1 The chicken
Do this pour boiling water over a piece of raw chicken.
If white foam comes out, that is not chicken. That is the water and salt they injected to make it heavier on the scale.
What to watch for in the supermarket
For eighteen years I wrote the long list on the back of the bag. Here is how to read it in the two seconds you actually spend looking — and three things you can check tonight, in your own kitchen, with no list at all.
The page I keep coming back to. Three tests, three things on the label.
Three tests, in your kitchen, tonight
Every one of these shows you what a thing is. Not what it does to you — what it is. You will have convinced yourself before I have said a word.
2 The cheese
Do this put a slice of cheese in a dry, hot pan.
Real cheese melts and runs. If it puffs up, browns and never runs, that is not cheese holding together. That is the emulsifiers.
3 The peanut butter
Do this open a jar and look at the top.
If there is no oil on top, ask yourself where it went. They hardened the oil so it never separates on the shelf.
What the label says, if you know where to look
A great deal of the raw meat and chicken on the shelf has been injected before it got there: water, salt and phosphates, under pressure. The phosphate holds the water inside the muscle so it does not run out in the tray. The pack gets heavier. The price per kilo stays the same. You pay meat prices for brine.
This is not hidden. The American rules require the percentage of added solution to be part of the product name, and the example printed in the regulation itself is chicken breast: 40% added solution of water, salt and sodium phosphate. Forty percent. Sixty percent of that pack is meat. The salt rides along with it: a plain chicken breast is around 60 mg of sodium in a serving. Injected, it can run 200 to 400. Same bird. The difference is brine.
- Read the product name, not the picture on the front. A percentage in the name means added solution. That percentage is not meat.
- Look at the pad under the tray. Whatever is in that pad, you paid meat prices for it.
- Work out the price per kilo of meat, not per kilo of pack. On a 15% solution that is a sixth more than the shelf label says.
I spent eighteen years on the other side of that decision. Now I tell you where it hides.
The same thing, from the other side
Half the people who write to me are women, and most of them ask about their skin. So let me say it plainly: health and beauty are the same thing. There is no cream that does what a year of eating properly does. Your skin sits at the very end of the supply line, so it is the first place to show what the rest of you is short of — and the first place to show when it is not. The only way I know to look better for longer is to live better. Everything on this site works on both at once.
The whole list
This page is three tests and three things to read. The guide is the whole shelf: what to leave, what to take home instead, what each of those long words does and why it is in there. It is nearly finished. Leave your address and you hear the day it is out — and the ten glasses are yours today.
What I send you
- The ten glasses. One for every complaint: what goes in, and the hour it works.
- The recipes. Bread, cookies, ice cream, jam. No flour, no refined sugar, nothing off a long list.
- The supermarket list. What to leave on the shelf, what to take home instead, and how to read a label in the two seconds you actually spend looking.
- The day each book is finished. You hear it here first, and pay less for it than anyone who comes after.
1,357 people are on the list.
One email now to check the address is really yours. Click the link in it and the glasses open straight away. After that, nothing until there is something worth telling you.
Also on this site: five of the glasses, three recipes, and who I am, and why.
Nothing on this page is medical advice, and I am not your doctor. If you take medication, talk to whoever prescribed it before you change anything.