I’m lucky we didn’t have soda or processed foods in the house much as a kid. It just wasn’t part of the Italian/Albanian cultural way of eating I grew up with. We ate a lot of simple, healthy foods like pasta e fagioli (beans), homemade pizza with tomatoes and olives (and no cheese), escarole and white beans, and lentil soup. The only “processing” I can think of was my grandmother asking me to go through the huge pile of uncooked lentils on her table to look for stray pebbles.

On holidays we’d have my Italian grandmother’s homemade cookies, or my Albanian grandmother’s homemade baklava. On very rare occasions we had a soda, either root beer or cream soda, as a treat. But that’s what sugar should be, an occasional, festive treat. Yet for many it’s an addictive, unhealthy habit that leads to a host of serious health conditions.

We recently wrote a post regarding how new documents reveal how the sugar industry went to great lengths to hide health issues related to the consumption of sugar. Well, another new article reveals how the Coca Cola Company is paying “experts” in nutrition to report that soda can be a a “healthy snack”.

Apparently, it’s the way many companies in the junk food industry are doing business these days. The Kraft company, known for it’s cheesy food like substances, has been found to have financial links to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND). It’s probably no coincidence that their individually wrapped slices are the first “food” item to receive the Academy’s stamp of approval for the Kids Eat Right program.

Marion Nestle of Food Politics states, “Kraft is well known as a sponsor of AND.  Such seals are usually money-raising gimmicks.”

Thankfully we’re not the only ones that think this is completely ludicrous. Dieticians for Professional Integrity are calling out the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and asking others to submit their letters of concern.

In the meantime, big corporations continue to get fatter wallets and fatten the paychecks of these so called “nutrition experts”, and laugh all the way to the bank while fattening up the arteries of the unsuspecting consumer.

I’ll take sifting through a pile of lentils over diabetes or heart disease any day.