15 Foods That Shouldn’t Be Classified As Food

Have you ever looked at packaged food items and thought “is this even real?”

If so, it’s most likely not.

With artificial food additives and coloring, some packaged foods can seriously be harming your body. And don’t even get me started on ingredients you can’t pronounce.

The amount of product in grocery store aisles that shouldn’t be classified as food could be endless, but here are the top 15 foods you need to stay away from. At. All. Times.

1. You Better Believe It’s Not Butter

Spray butter is even worse than fake butter. With added oils, gums, and artificial flavors, fake butter should never be on your grocery list.

2. Chocolate Drink

That’s right, chocolate drink, NOT milk. Woefully, nowhere even close to milk.

The second ingredient on this list is high fructose corn syrup. Honorable mentions include xanthan gum, guar gum and hydrogenated soybean oil.

3. Cheesy “Cheese”

Canned or spray cheese should never be an option for “easy cheese”. It’s full of fillers, oils, and even emulsifiers.

Lobbyers have tried to force Kraft to call their Easy Cheese product “embalmed cheese” because of how fake the cheese actually is. Unfortunately, the case was settled on calling it processed cheese. It doesn’t sound appetizing, but people are still buying it.

4. Frozen Dairy Dessert

Companies call it this when they can’t legally call it ice cream. That should already set off alarm bells.

For anything to be called ice cream, it needs to contain at least 10% milk fat. Frozen dairy dessert is code for whey, corn syrup, and plenty of gums.

5. Miracle Whip

The only thing that makes this “mayonnaise” a miracle is that a company could even get away with calling it mayonnaise.

A real mayo can only be classified as such if it contains, at minimum, 65% vegetable oil. This product, however, turns into more of a dressing with high volumes of vinegar and soybean oil.

6. Blueberries

How to chemically make a blueberry:

Mix together citric acid, dextrose, fractionated palm kernel oil, cellulose gum, maltodextrin, artificial flavors, 2 types of blue and 1 part red.

And yes, this imitation blueberry is added to many packaged products.

7. Vanilla Flavoring

Beware the ingredient list when it comes to vanilla flavored foods. Popular vanilla products, such as Nilla Wafers, don’t even contain anything with the prefix ‘van’, let alone a whole vanilla.

If an ingredients list contains something along the line of “natural and artificial flavors” be sure it sources where the natural flavors could be coming from.

8. Whipped Cream

Whipped cream should have 1 ingredient: cream.

Most whipped cream at the grocery store has a whole lot more than this. One popular jar of whipped cream even has a 14-ingredient long list. And they call that real food?

9. Chocolate Chip Flavor?

Calling a cookie chocolate chip flavor is a marketer’s way of saying “it’s not real”.

The FDA requires anything called chocolate to be made from cocoa butter, i.e. actual chocolate! Anything else is made from vegetable oils and harmful trans-fats.

10. Vegan Cream

Wait… is that possible? No. No it is not.

Popular cream-filled cookies, such as oreos, have recently been boasting their vegan ingredients, but don’t be fooled by their clever marketing strategies. This only means their cream isn’t made from a healthy animal, but from sugars, canola oil, artificial flavors, and who knows what else.

11. Caramel Syrup

You’ll probably want to stop topping your sundaes with caramel syrup after finding out what’s in it.

Caramel color is always added to industrial caramel syrup, which is made from processed ammonia and 4-methylimidazole, a compound that’s carcinogenic.

With caramel being so easy to melt down from sugar yourself, it’s a whole lot safer to keep it on the grocery shelf and not your own.

12. Peanut Butter

If your peanut butter contains added sugars and partially hydrogenated oil, i.e. trans-fat, I hate to say it, but it’s not peanut butter.

A jar full of sugar oil with peanut flavoring is more accurate than calling it butter.

13. Egg Substitutes

The only thing that should substitute an egg is another egg. Otherwise, you’re filling your stomach with at least 20 other ingredients trying to mimic eggy goodness.