Despite being highly processed and not at all healthy, consumers still purchase box after box of “natural” and organic breakfast cereals thinking it’s good for them.
This is because consumers get so easily excited about a label with just one or two ingredients and no chemicals or preservatives, but rarely seem to consider how those ingredients are sourced or processed – which is many times more important!
Kashi GoLean, an extremely popular brand of “natural” cereal recently got slapped for abusing this misplaced consumer trust by The Cornucopia Institute’s Cereal Crimes report.
A box of Kashi GoLean cereal was purchased from a Whole Foods in Boston and sent to an accredited lab for testing.
The findings?
The cereal was 100% GMO and had pesticide residues despite having “natural” on the label.
Kashi responded by saying the information was inaccurate and misleading because it was not based on a formal scientific analysis of Kashi products.
Huh??
How can testing a box of Kashi cereal at an accredited lab not be scientifically accurate?
Oh wait, I know! Â It’s because Kashi wasn’t funding the testing behind the scenes so they could stealthily control the results that were reported, right?
Kashi’s arrogant and lame response is typical of giant food manufacturers like Kellogg, which owns Kashi, who are used to being able to claim just about anything they want about their products and get away with it.
Even more lame, when it became apparent that Kashi wasn’t going to be able to spin its way out of the PR nightmare, it was announced that Kashi would be 100% GMO free by …
2015!
Don’t worry guys. Â Keep on eating that GMO, pesticide laced cereal for just a few more years and we’ll be sure to get our act together and get rid of them before you’re in a wheelchair! Â And, if we’re lucky, you will forget all about this messy public relations snafu in a few short months so we won’t really have to change at all!
The fact is, Kellogg supports GMOs for use in “natural” products. According to the grassroots organization GMO Free USA, Kellogg is actively working against requiring the labeling of GMOs having contributed $33,000 so far to propaganda campaigns to defeat it.
Best not to trust food companies with your most important meal of the day and go barcode free with your breakfast choices. Â The soaked cereals of traditional cultures are an excellent choice or, if you really need a cold breakfast cereal, make a truly healthy one yourself so that it doesn’t contain the extruded, denatured, allergenic cereal grains of the heavily processed, boxed variety that are falsely promoted on the label as somehow healthy because they are natural or organic.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Oh no….say it isn’t so
and my daughter broke a tooth on it!
yikes.
Couldn’t share this one fast enough! Thanks Sarah!
Beware most packages foods that have a long shelf life. Few of them are good for you because “natural”, “healthy”, etc are marketing terms attached to products/processes, without any widely accepted standards.
BE A LABEL READER!!! I read Kashi labels years ago and knew they weren’t good. Also, know which ingredients are available in gmo (soy and corn are two) and buy only organic when those are listed. And for us, we avoid soy altogether.
While we are talking about healthy cereal, Sarah, can you tell me how to incorporate traditional soaking of grains with my steel cut oats cereal that we eat? I soak the oats in boiled water an hour or more (until the oats are tender and water absorbed), then add nuts, dried fruit, etc. to make a muessli that stores in the refrigerator. When we eat it, we add Greek yogurt and fresh fruit. Thanks!
Yes Sarah, I would like a little help her too. Thanks for asking her Susan.
Susan and Pamela, if you click on the Categories search feature midway down on the right side, and click on Breakfast, you’ll see her posts on traditionally soaked oatmeal, homemade cold cereals, etc.
And speaking of cold cereal, we enjoy leftover soaked oatmeal in the summer straight out of the frig. Of course it has many good things already mixed in from the day before, including shredded coconut, coconut oil, raw butter, sea salt, and coconut sugar or maple syrup. I have a rare two-quart Le Creuset cast iron enamel pot that’s perfect for this.
I’m not experienced with this and would like specific instruction 🙂
Would I just add a little lemon juice when the oats are in the water? Would it change the taste? This recipe does not give “mushy” oatmeal, the oats are more formed. And I don’t know what it would do to soak it overnight. I do make it the night before, and have put a little whey from the greek yogurt in when mixing it up. But it goes straight to the frig. I don’t know if that is enough “soaking” though.
I came across this website: http://www.passionatehomemaking.com/2008/04/whole-grains-grinding-soaking.html which suggests that oats be soaked for 24 hours. I usually add a tablespoon of homemade yogurt (which I culture for 16 or more hours) to the water in which the oats soak since it does not impact the flavour (I also rinse my oats before I cook them although it is not absolutely necessary). Some sources I’ve come across also suggest adding a tablespoon of whole grain flour to reduce the phytates in the oats even more. “The higher phytase content of these grains will compensate for its lack in oatmeal, and aid in the breakdown of the phytic acids” ). Hope that helped!
There are countless examples of big food companies presenting misleading and outright false information on their labels – after all, their budget for producing the product goes mostly to this effort, and not the quality of the product itself. Kashi is certainly not the only one, but it’s been in the news a lot lately, and so many people I know buy these products and think they are great. I stopped buying Kashi and similar products probably 7-8 years ago, and I’ve discovered that the only way to go is to buy food from sustainable, local producers you know and trust.
This is insane! I worry for my own health, but also the health of the people of America, and my future children. If ONLY the American public wake up as whole and start demanding on a mass scale REAL FOOD (or grow it ourselves)! But most only care about quantity, NOT quality! God help us! But on a happier, note there are MANY people out there who are trying to turn this around, thank you Sarah!
Amen!
This is a prime example of finding out who own the label.
Hello – Kellogg!
Another huge one is Johnson and Johnson. People think they are buying something safe for their baby when getting Aveno products. It’s the same junk as all the other Johnson and Johnson brands but labeled differently!
So sad