Target, Walmart Selling Fake Ginkgo, Garlic, Ginseng Thanks to Political Loophole

This week, the New York State Attorney General charged Walmart, Target, Walgreens and GNC with selling "mislabeled" and "adulterated" dietary supplements.  

No surprise, at least to Fake Food Watch readers.  (See below for my list of other dietary supplements that should also be investigated by authorities... ) 

Many health supplements are fakes. Most, actually. Frauds. Bogus, pricey bait for consumers.  Neither effective, nor worth the billions Americans waste annually in vain hopes of improving their health. 

That's because "These drugs are not subject to the F.D.A.’s approval because of a loophole in a 1994 federal law (spearheaded by Utah Sen Orrin G. Hatch who received funding from supplement makers), fraudulent products can easily reach consumers without accountability or oversight," per Salon.com.    

Republican Sen. Hatch berated 2012 proposed legislation created to force greater accountability in the lucrative dietary supplement industry. 

Sen. Hatch bitterly railed against an amendment that would ..."require facilities engaged in the manufacturing, processing, packing, or holding of dietary supplements to register with the FDA, provide a description with a list of all ingredients, as well as a copy of the labeling for each dietary supplement product.  Additionally, the facilities must also register with respect to new, reformulated, and discontinued dietary supplement products. 

While I appreciate my colleague’s commitment, his amendment is based on the misguided presumption that the current regulatory framework for dietary supplements is flawed..."  (Source - U.S. Senate website of Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah)

Findings of the New York State Attorney General?  Of 390 DNA barcoding tests performed on 78 samples of 24 generic products sold at the four retailers: 

• At Walmart, "4 percent actually contained the ingredients listed on the label."
• At Walgreens, 18 percent contained the listed ingredients.
• At GNC, 22 percent contained the listed ingredients.
• At Target, 44 percent contained the listed ingredients.
• (Source - Food Safety News)

Each sample was tested five times; samples were selected from all regions of New York state. The dietary supplements tested were garlic, ginseng, gingko biloba, St. John's wort, echinacea, valerian root, and saw palmetto.

Even I'm amazed at the incredible array of fake fillers found in these supplements in lieu of ingredients listed on the labels. "In many cases, the authorities said, the supplements contained little more than cheap fillers like rice and house plants, or substances that could be hazardous to people with food allergies," per the New York Times.

Specific ingredients found in supplements tested often included:

• Dracaena, a houseplant (right photo)
• Rice
• Wheat
• Spruce
• Pine
• Palm
• Wild carrot
• Grass
• Allium, from the garlic family
• Radish
• Daisy
• Mung bean

Friends, don't waste your hard-earned money on dietary supplements. The industry is barely regulated. And profiteers, of course, prey on this regulatory loophole to line their rich pockets at your expense and the expense of your health hopes.

Among other products I urge state and federal regulators to also investigate for misleading consumers about the health benefits and/or ingredients are:

Raspberry ketones - See "Raspberry Ketones: Another Industrial Food Quasi-Scam?"

Olive leaf extract - See "Olive Leaf Extract: Industrial Food Quasi-Scam with Clever Story"

Ensure - See "Ensure Drink: Sugary Fake Food Pseudo-Wonder Tonic by Vicodin Maker"

Coconut water  - See "The Coconut Water Fad: Hucksterism, Health Elixir or Quasi Fraud?"

Walmart, Target Fatten Profits by Fattening Football Fans, Children

This recent Walmart "Game Time" ad colorfully promotes a party meal of:

• Red Baron Pepperoni Pizza, frozen
• Lay's or Doritos "Party-Size" Bag of chips
• Great Value Chicken Wings "Sections," frozen  
• Gatorade Sports Drinks, 8 20-oz bottles
• Velveeta (a "Pasteurized Recipe Cheese Product) 
• Nabisco Ritz Crackers, Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies in "Family-Size" packs
• M&M's Peanut Candies, 42-oz package
• Football-topped cupcakes

And Ro-Tel, canned tomatoes and green chilis (plus salt. calcium chloride, citric acid, and unidentified "spices") presumably to be mixed with Velveeta, and then dipped with Doritos chips.  

Walmart's fun "Game Time" meal is a time-bomb of salt, sugar, and fat cleverly engineered by industrial mega-corporations to maximize sales and profits.  

(For details, read  "Salt Sugar Fat" - Stunning Big Food Tactics to Hook, Trick, Harm Americans.) 

Problem is... that time-bomb will detonate in your body. In most countries, this highly-processed industrial-concocted "meal" would be viewed as an inedible morass of amped-up salt and sugar flavors. Disgusting fake food. 

This "meal" is guaranteed lethal to your health. A diet of salt, sugar, and fat, laced heavily with hundreds of chemicals...preservatives, fillers, emulsifiers, artificial colors and flavors... has been scientifically linked over and over to diseases including diabetes, heart disease, even cancers.  

A massive new study by the American Association for Cancer Research found that 25% of cancer diagnoses are directly related to "poor dietary habits" and "obese or overweight," usually stemming from poor diet and exercise.  

I don't mean to call-out Walmart as singularly responsible for ruining Americans' health. Most major U.S. food retail corporations are to blame for fattening profits by selling products that fatten customers.  

Take, for instance, this Target ad, which was wrapped around a late August "Back-to-School" promotion.  

The Target ad prominently pushes the big three of highly processed, intentionally addictive U.S. junk food favorites of children... Kraft macaroni & cheese, Coca-Cola soft drinks, and Doritos chips.  

Convenience foods for cheap prices.  At back-to-school time when time and money are scarce for lower-income parents.  

The solution?  Don't buy this junk.  And as much as possible, don't buy from corporate retailers who sell this junk.  Buy from farmer's markets and green grocers.  Buy from stores that specialize in higher quality products. In my neighborhood, that includes Sprouts, Whole Foods, and often, Trader Joe's.  

Remember..  Products that don't sell will be dropped by markets and ultimately discontinued by manufacturers.  And retailers with sale drops will respond by changing their product lines.

We, the consumers have all the power.  Let's use it to dump highly processed fake-foods from our football parties, from our childrens' palates, and from our tables.  

Let's use our power as consumers to take back our health.

Related Reading

"Salt Sugar Fat" - Stunning Big Food Tactics to Hook, Trick, Harm Americans

Soy Sauce Fakes: How to Avoid Industrial Corn-Syrup Soy Sauce

Taco Bell Salad: Why No Warning Label for Lethal Salt Content?

Chick-Fil-A, Subway, Kraft, Cheerios: Changes Made at Public Demand

More good news that public opinion is working to force mega-corporations to make their highly processed food products healthier. 

Last month, I reported that public sentiment recently pressured manufacturers and retailers to begin taking bold steps to label or halt using GMO ingredients and foods. 

• Target quietly introduced its "Simply Balanced" brand of USDA-certified organic products.
• General Mills altered original Cheerios to include only non-GMO ingredients
• Whole Foods will no longer sell Chobani yogurt because of "the yogurt maker’s use of milk from cows whose feed is derived from genetically engineered crops."

Now comes terrific news of dozens more changes to highly processed foods... changes to remove ingredients that never belonged in healthy foods.  Among these welcome changes...

Kraft Singles, manufactured since 1949 by Kraft Foods. will shed artificial preservative sorbic acid, to be replaced by natamycin, which Kraft dubs as "natural." The European Union, which has notoriously higher food standards than the USDA, has approved natamycin for use in cheeses.  

"Consumers are looking for those less artificial cues and messages. Those messages are more meaningful to consumers than they have been in the past." observed Gavin Schmidt, manager of cheese research and development at Kraft.

Eliminating artificial preservatives won't make Kraft Singles devoid of chemicals or a real, rather than fake, food. But it's a definite step in the right direction for Americans' health. 

Subway, the world's largest fast food restaurant, is removing a chemical, azodicarbonamide, from its breads, in response to public outcry started by one astute blogger's petition. The chemical is used as a dough conditioner, but is  also found in yoga mats, shoe rubber, and synthetic leathers.  

Azodicarbonamide is banned from foods in Europe and Australia, but classified as "safe" by the USDA. Per the World Health Organization:

"Case reports and epidemiological studies in humans have produced abundant evidence that azodicarbonamide can induce asthma, other respiratory symptoms, and skin sensitization in exposed workers."    

Center for Science in Public Interest studies show that when the chemical is baked in bread it creates the carcinogen urethane and "leads to slightly increased levels of urethane in bread that pose a small risk to humans."

Removing one chemical from the many dozens hidden in Subway sandwiches doesn't make its fare much healthier.  But removal does make their bread less of a risk for health-sensitive consumers.  (Read Subway's Chemical-Laced Sandwiches: Fooled by the Look, Taste of Freshness.)

Chick-Fil-A announced that within five years, they will serve only chickens raised without antibiotics. This commitment will command extraordinary effort since more than 90% of all chickens destined for U.S. consumption are grown in factory farms heavily dependent on antibiotics. Chick-Fil-A sales topped $5 billion in 2013.  Enthused management:

"When the people who matter most to you ask you to do something important --- you listen. So when our customers started asking us about antibiotics in chicken, we began exploring our options....

"This is why we are collaborating with national and regional poultry suppliers to build a supply chain based on chickens raised with no antibiotics. We are asking suppliers to work with the USDA to verify that antibiotics are never administered from the hatchery to the processing plant...Changes like these take time, but we believe this is the next step in honoring our heritage and our continued commitment to service and quality."

Change Dictated by People, Not Political Leaders

Federal and state political leaders have failed to keep the U.S. food supply clean of chemicals, additives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, and artificial flavors and colors deemed unsafe and unfit for eating in much of the world, and certainly in all other developed, democratic countries.

But business market forces, fueled by public buying decisions, are exerting massive pressure on industrial fake-food mega-corporations to change their highly processed ways.    

McDonalds, for instance, rang-up surprisingly sluggish sales for the fourth quarter of 2013, amid reports that it's "losing customers, as the world's largest hamburger chain struggles to attract diners with its higher-priced sandwiches and new offerings like Mighty Wings." 

Cited as the reason for falling sales at McDonald's? "A shift in eating habits toward foods people feel are fresher or healthier," per AP. "We've lost some of our relevance" lamented McDonald's CEO Don Thompson. 

So far, healthy changes have been minuscule to the U.S. food supply by major corporations. A mere French fry on a mountain of McDonald's finest fried GMO spuds. 

But the trend is good news! And made all the more good and powerful because, we, the people, are in charge. 

Public Forces Food Industry to Sell Non-GMO Products, Ingredients

The good news in 2014 is that market forces are alive, well, and working quite effectively to label GMO foods, or to remove them entirely from grocers' shelves.  And instead, to pressure retailers to offer non-GMO foods for sale. 

The political process may have failed, thus far, to label or halt GMO foods, but public sentiment is firmly forcing manufacturers and retailers to begin taking bold steps.  

Per Forbes this week:

"... public opinion is reaching critical mass. Ninety-percent of Americans believe that GMOs are unsafe, 93 percent of Americans favor stringent federal GMO labeling regulations, and 57 percent say they would be less likely to buy products labeled as genetically modified." 

Retailers and manufacturers respond when the public demands. Among big-deal changes in 2014 are...

Target has quietly introduced its Simply Balanced  "wellness" brand of foods to its grocery shelves, including the USDA-certified organic blue corn tortilla chips pictured above.  The USDA-certified organic label means that all ingredients are non-GMO, as well as dozens other attributes. 

(I bought two bag of these chips this past weekend for family football-watching munchies. The chips are delicious! Target got the requisite taste right.)

The Target website exudes:

"The products include wholesome ingredients, and more than 40 percent of the assortment is organic. There are no products with hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, synthetic colors, artificial preservatives, artificial flavors or artificial sweeteners.

"The good news doesn’t stop there: The majority of Simply Balanced items are made without genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and Target will eliminate all GMO ingredients from the line by the end of 2014. Target is also setting a goal to increase organic food offerings by 25 percent by end of fiscal year 2017."

Cheerios, original only, have been altered to include only non-GMO ingredients.  General Mills spokesman Mike Siemienas commented, "We switched from what we were using to non-GMO corn and non-GMO pure sugar cane... We do value our Cheerios fans and we do listen to their thoughts and suggestions." Siemienas noted that "did not change the formula and has never used genetically modified oats."

Whole Foods recently announced that starting in 2014, Chobani Greek Yogurt will no longer be sold in its 370 stores because of "the yogurt maker’s use of milk from cows whose feed is derived from genetically engineered crops," per The New York Times. Chobani yogurt sales topped $1 billion in 2013.  

Replacement of Chobani with other, non-GMO Greek yogurts is part of Whole Foods' larger, ambitious goal of removing or clearly labeling all GMO products from its shelves by 2018. Boasts the Whole Foods website:

"We now have thousands of products within our stores verified as certified organic and/or Non-GMO Project Verified. In fact, we sell 4,800 Non-GMO Project verified products, more than any other retailer in North America."

Yes, the American political process has, so far, failed to allow the law to reflect public will on GMO foods.   Industrial food corporations outspent California grassroots voters $55 million to $9 million to defeat Prop 37 in 2012, yet won by a paltry margin of 51 percent to 49 percent, and spent $22 million in Washington state for another razor-thin victory. 

But political prospects for GMO foods labeling are brighter in 2014 in state legislatures than ever before. 

"As many as 26  state legislatures could consider similar bills for labeling genetically engineered foods during the 2014 legislative season. Two Northeastern states, Connecticut and Maine, have passed bills requiring labeling of genetically engineered foods, but both of those laws are contingent on other states in the region taking the same action." (Source - Food Safety News, January 7, 2014)

Indeed, market forces are alive, well, and working quite effectively to label GMO foods, or to remove them entirely from grocers' shelves.  

These positive changes by major corporations newly offering non-GMO products and clearly labeling or dumping GMO foods are potent reminders of the power wielded by the purse of the American people. Power to the people!