Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience

[proverbialwisdom]

144. BINGO - 'Unacceptable Ingredients: How many groceries sold @Walmart would be banned by Whole Foods?'

Feb 19
Last year revenue at Walmart equalled $466.1B; the largest retailer in the WORLD! Unfortunately, they are selling... http://fb.me/6Ik7Lmc4O

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/whole_foods_and_walmart_how_many_groceries_sold_at_walmart_would_be_banned.html

“Unacceptable Ingredients”
How many of the groceries sold at Walmart would be banned by Whole Foods?

By Ben Blatt
FEB. 18 2014 11:37 PM

Whole Foods, one of the largest health-conscious grocery stores in America, maintains a list of “Unacceptable Ingredients for Food.” The store’s blacklist is 78 ingredients long and contains many well-known villains in the eyes of health-conscious eaters—aspartame, MSG, and high fructose corn syrup, to name a few. Though Whole Foods has grown over the years—it currently boasts more than 300 locations nationwide—it’s still a small operation in comparison to Walmart, which runs more than 3,000 food-selling supercenters in the U.S., making it the largest grocery store in the country and indeed the world. Walmart does not ban any of the ingredients on Whole Foods’ restricted list. In fact, approximately 14 percent of food items sold at Walmart could not be stocked on the shelves of Whole Foods simply because they contain high fructose corn syrup. When all 78 ingredients banned by Whole Foods are taken into account, roughly 54 percent of food items sold at a Walmart would be prohibited at Whole Foods.

Walmart posts on its website the ingredients of 19,900 food products it carries in its grocery sections. To create my data set, I matched the ingredients of each product against Whole Foods’ “Unacceptable Ingredients for Food” list. It should be noted that while 19,900 products constitutes a large sample, it does not represent the totality of Walmart’s food offerings, as there are many products for which the chain does not provide nutritional information on its website, and other products it doesn’t list at all. The Food Marketing Institute estimates that the average supermarket stocks approximately 42,000 items. When I asked a Walmart spokeswoman via email if the 42,000 figure held true for its stores, she responded that the number varies from store to store, based on format, and declined to provide an average.

Many of the ingredients banned by Whole Foods are ones that frequently show up in processed foods, products that have been prepared and packaged in a way that allows them to be sold on a mass scale at a later date. Given the popularity of processed foods among American shoppers, and the disdain for preservatives in health food circles, it’s perhaps not surprising that one out of every two products sold at Walmart has an ingredient banned by Whole Foods. Consider the soft drink category. Of the soft drinks sold at Walmart, approximately 97 percent contain ingredients that Whole Foods considers “unacceptable.” High fructose corn syrup and the preservative sodium benzoate, both on Whole Foods’ banned list, are in the majority of Walmart’s soft drinks.

If you’re trying to avoid unnatural ingredients you may not be a soda drinker. But let’s look at the seemingly more natural category of water. More than 36 percent of drinks that Walmart labels as “water” also have ingredients that disqualify them from Whole Foods’ shelves. While standard Aquafina and Aquafina FlavorSplash Lemon Water have similar packaging and might even be sold on the same shelf, the latter contains four ingredients (sucralose, calcium disodium EDTA, acesulfame potassium, and potassium sorbate) that would prohibit its sale at Whole Foods.

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You learn something new every day. BTW, SLATE's 'analysis' is nothing I could agree with and serves to muddy the waters unnecessarily.