r/Foodnews

(The products mentioned here were from UK grocery stores)

Highlights:

- Nearly 95% of oat milks tested positive for HT-2 toxin, which has been linked to immune and gastrointestinal damage.
- About 90% of soy milks contained ochratoxin A, a compound classified as a probable human carcinogen.
- Every plant based product tested contained at least one mycotoxin.
- Mycotoxins can affect gut health by contributing to intestinal irritation, inflammation, and potential gut barrier disruption.
- The levels were reportedly below current safety limits, but the concern is repeated exposure over time, especially for people who consume plant based milks often.

I personally drink a lot of Oat Milk. For people living in the United States, for example, should we be concerned that our Oat Milk contains the same toxins?

We eat chips pretty regularly, no? You know how it is - affordable, tasty, goes with everything. I genuinely thought no surprises here.

I was wrong. There were surprises.

I've been building a food scanner app called Clarify for the past few months. You scan any packaged food label, it reads the ingredients, and tells you whether it's good for YOUR specific health goals - not just generic nutrition advice.

So I scanned the Balaji chips as a test.

Flags it gave me:

- High sodium (way more than I expected per serving)

- Flavour enhancer 627 and 631 — both derived from animal sources, which matters if you're vegetarian (it's literally on the label but who reads that far)

- "Natural flavouring" listed with zero clarity on what it actually is

None of this is scandalous. It's chips. But the point is I had no idea about any of it, and I eat this stuff regularly.

Then I scanned a "healthy" multigrain snack I'd been buying as a substitute. It had more sugar per 100g than the chips.

That's kind of why I built this. Food labels are technically readable but practically designed to confuse you. Tiny font, weird serving sizes, ingredient names that mean nothing to a normal person.

Clarify is free on Android if anyone wants to try it and report back what horrors they find in their pantry. Would genuinely love to hear what comes up - especially for Indian packaged foods since there's not a lot of apps that handle those labels well.

The MGM Grand Buffet closes as Americans reexamine their relationship with the smorgasbord.

New article in MedShadow about a scary problem with a relatively obscure supplement that tends to fly under the radar. Still, the regulatory problems discussed could affect any supplements.

Made a video breaking down foods that aren't what they seem fake wasabi, imitation crab, parmesan that's not real parmesan. Some of these genuinely surprised me while researching. Would love to know if any of these caught you off guard.