POLISH "CHEMICALISED" CONVENIENCE FOODS

Some educated Poles refer to all the instant foods, soup mixes, cake mixes, hot mugs, assorted heat & eat things and snacks, of which there are more and more on the Polish market, as "czysta chemia" (pure chemistry). They say food-industry moguls use deceptive wording like nature-identical to suggest that the lab-produced ingredients are somehow natural. They print "no preservatives" on the package only because benzoate of soda is absent without informing that many other substances can serve as chemical preservatives. Or they say "contains no sugar" but mean only sachrose (beet or cane sugar), whereas dextrose (maize sugar), fructose (fruit sugar), glucose (grape sugar) and others are also sugars. Are any of you also concerned about the amount of chemicals (stabilisers, acidity regulators, emulsifiers, artifical flavouring, etc.) being ingested in all the colourfully packged fake foods on the market?

i do find it is difficult for some polish people in england to understand just how much rubbish are in this soup packets and seasoning etc

"They" do? ...... All in one breath?

From what i have seen the Poles eat far less rubbish foods than us Brits do...The other day i was at a friends house , and her 16 year old daughter feeling a bit snakish went and got a raw carrot from the fridge and ate it...Try offering that to a British teenager who is hungry , not a chance , they want a burger and fries , and a couple of packets of crisps...

True enough, Wildrover. We tend to consume things with more sodium benzoate, sodium metabisulphite and MSG. With the number of foods with E numbers, we'd be as well taking E itself ;)

Poland does enjoy these Knorr noodles and pot cups which are full of gunk. I love them though so I'd be a hypocrite to speak out against them :)

Yeah me too , i also like a big mac and fries now and then , as well as those yummy hot dogs they sell at some Orlen stations....Non of this stuff is very healthy i guess...

Big Mac and fries just sit on me so I can't eat that stuff. I need to get my weight down a wee bittie to make room. A long bike ride tomorrow will kickstart that process.

Come and stay at my place for a while ,i hardly ever have any food in , can,t afford it ..you will lose weight in no time....Perhaps i can make money with the Wildrover no food diet plan....? make a video , write a book , perhaps a slot on Polish tv...????

No food diet plan, sounds good. It makes a change from the seafood diet where I see food and eat it. My weight gain program got ahead of itself :(

I was always lucky in my younger days to be able to eat like a horse and not get at all fat , partly due to my metabolism i guess , and the fact i was flinging motorcycles around a race track at warp factor six , its actually very hard work , not just a case of twisting a throttle as some may think...I did like my junk food tho...

Now in Poland i can,t afford enough food to get fat , and what i do eat is far more healthy than the stuff you buy in the UK...

Home-made salads are easy to put together here and are dirt cheap at the right time. I eat more and more of them.

I too am sceptical of the 'bez konserwatów' products. There's always some guff pitched in there to sustain it.

True , but i tend to be dead lazy when it comes to eating...If they invented something that you could just press a button on the can and it cooked itself , and flung itself on a plate that would be the very thing for me....

Well, you know what they say, Sir. 'Necessity is the mother of invention'. When the joints seize up and the brain grinds to a halt, that kicks in ;) ;)

The word rings a bell....?????

Well, as long as it does something, you can keep the doc at bay ;) ;)

Sorry, I'm sidetracking the thread. I liked your point about the various sugars that don't seem to pass as sugar. Sugar-free, just with glucose and fructose which are even worse LOL

My girlfriend's kids seem to eat a lot of rubbish, although certainly one of them is partial to carrots. Another example is that whereas I only ever buy fresh fruit juice, they always buy stuff that's made from concentrate with added chemicals (I'm not just talking about vodka).

I guess you would be rather partial to carrots yourself , probably without the stick...

Only fresh ones with no additives. I'm sure that if more people ate carrots on their own (the carrots on their own, not the eaters necessarily), they would sell carrots individually wrapped in clingfilm with an expanded polystyrene tray. They'd sell carrots with added vitamins. Extra double scrubbed carrots. Even carrot-on-a-stick.

Perhaps i should start eating carrots...perhaps then i could see in the dark the next time my Polish electrical system plunges me into darkness....

One thingy to remember about carrots is that unlike many other veggies, carrots are not good at filtering out or processing out most toxins present in the soil where they grow. The best ones then, will be those grown one one's own. While best results are achieved when carrots grow in the garden, using reasonably deep pots (a foot or more deep) yields acceptable results too.

Actually, conventionally grown carrots are not as bad as strawberries, spinach, peppers or peaches. The mentioned above are the most polluted, so if you can help it buy them organic. That's what my health foods magazines tell me. Anything that you eat most often, including apples and milk, pasta or bread - the organics are a better choice. You don't need to worry about most of the veggies and fruit, as long as they are throughly washed (3 min under running water). OK, it's a kind of waste of water but I'd rather waste water than ingest unnecessary chemicals they are sprayed with. Anyway...works for me. :)

I am somewhat surprised that Poland went so quickly for the convenience of packaged, frozen foods. The younger generation thinks that food comes in a package...

then comes a variety of health problems starting with allergies. After all, our body cells have to scream for help at some point being contaminated with ingredients they can not use as fuel and don't know what to do with. The health symptoms star to appear. Rings the bell for anybody over 40? And, if you're not there yet, think about it. You are what you eat.

Eurola, the waste of water would be OK if it actually helped. But a lot of time it doesn't. Not for your regular supermarket fruit, the shiny stuff. The chemicals are locked in by a layer of wax. Water alone won't help much with this. Peeling might, depending on how long the fruit (such as apples, peach etc) have been shelved.

I stopped worrying about pollution after enjoying a nice meal with my hosts after delivering aid to them in Belarus....Everything grown in the ground there is affected by the Chernobyl disaster , so not only can i see in the dark...but i glow in the dark too....!