Let’s Start with Weight Watchers (Frozen) Chocolate Brownies:

Do you really want to eat emulsifier, soya lecithin, whey powder and inulin? Do you even know what they are?! Other delights, towards the end, are pork gelatine (veggies beware) and locust bean gum. In my opinion, this product is about as bad as processed food can be.

One of these (frozen) chocolate brownies is 163 calories. I can hardly think of a worse way to consume 163 calories. PLEASE don’t be this horrid to your body.

See, again, if you can make out the ingredients list below (the first words are in English – the ingredients list comes in several different languages, so that many unfortunate children across the world can have access to this concoction of sugar and not much else). They are, in order of largest ingredient first, glucose syrup, sugar, gelatine (non veggie), dextrose, citric acid, flavourings, fruit & plant concentrates, colours (including carmine, which is made from crushed insects), beeswax, invert sugar syrup.

On the back of the packet, there’s the “Food facts” where the product (proudly?) points out that it is ‘gluten free’, ‘nut free’, ‘milk free’ and ’soya free’. That’s because it’s free of pretty much anything except sugars and gelatine (gelatine being crushed animal parts)! It could also tick boxes to say that it is vitamin free or mineral free!  I would love anyone from Haribo to tell me if there is a single nutrient in the whole pack (other than the protein from the crushed animal bones) – or is the entire product pure empty calories?

Grown-ups – surely you can find a more nutritious ‘treat’ than this to give children?! Children will grow up healthier, if they never think of empty calories as ‘treats’.

The ingredient list is sugar, glucose syrup, skimmed milk powder, milk fat, vegetable fat cocoa butter, cocoa mass, lactose, demineralised whey powder, fat reduced cocoa, barley malt extract, emulsifiers, salt, egg white, hydrolysised milk protein, natural vanilla extract.

The main issues that I have with confectionery bars (of which the Mars Bar (R) is one of the best known) are:

a) they are processed foods and your body is much better off with real food – food in the form nature intends us to eat it;

b) they are often laden with sugar and man made fats and things that you simply don’t need in your diet; and

c) for this particular example, the Mars Bar, apart from the milk products, this is pretty much empty calories (and you’d be better off consuming normal milk than skimmed milk powder and milk fat).

An average size woman, needing c. 2000 calories per day, would consume 1/8th of her daily needs with just 1 Mars Bar and not get much nutrition in return for these 259 calories. She could, instead, have a really large tuna salad for close to this number of calories and that would have massively more vitamins and minerals.

1) They are strongly marketed towards children, with adverts and toys and characters, which appeal to children. Every person, and especially a child, is better off without sugar and empty calories to start the day and it would be lovely to see porridge or 100% whole-wheat as the first choice for cereal for children;

2) As with almost all processed food, the sugars are listed individually, so that sugar per se doesn’t necessarily head the list of ingredients. In all but one of the varieties in this multi-pack, both sugar and glucose-fructose syrup are contained (the Rice Krispies multi-grain has caramel as a second sugary ingredient instead). If the sugars were all ‘lumped’ together, it would give a more accurate picture of just how much sugar is in this manufactured cereal;

3) Cereals love to claim “fortified with vitamins” and all these cereals have niacin, iron, and some of the B complex vitamins.  Any person would still be better off with a good multi vitamin and mineral tablet (with the full range of vitamins and minerals, and not just a few) and a bowl of sugar free cereal instead.

Notice, again, how all the sugars are separated – if grouped together, it is likely that the sugar in the chocolate chips, the sugar in the biscuit and the inverted sugar syrup would together be the largest ingredient.

Notice also the other things that you would be putting in your body, if you ate these biscuits. If you don’t know what emulsifier, whey powder, ammonium hydrogen carbonate and sodium hydrogen carbonate are, do you really want to be eating them?

I do not believe that people who crave biscuits can eat them in moderation. One biscuit has 57 calories – I bet you could munch your way through a few hundred calories before even thinking about it. If you crave biscuits, wheat and/or sugar, you need to stop eating them. You can’t be a food addict ‘in moderation’, just as an alcoholic can’t have one drink and leave the rest of the bottle.

This is a brilliant example of how calorie counting leads to the three conditions that cause insatiable food cravings. In this concoction of just 56 calories we have wheat, dairy, sugar (the main food intolerances), yeast, sugar and biscuit (feeds Candida beautifully) and sugar, sweetener and other things that any ‘hypoglycaemic body’ is not going to recognise and process effectively.

I really am at a loss sometimes to wonder why anyone would put so many processed ingredients into their body at all – let alone for so little fuel/petrol.

Why would you want over 10 ingredients when you can have just 1? Is it because this has less saturated fat than butter? This is just good marketing. Saturated fats are not the baddies – transfats and manufactured fats are the worst fats of all. Transfats are even banned in Denmark, Switzerland and New York.

Don’t forget, in The Harcombe Diet you don’t have butter, or spreads, on bread, as you don’t mix fats and carbs. So manufactured pots of spreads have no place in The Harcombe Diet. Butter does have a place – it can be used in cooking with fat meals e.g. scrambled eggs, or, you only need a tiny scraping of butter as a delicious way of cooking fish (baked in tin foil with herbs and a dash of butter).

Then the next largest ingredient is sweetened condensed milk.

Then you have the chocolate flavour coating (sugar, vegetable oil, whole milk powder, fat reduced cocoa powder, milk whey powder, emulsifier, flavouring).
Then more sugars – fructose and glucose syrup.
Then milk chocolate pieces (more sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, cocoa mass, milk sugar, emulsifier, vegetable oil, invert sugar syrup, sugar, glycerol, agar, flavourings, disodium phosphate, emulsifier and E320).

We simply must get used to reading ingredient labels. Or, better still, stop eating anything that has more than one  ingredient on the label. Brown rice, porridge oats, salmon, tomatoes etc – that’s what my body wants. How about yours?

Wheat flour is the first ingredient. Dried skimmed milk delivers the dairy and sugar is there in the form of glucose, sugar in the chocolate powder, more sugar and then sweetener, just in case there’s not enough sugar elsewhere.

This is highly likely to feed cravings for the common food intolerances and for more sweet things.

Please can we stop encouraging people down the calorie counted/processed food route and back to real food. Have a real glass of milk before bed and you will sleep better and be much healthier overall.