unlike your friends) and allows or destructs certain functioning. You need to know what's in it.
If you've educated yourself about nutrition, you already know this. If you haven't, you're probably still buying a lot of trans fats and high fructose corn syrup, suffering undiagnosable aches and pains, and playing roller coaster with your health and weight (or will be soon). More than that, you probably have no idea that foods with "0 g" next to the Trans Fat column on the label doesn't actually mean the stuff is trans-fat free.
If you're a "sometimes" reader of labels, the advice in this blog is especially for you, because it's likely that if you bother to read labels at all, you are only thinking to read them on foods you consider "staples." Which means the last place you probably check is chewing gum. Guess what? It's there.
Food processing plants and product engineers are extremely sneaky. I mean inconceivably sneaky. They're their own CIA. If I hadn't been training myself for years to wear hyper-label spectacles every time I'm near food, I wouldn't have guessed either that they were putting trans fats in my favorite gum.
About a year and a half ago was when I first discovered that Orbit, the best gum I ever bought (judged solely by how well it disguised my coffee breath), was using partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in various flavors of their product. I had been chewing the peppermint kind (free of trans fats, high in aspartame) but found myself at an unfamiliar bodega in Brooklyn once where peppermint was unavailable. I turned to "Mojito Mint," squinting at the label.
What I found was trans fat, first ingredient. So I put it down and picked up the next one (Raspberry Spasm, or something) and what I found there was the same. I looked through all the other weird flavors and couldn't get away from the stuff. I left the store empty-handed and went home to brush my teeth.
Since then, I have pretty much sworn off gum altogether. And when it comes down to it, that's best. If you can help it, don't buy mints, breath "tape" or any of it. All the food companies that are trying to eliminate trans fats from their snacks are just transferring it to stuff that's already entirely bad for you, like gum and candy, whose labels people are less likely to read because they buy it whimsically at the checkout.
Drink enough water, keep coffee to the mornings, brush your teeth more often, and you'll be fine. If you're popping gum when you're hungry, just eat real food. And if it's the kind with labels, read them.
