Anyone for chemical soup?

By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald Columnist

Thursday, December 7, 2006 - Updated: 03:50 AM EST

Ever since New York banned them in restaurants, we’ve been in a trans-fat frenzy.

But what about mysterious ingredients in what else we shove down our throatsDiet Coke: Caramel color, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate, citric acid, caffeine and phenylalanine, an essential amino acid found in aspartame, which makes Coke taste sweet. Among aspartame’s byproducts are methanol and formaldehyde, which some nuts on the Internet claim will kill you. At least I hope they’re nuts.

Kids’ treat Kool-Aid: citric acid, calcium phosphate, acesulfame potassium, sucralose and artificial color red #40, which other nuts on the Internet rail against.

Another kid’s treat, St. Nick’s Deluxe Christmas cookies: Have you bought your batch this year? They’re chock-a-block with artificial colors #5 and #6 yellow, #3 and #40 red, #2 blue; and then sulfur dioxide, sodium benzoate, vegetable shortening, artificial flavors to go with the artificial colors, sugar, sugar, sugar! And carnauba wax.

Yum.

I’m sure the 30-plus chemical names listed on a can of infant formula, which make it sound like some combustible science experiment, in fact are great for baby, no matter what still more nuts on the Internet claim. Not to mention the breast-feeding nuts. For the children’s sake we must hope they’re all nuts, every single one.

But at least there’s no trans-fats in Similac infant formula. There is none in childhood favorite Oreos either, ever since the anti-trans-fat crowd sued Kraft in 2003 to get rid of them. No, your basic Oreo Double Stuf, the better for milk dunking, is made of sugar, sugar, sugar! Plus high oleic canola oil and/or palm oil and cocoa processed with alkali and high fructose corn syrup (more sugar), plus salt and nutritious artificial flavors.

For a true trans-fat taste one must go to another staple of babyhood: Nabisco’s Zwieback Toast and Arrowroot Biscuits, “Baby’s first cookie for over 100 years!” the Arrowroot label reads - and no added preservatives or artificial flavors. Just, you know, added trans-fats. But “a trivial amount,” the Zwieback label reads.

Then there’s Chex Mix, a snack favorite at after-school programs across America. It’s got “55 percent less fat than regular potato chips,” the label reads. Alas, the trans-fats are everywhere among the monosodium glutamate, the ammonium bicarbonate, the BHT to preserve freshness, and, ubiquitous in prepared food, the high fructose corn syrup, the maltodextrin and the distilled monoglycerides. Then there it is, slipped right in, the partially hydrogenated soybean oil, a trans-fat killer in their midst.

Here’s what else a careful label-reader notices: How labelers try to fool you. “0 trans fats” reads the big green circle on the front of another all-American favorite, Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn. But then in tiny letters on the back you see palm oil and canola oil, and Orville admits such oil “adds a trivial amount of trans fat.”

Trivial to whom, one might ask?

Here’s one to rev up the anti-illegal alien crowd: The ingredients on Pringles potato chips are in Spanish.

OK, maybe you’re old enough to remember when Grandma chased chickens around the yard, wrung their necks, and we ate free-range for supper! But then we started buying beef shot with steroids, milk from cows shot with rGBH. Then we switched from butter to margarine for health reasons. Now we’re daily downing foods filled with stuff with names we can’t even pronounce.

Land O’ Lakes margarine, by the way, contains the chemicals and trans-fats hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cottonseed oil, sodium benzoate, mono and triglycerides and artificial flavors.

Land O’ Lakes unsalted butter has a single ingredient: cream.

I think we’ve made some mistakes.