The magic word "without"
When it comes to food, it can not be clean enough. "Clean eating" means in new German the praiseworthy trend to always prepare fresh food. But let's be honest: who really always manages to do that?
Probably few. Manufacturers know this and respond to consumer demand for utmost naturalness by keeping their product labels "clean": preservatives, flavors, anything that is discredited by potential customers for whatever reason, legitimate or not do not appear in the list of ingredients. Instead, on the packaging is advertised big, which is just NOT in it.
The range of foods that are advertised as being free of flavor enhancers, sugars, genetic engineering, dyes et cetera, therefore, is constantly growing. In short: The industry has discovered the so-called "clean labels" as an effective marketing tool - and managed to upgrade goods with "clean" labels to modern lifestyle products.
What is often forgotten: By no means all that is harmful, which is banned from the recipe. Anyone who benefits is therefore not necessarily the health, but above all the respective manufacturer, who can demand more money for his "pure" offer. For the alleged quality feature "free from" or "without" customers willingly pay extra - often double or even triple, the polls confirm again and again.
The most well-known example of the "free from" hype is the variety of foods sold with the promise to contain no gluten or lactose. In the past, manufacturers of such products only addressed those who really needed this special product range because of allergies or intolerances - after all, a healthy person can easily digest gluten and lactose. However, the big "free from" packaging labels meanwhile deliberately suggests that gluten (a protein found in grains such as wheat) and lactose (the natural milk sugar) are detrimental additives and that giving up would be healthier for everyone.
Even the placement of the alternative range in the supermarket is part of the marketing strategy: it is usually close to the organic products - this gives it the appearance of particularly high quality and a health-promoting effect. The fact that these special goods are significantly more expensive than the conventional, is hardly noticeable in this environment.
And what about additives? Are not they really dangerous? Around 300 are authorized in the European Union and must be marked with E numbers on packs. Whether they could harm your health is sometimes in fact unclear. For example, there are indications that so-called azo dyes are questionable, which is why on the corresponding products the warning "may affect activity and attention in children" must be. The desire to avoid all these ingredients for safety's sake, so it is quite understandable.
"Free from waste oil" has a similar significance
Only: the foods with "clean labels" often do not fulfill this need. For example, according to the consumer centers, the slogan "without artificial colors" is usually worthless, as it makes it difficult to draw a clear line between "artificial" and "natural". Thus, tested chocolate peanuts containing this hint even a whole series of dyes that were partially - and absolutely legally - chemically enriched with copper. In addition, since the azo dyes have fallen into disrepute, manufacturers are often looking for substitutes from coloring fruits and vegetables. Even if critics of this procedure see no danger to their health, they nevertheless find it a delusion: when a cherry yoghurt is dyed with beetroot powder, it has a high-quality effect, even if it contains hardly any cherries. And cheap algae powder can give wasabi peanuts a deep green color, though there are only traces of Japanese horseradish in it.
Another natural suggestive formulation is "without flavor enhancing additives". And that it often does not simply mean "without flavor enhancers", has a reason: Most of the time it is dispensed with monosodium glutamate, which is frowned upon by the customers. Instead, however, also in organic products, yeast extract is used. For the manufacturers this has the advantage that they do not have to specify a deterrent E number on the package - yeast extract (which by its very nature contains a lot of glutamate) may list it as a "normal" ingredient. As this trick has gotten around, some producers are mixing tomato juice concentrate in food.It also naturally enhances the flavor. Particularly misleading are the "free of" pledges, if the manufacturers themselves praise themselves for having omitted a substance that they are not allowed to use in the offered product anyway. Mini-pizzas, ready spaghetti bolognese and ham salad are touted as "free of artificial flavors" - although they have to be that according to the flavor regulation anyway. In fact, the statement says something like the promise that the food is "guaranteed without waste oil" or "free from rat poison."
