Exploring Fast Food Ingredients and Health Implications

Today, we dive deep into the world of fast food ingredients and their impact on health. Our guest for today is Mel Weinstein, a former food chemist who has spent decades studying industrial foods and additives.

Mel and Rip discuss a variety of eye-opening topics related to fast food ingredients, how they end up in our food system, and the impacts they have on our health. 

You'll learn about:

• Mel’s personal journey to food chemistry, vegetarianism, and eventually veganism

• All cornfields are not the same! How field corn, or dent corn, differs from the sweet corn we buy at grocery stores.

• How this dent corn is grown and processed to create various products and components like starch, oil, protein, and fiber.

• The government's role in regulating the food industry and how this later influenced the creation of dietary guidelines.

• What the food manufacturing companies did to resist these recommendations and drastically alter the food industry (and our health). 

• The rise of fat-free products loaded with sugar and the unintended consequences of Olestra, an indigestible fat-like substance, as a response to the government's push to reduce fat in foods.

• Why it’s difficult for consumers to know what they are eating when dining out in restaurants.

• The ridiculous amount of ingredients found in common meals at places like Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut. 

• Mel’s Processed Food Index (PFI) and what makes something lightly processed vs. extremely processed, or industrialized.

• What are some of these “Ingredients” commonly found in food products, such as azodicarbonamide, natural flavors, hydrogenated soybean oil, methylcellulose, pea protein isolates, and soy protein isolates, and do they get the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” from Mel?

• What about carrageenan, alternatives like xanthan gum and enzymes, wheat gluten, and the industrialization of citric acid?

• Should we "fear our food?!"

We know fast food is, for the most part, crap, but what we didn’t realize is just how bad some of it really is. Not surprisingly, the food industry doesn’t want us to know what’s really in that fried chicken or juicy burger, but thanks to Mel we’re inspired and educated to drive right on past that drive-thru.

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About Mel Weinstein

Mel Weinstein is a retired chemist living in Central Illinois. In his professional career, he taught chemistry for 10 years at the community college level, worked as an analytical chemist for over 20 years in a research center for a multinational food ingredients company, and studied food science at the graduate level. Since his early 20's, he has had a fascination with the constituents of industrial foods, exploring the purpose of additives and their impact on health. In 2016, he started an online podcast called "Food Labels Revealed" to share with consumers his knowledge of food ingredients, their history, and potential problems associated with diets high in hyper-processed foods.

In studying the myriad additives found in commercial foods, he eventually posed the question, "Do fast foods contain the same additives as found in packaged foods on grocery store shelves?" To answer this question, he researched menu items in various fast-food restaurants. The results of the research led to the writing of this book, Fast Food Ingredients Revealed. Mr. Weinstein sincerely hopes that in reading this book consumers will gain a better understanding of what they are eating when they are lured into fast food restaurants promising fantastic smells, tastes, and textures invented by very creative food scientists and engineers.