You’ll Never Believe What Happens To Kraft Cheese When You Try To Melt It (You May Never Eat It Again)

It can be tricky to get your kids to eat healthy. Lucky for you, it just got easier. Don’t bother pushing those fruits and veggies down their throats, stick to the things you know are healthy, like Kraft Singles!

That’s right! It’s official. Those thin slices of plastic wrapped processed cheese product have been given the honor of becoming the first food to receive the “Kids Eat Right” label. Wonderful.

Congratulations to Kraft Cheese Slices?

I guess congratulations are in order for Kraft Singles, the best food for making sure your kids eat right. The cheese that can’t legally be called cheese. That’s what your kids should be eating according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), the institution responsible for the designation. Apparently they’re loving their grilled cheese sandwiches and cheeseburgers.

Kraft Cheese Slices? Really? Why? How?

It’s no surprise to anyone that Kraft can buy a label, even one that contradicts everything we know about health and nutrition. The financial ties between Kraft and the Academy are well documented. But still, this announcement verges on the obscene.

Everyone knows that Kraft Singles aren’t real cheese. In fact, they’re the furthest thing from it. Because they are less than half cheese, they can’t even be labelled processed cheese food. Instead they are relegated to the lowest of the low, the processed cheese product territory. Right there with Cheez Whiz. Yum.

In addition to some actual cheese, they include a laundry list of other ingredients including: whey, water, protein concentrate, milk, sodium citrate, calcium phosphate, milkfat, gelatin, salt, sodium phosphate, lactic acid, annatto and paprika extract, enzymes, vitamin A palmitate, cheese culture and vitamin D3.

While not all of those ingredients are necessarily bad for you, some are preservatives which can cause all sorts of health issues, ranging from heart disease and cancer to respiratory problems and, most alarmingly, behavioural changes in children. The dyes and other synthetic additives are no better.

A Gateway Processed Cheese Product

More generally, the label is disheartening because of the culture of eating it promotes. By influencing the minds of today’s youth, Kraft is perpetuating a diet of processed foods, high in preservatives, chemicals, and ingredients you can’t even pronounce.

Any reasonably objective nutritionist these days knows that a diet consisting of whole foods and whole grains with lean proteins and plenty of fruit and vegetables is the way to go. Even cheese that is actually cheese would not be at the top of their list.

The Process Sucks

At the end of the day, getting your kids to eat right is hard enough as it is. So having to raise them in a world where giant food corporations like Kraft are allowed to peddle processed cheese product to them in the name of eating right, is incredibly infuriating.

We know better. We know processed foods are negatively impacting our health. And yet, somehow we wake up to read a headline about nutritionists putting their seal of approval on slices of processed cheese product. It’s an absolute mockery.

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/kraft-singles-kids-eat-right_n_6879658.html

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/03/nutritionist-group-feed-your-kid-kraft-cheese-product

http://www.livestrong.com/article/325437-harmful-effects-of-preservatives-in-foods/

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