Cook from scratch--or beware your future health!/ Guardian

I gave a "super-easy" cooking class this morning.  Why is a doctor giving cooking classes?  Because the quality of the ingredients in processed food is so poor, I believe it is ushering in an age of chronic ill health.  At least when you cook from basic ingredients, you know what they are.  I may have to start printing recipes on this blog in future.  For now...  From the Guardian:

Fake-food scandal revealed as tests show third of products mislabelled

Consumers are being sold drinks with banned flame-retardant additives, pork in beef, and fake cheese, laboratory tests show 

Consumers are being sold food including mozzarella that is less than half real cheese, ham on pizzas that is either poultry or "meat emulsion", and frozen prawns that are 50% water, according to tests by a public laboratory.

The checks on hundreds of food samples, which were taken in West Yorkshire, revealed that more than a third were not what they claimed to be, or were mislabelled in some way.

Their results have been shared with the Guardian.Testers also discovered beef mince adulterated with pork or poultry, and even a herbal slimming tea that was neither herb nor tea but glucose powder laced with a withdrawn prescription drug for obesity at 13 times the normal dose.

A third of fruit juices sampled were not what they claimed or had labelling errors. Two contained additives that are not permitted in the EU, including brominated vegetable oil, which is designed for use in flame retardants and linked to behavioural problems in rats at high doses. 

Experts said they fear the alarming findings from 38% of 900 sample tests by West Yorkshire councils were representative of the picture nationally, with the public at increasing risk as budgets to detect fake or mislabelled foods plummet...