A slice of Dave's Killer Bread has more added sugar than a slice of Wonder Bread. On the 21 Whole Grains and Seeds loaf the ingredients go organic whole wheat, water, organic cane sugar, then the grain and seed mix. Ingredients are listed by weight, so there's more cane sugar in the loaf than the entire 21 grain and seed mix. A Dave's slice weighs 45 grams and has about a teaspoon of added sugar. Wonder Classic White has 5 grams in two slices, which weigh under 30 grams each. Gram for gram the two breads come out about even.

Land O Lakes Fat Free Half & Half is mostly skim milk and corn syrup. The carton lists skim milk, corn syrup and cream, then 0.5% or less of carrageenan, sodium citrate, dipotassium phosphate, mono and diglycerides, vitamin A palmitate and color added. Half and half is milk and cream mixed together, and the cream is where the fat and the body come from. Take the fat out and you're close to skim milk, which is thin and pale in coffee. The corn syrup and carrageenan are there to give it some body back, and the color is there so it looks like half and half. Vitamin A dissolves in fat, so it came out with the cream and has to be added back. The regular Land O Lakes half and half is just milk and cream. FDA still lets the fat free version use the name, as long as it flags anything regular half and half isn't allowed to have. Corn syrup and carrageenan are allowed even in the regular kind. Color isn't, so the carton puts an asterisk on it that says ingredient not found in regular half and half.

The butter on your movie theater popcorn isn't butter. At most theaters the pump is filled with buttery topping, which is soybean oil, artificial butter flavor and beta carotene, the same pigment that makes carrots orange. It can't be sold as butter. Federal law has defined butter since 1923. It has to be made from milk or cream, with nothing added but salt and color, and be at least 80% milkfat. That's why the jug the theater buys says buttery topping or butter flavored topping. Some brands also add TBHQ and citric acid to keep the oil from going rancid, and FDA caps TBHQ at 0.02% of the oil. At a lot of theaters the popcorn is yellow before the topping ever touches it. Gold Medal's Flavacol popcorn salt goes in the kettle, and its ingredient list is salt, artificial flavor, Yellow 5 Lake and Yellow 6 Lake. Some theaters do use real butter. Odell's sells theaters a real butter topping with the water and milk solids taken out, so it can ship without refrigeration.

Coffee-mate Original has no cream in it. The bottle is water, corn syrup solids and soybean oil, and the only dairy is micellar casein, a milk protein, in the under 2% group. It's labeled non-dairy anyway. FDA allows that on a product with casein as long as the ingredient list says it's a milk derivative, and this one does. The soybean oil is homogenized into droplets small enough to scatter light. That's what makes it white, the same way oil clouds a vinaigrette when you whisk it. The corn syrup solids make it sweet. The casein holds the oil in suspension, so it doesn't separate in hot coffee, and the carrageenan keeps it from separating in the bottle. The front sometimes says triple churned, a word that comes from turning cream into butter, on a bottle with no cream in it. Soybean oil costs a fraction of what cream does, and it keeps the creamer lactose free. The flavored bottles use sugar in place of corn syrup solids, and some, French Vanilla included, add sucralose and acesulfame potassium on top of it.

Nature's Own says no artificial preservatives, but there's a preservative in it. The 100% Whole Wheat loaf lists it as cultured wheat flour. It does the same thing as the preservative in Wonder Bread. A supplier makes it by fermenting wheat flour with bacteria, often a strain of the same species that puts the holes in Swiss cheese. As the bacteria grow, they make propionic acid. Then the flour is dried back into a powder. Propionic acid is the active part of calcium propionate, the preservative on the Wonder label. A representative of the ingredient supplier told Baking Business last year that cultured wheat flour is basically calcium propionate. The claim on the bag holds because cultured wheat flour counts as a natural ingredient. If a loaf says no artificial preservatives and still keeps on the counter, look near the end of the list for cultured wheat flour, cultured dextrose or vinegar.

The brown sugar at the grocery store is usually white sugar with molasses added back. Light brown is about 3.5% molasses. Dark brown is about 6.5%. The molasses is where the color and the caramel taste come from, and there's too little of it to change the nutrition. Brown sugar is still about 95% sucrose, with 380 calories per 100 grams against about 390 for white. Stir a little molasses into white sugar at home and you've made brown sugar.

Your strawberry Twizzlers have no licorice in them. The list is corn syrup, wheat flour, sugar and cornstarch, then palm oil, salt, artificial flavor, citric acid, mineral oil, Red 40 and soy lecithin at 2% or less. Hershey says it themselves. The strawberry and cherry ones don't have licorice extract, which is why they get called licorice type candy. The black ones do have it, and it still isn't much. Black licorice Twizzlers are the same corn syrup, wheat flour, sugar and cornstarch, with licorice extract listed in the 2% or less group. Strawberry is 70% of the Twists Hershey makes in a year. Licorice extract comes from the root of the licorice plant, and the sweet compound in it is glycyrrhizin. FDA warns that if you're 40 or older, eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least 2 weeks could drop your potassium and cause an irregular heart rhythm. FDA also says a lot of licorice candy made in the US has no licorice in it at all. It uses anise oil, which smells and tastes the same.

The cinnamon in your cabinet is almost certainly cassia, which is a different plant. Real cinnamon, the kind sold as Ceylon or true cinnamon, comes from Cinnamomum verum and it's grown mostly in Sri Lanka. Nearly everything sold in America as cinnamon is cassia, one of 3 related species grown in Indonesia, China and Vietnam. FDA does not require the label to tell you which one is in the jar, so most of the time it just says cinnamon. You can tell them apart by looking at a stick. Cassia is one thick hard curl of bark that you could hit someone with. Ceylon is thin and layered like a cigar and it crumbles when you press it. They don't taste the same. Cassia is hot and aggressive and it's what American baked goods are built around. Ceylon is lighter and more floral. A small jar of it costs 3 to 4 times as much per ounce as regular cinnamon, but buy it in a bag and it's about the same price. McCormick's regular cinnamon is harvested in Indonesia, which makes it cassia. Their gourmet jar is Saigon cinnamon from Vietnam, and that's cassia too.

Fairlife chocolate protein shake has one main ingredient. Filtered lowfat milk. Every other item on the list is under 1%. The 26 grams of protein in the bottle comes from filtered milk, not from anything added. Regular lowfat milk is about 8 grams of protein a cup, so 14 ounces would give you around 14 grams. Ultrafiltration pushes the milk through membranes that hold the protein back and let the water and most of the lactose through, then the plant recombines it with more of the protein fraction. That's how you get to 26 with nothing on the list but milk. The under 1% group is the taste and the texture. Four sweeteners, monk fruit, stevia, acesulfame potassium and sucralose. Each has its own aftertaste, and stacking them at low levels lets each one cover for the others. Then carrageenan, cellulose gel and cellulose gum, three thickeners that keep the cocoa from settling and give the shake some body. It's about as clean as a protein shake gets.

A can of PAM olive oil spray says 0 calories and 0 grams of fat. The ingredients are extra virgin olive oil, soy lecithin and dimethyl silicone. It's a can of oil. The serving size is a quarter second spray, or 0.25 grams. Under FDA rules anything under 5 calories a serving can say 0, and anything under half a gram of fat can say 0 grams. A quarter gram of olive oil comes in under both. The can says about 665 servings. Nobody sprays for a quarter second. Count how long you hold the button down next time you grease a pan. 2 seconds is 8 servings. There's an asterisk next to the olive oil in the ingredient list. It says adds a trivial amount of fat.