01. The nutrition facts are lying to me
A tale of mystery, deception, and sliced bread.
Hi there! Welcome to Eating Is a Feeling. A monthly newsletter about food, eating, and all the feelings in between. It’s also a repository for some reviews, recipes, and personal stories outside of the work I do for other publications. In my first Tweet about this newsletter, I also called it a way to confront the blank-page terror that comes up once in a while.
You see, I’m prone to self-sabotage. I sometimes find myself in a funk that’s hard to switch off and it affects almost every aspect of my life. The words don’t come easy, effort feels more effortful, and I’d much rather ditch my laptop and work on other things that don’t involve creative work. This is something I hope to solve with therapy, but I’ve also observed that the spiral deepens whenever I’m not writing. Writing can be so difficult but it can also be so liberating — joyful even. A “Hola Papi!” letter on creativity reminded me just recently: If you want art to be a part of your life in some capacity, then you have to give it something. It does, in my experience, give back. So here’s to trying and giving (giving!) Jessica Zafra once said in a class of hers that you need to strive for at least 1000 words a day. “It’s like practicing your tennis serve,” she said, so that when it’s game time you can just focus on playing the game. I can’t play tennis for shit, but I get the metaphor.
If you’re receiving this in your email, thank you for subscribing! You’ll receive at least one update a month. They’ll vary in length, some might be long and some might be a little short, but I promise that you’ll get at least one food-related story from me every month. I hope to make it worth your time.
Anyways, here’s the first issue of Eating Is a Feeling. Thought I’d start this newsletter with a story I’ve been keeping on the burner for a while. It never saw the light of day because I didn’t want to get the publication I was writing for into trouble. So from here on out, people can just send their complaints straight to me!!! This was inspired by one of my favorite pieces of investigative journalism called “What the Hole is Going On?” by Rachel Handler on America’s bucatini shortage. All images by my husband Bj Abesamis who I lovingly conned into helping me out with this assignment.
Trying and giving,
Toni P.
The Nutrition Facts Are Lying To Me
Part 0: The Motive
The nutrition facts are lying to me. Or they’re not telling the whole truth at least. According to the FDA, nutrition facts can sometimes be inaccurate. They can miss this mark by a lot, like by 20%, and it’s still considered legal. These discrepancies in nutrition facts aren’t such terrible things from a health perspective, but when I learned about this a few years ago I was freaking out.
It isn’t a stretch to say that there was a time I was religious about calorie counting. You couldn’t take me anwhere! I’d bring my tiny Shopee-bought weighing scale to places like Ababu or Mamou. I’m sure my friends were embarrassed, but they never showed it. The way I’d transfer all the contents on my plate to another plate just to determine the exact grammage of a Chelo kebab. I’d pester waiters if they had any idea if the pork they were using used lean or fatty cuts. Looking back, it was a lot. Probably too much.
The thing about calories is that we literally need them for everything: breathing, pumping blood, taking a shit, thinking about dinner, and so on. They’re units of energy, not weight. And we each need a set amount of calories daily just to be able to function normally. Here’s the most basic premise of calorie counting as a diet: any calories in surplus or deficit of your required daily allotment can result in changes to one’s body composition.
And there was my primary motivation. I wanted to lose some weight!!! I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my weight. So after trying all sorts of things, I learned to count calories. And in so doing, I learned about macros. Carbohydrates, fat, and protein.
Part 1: The Mystery
IIFYM or “If it fits your macros” became my mantra and baseline. Meals and snacks were planned around macros. If I wanted to eat anything else, the answer was always the same: If it fits your macros.
Can I have a donut?
— If it fits your macros.
Can I have eat these fries?
— If it fits your macros.
Can I eat at all?
— If it fits your macros.
Living like this was repetitive and a little sad, but it provided me absolutes. Food was black and white. I imagined my body like a computer that could only process binary code. No matter how special, be it Snake River Farms Wagyu Beef or a Jollibee Yumburger, food could be reduced to a set of numbers: 24g of carbohydrates, 5g of protein, and 3g of fat. None of it mattered as long as it fit my macros.
But all this was put into question the day I saw it at the grocery. Imagine me, MyFitnessPal app in hand, looking completely incredulous while holding a yellow bag of Gardenia’s Amazing Black Forest. Here’s a description of this bread from a Lazada listing: “Luscious cherry bits embraced in generous dark chocolate swirls on soft and moist Gardenia bread. It’s amazingly indulgent!”
This bread was an anomaly. Not because of the cherry bits and dark chocolate chunks, but that — according to the nutrition facts — two slices of Gardenia Amazing Black Forest contained 22g of protein, which is nearly as much as a palm-sized serving of steamed chicken breast.
Part 2: The Quest
And because my life choices were wholly dictated by macros, Gardenia Amazing Black Forest became part of our regular grocery runs. Our lists would look something like this:
[ ] Eggs
[ ] Laundry Soap
[ ] Feminine Napkins
[ ] Gardenia Amazing Black Forest
[ ] Kitchen Towels
[ ] Bleach
We ate it for breakfast. We ate it at the gym. We ate it at midnight. Whenever the mood struck. After all, the nutrition facts were FACTS. I’d see the boys at the gym bring whole loaves with them as part of their pre-workout snacks. They’d take bites between their heavy squat and deadlift days. It was calorie-dense, yes, but at least it fits my macros.
And yet…
I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Could two slices of chocolate bread really be the equivalent of a protein shake? Instead of blissfully living in ignorance, I wanted answers. After shopping around a few Reddits and asking for opinions on Facebook, the answer was always the same: “the nutrition facts said so,” with some variations of “it is FDA approved.” But five-year-old Reddit threads aren’t exactly what you can consider irrefutable facts. So I called up a friend who is taking his graduate studies at Sloan Kettering in New York. He started what became my quest for the truth.
“You know, nutrition facts aren’t an exact science,” he started. “Not everything you see on the label accurately reflects what our bodies can even absorb.”
“But I’ll admit, 22g of protein for two slices of bread is a little weird given the ingredients are mostly flour and chocolate,” he said.
Overwhelmed by curiosity but lacking in the necessary skills to determine the actual protein content of the bread, I figured that there were other ways at arriving at the truth like cold calls and writing emails. After sending a bunch of them through contact forms and loose email addresses on LinkedIn profiles, I finally found myself on a call with one of their brand managers who agreed to an interview when I introduced myself as a “lifestyle writer”.
On the phone, she was excited. She even broached the idea of a factory tour and some one-on-ones with a few of the higher-ups. But after I sent in my questions and a couple of follow-up emails and texts later... Silence.
My friend in New York was sympathetic. “You know, if there’s a way you can get some of that bread here, I can literally run a test during my free time.” Immediately I began arranging what I thought would have been a grand heist. I asked friends if anyone was heading to New York and if they’d be willing to slip a little slice of bread into their luggage. One friend said yes, but she was leaving in two days.
I dashed to the convenience stores and neighborhood groceries but all were (oddly) out of stock. Grocery attendants told me there hasn’t been a delivery for a while. I checked a few stores online and found that it’d take at least three days for them to fulfill my order. I thanked my friend for even agreeing but told her that the bread was nowhere to be found. She wished me luck and hoped I’d find the answers I was seeking. The story was put on indefinite hold.
Part 3: The Disappearance
Contrary to their red, white, and blue logo, and claims that Gardenia uses “Uncle Slocumm’s American Recipe,” it isn’t an American brand. In fact, Gardenia actually originated in Brunei and came to Philippine shores in 1997. But Gardenia’s “American recipe” was invented by a touring non-profit volunteer worker and baker named Horatio Sye Slocumm, who wanted to “assist the economies of Third World Countries.”
Slocumm was sent to Sabah in 1969 to teach local bakers how to come up with their own bread. Malaysian co-founder Wong Tze Fatt turned this recipe into a brand, which grew and grew to the point that he franchised Gardenia to the rest of Southeast Asia and then eventually sold it to a Singaporean company. There’s this whole article about another Gardenia-related murder mystery that I recommend as secondary reading.
Product lines seem to vary per country. Wholemeal Banana Walnut seems to be a Singapore exclusive and the Amazing Black Forest is only found in the Philippines.
Weeks after my failed bread heist, I couldn’t find the Amazing Black Forest anywhere. It disappeared from the grocery shelves and nobody really knew when it was coming back. I’d accost Gardenia delivery vans, asking the men wheeling out their plastic trays if any of them had Amazing Black Forest, and their answers were always the same: “Wala eh.” Nothing.
In the meantime, I learned a little bit more about how nutrition facts are determined in the Philippines. The short of it is that you hire experts to do it for you. You take your product to an FDA-approved lab that determines the chemical makeup of food through a series of tests. One of these tests is called the Kjeldahl method.
The Kjeldahl method (first invented in 1887) is an industry-standard way to analyze the crude protein content of a product. It works by measuring the total nitrogen of a food item which then is used to estimate through a series of conversion factors just how much protein there is in a certain food.
Without any way to test for the total protein in Amazing Black Forest (because it had disappeared from the shelves), there was only speculation: Perhaps the lab that tested for the protein content was off the mark. Perhaps the chosen lab had a bad day? Maybe Gardenia didn’t think there was anything wrong with having 22g of protein for two slices. Gardenia’s other chocolate breads logged their protein at ~10g, which wasn’t even half of Amazing Black Forest.
And then one day, it was back. During one of our regular runs to the grocery, I recognized the yellow plastic packaging peeking out behind the wheat bread, but it wasn’t totally the same. The packaging had gone through a small restyling. The yellow wasn’t as neon and the red was a little warmer. The label was more or less the same, except there was a new addition to the label on the bottom. A new line that read:
New and improved. Nutri+Plus Advantage.
I turned the bag around to read the nutrition facts.
10 grams of protein.
Part 4: The Bread
There was no fanfare, no public announcements, or even brand campaigns for this repackaged Amazing Black Forest. Nobody seemed to have noticed that it suddenly lost 12g of protein from its nutrition facts label. I thought about how I wanted to tell this story in a kind of grand exposé-way. To make an article about sliced bread, yes, but ultimately to elevate a greater awareness to nutrition facts and the state of nutrition science in the country. To graduate from lifestyle writer to a somewhat serious journalist. But after standing in front of the bread shelves pondering my next move, I watched people pick the bread from the shelves and decided maybe that was that.
There was no big victory party. No applause for my scoop of the century. But a significant change for me was that my life basically went from counting protein servings to... Not. Spending a few months chasing after bread and nutrition facts might do this to you. Now, I look at a nutrition facts label and wonder just how close or far a certain thing is from the “truth” — whatever that means. But I’ll admit, learning that labels don’t always have the exact answers has done me a fair amount of good. Food is more enjoyable when I don’t strip its components down to black, white, and absolute. Maybe one day I’ll find out whether or not I spooked Gardenia into changing their nutrition facts, or maybe I never will. At least for now, I can eat my bread in peace.*
