Spooky Lofthouse Cookie

No stated value

While I don’t mind if Halloween baked goods are designed to look scary, the scary food additives are certainly not what we want. Recently I have reviewed “Back To School” Lofthouse cookies. Here is another example of almost exactly the same poor nutrition and high health risk product. Suspiciously, there is no even a single quality statement on the label of the orange iced Lofthouse Frosted Sugar Cookies. They simply are tossed into Walmart’s livestock feeder for us. The only statement we read on the label reflects the manufacturer’s attitude to what they produce: “baked with pride.” Wha-a-a-t? This cannot be true… I suggest “baked without shame” instead. Why? Just look at the risks YOU and YOUR children take.

DyeDiet Doesn’t Buy It!

Lofthouse Sugar Cookies: Risk, Nutrition and Dye Content

True value

For a dozen of the cheapest possible nutrients (14 green segments) they add two dozens of questionable chemicals (14 red and 9 yellow segments!), 37 ingredients total.  Make no mistake; orange color comes from a mixture of the two azo-dyes, Yellow 5 (Tartrazine)  and Yellow 6 (Sunset Yellow) 4 mg of each per cookie. So you get 8 mg of yellow coloring with the icing and ~ 1 mg each of the other four artificial colorants found in decorating sprinkles, totaling 12 mg of the dyes per cookie. As a chemist I know why these colorants should have never been a part of human diet. If you are curious please read the CSPI document Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risks and Feingold Association’s   Diet, ADHD and Behavior document.

Main ingredients:

• Sugar
• Enriched bleached wheat flour. Can you imagine what is left  of the healthy whole grain flour after it was treated with Clorox?  Watch video Enriched Wheat Flour.
• Margarine – cheap surrogate butter.

With every single 38 g cookie you will get 160 calories (1600 per container) from carbohydrates and fats, 3 teaspoons of sugar (16 g !!) and 1 g of protein. You will take unacceptably high risk associated with 14 biochemically foreign food additives, DDFI = 115/38 ~ 3 and you will not get nutritional value your body needs, DDNF = 38/151 ~ 0.25.

Don’t tell me that you don’t like chemistry, if you buy Lofthouse cookies!

A better alternative

Why should we all treat our lovely kids to this semi-synthetic food surrogate? (Read document Food marketing to children and youth also read today’s article from Harvard Gazette Food reform to fight obesity about role of the government in this issue).  “Food and beverage marketing practices, geared to children and youth, are out of balance with recommended healthful diets, and contribute to an environment that puts their health at risk.” Give us a break! We want our freedom of choice back! I don’t blame a small local bakery where a small apple crossover or a cherry crostata costs whooping $4.50 apiece. They do not have anybody 50 miles around to compete with. Look, Walmart sells Lofthouse’s stuff for a quarter a cookie but that is NOT food. It is carbohydrates from sugar, carbohydrates from the bleached flour, saturated fats from the cheapest vegetable oils and an injection of vitamins B for the excuse.

Perhaps everything is right; you pay merely nothing for nothing edible. But keep in mind for later, your medical bills will be unaffordable and they will come much sooner than you may expect. So the DyeDiet solution is:

• Pay for food, not for the additives;
• Even if you have to pay more, simply buy and eat less and you will be healthier!

While I don’t want to recommend any product with a foreign food additive in it (red segment), here is Kit Kat wafers which are way less risky alternative for trick-or-treat:

KitKat Wafers: Risk and Nutrition

Look, its risk diagram is greener but you need to know that vanillin is a synthetic yet not harmful artificial flavor added instead of more expensive vanilla extract; and PGPR is a synthetic emulsifier used as a cheap replacement for the natural cocoa butter. Yes, maybe Kit Kat is NOT perfect but it is safer than Lofthouse cookies if eaten in moderation.

Eat food, not food additives. Join and support American Food Day on October 24^th!

Tags: artificial color content, dye content in cookies, dye diet, featured, food dyes exposure, food reviews, Food Risk Score, Halloween treats, Lofthouse cookies, nutritional value, shopping at Walmart, tricl-or-treat cookies

Category: Baked goods, Cookies, Food Dyes Exposure