Counterfeit Foods: The Truth About Honey, Oil & Sourdough

You've most likely innocently bought one of these 3 foods this week without knowing it was fake. Yeah, fake. Your sourdough bread might be lying to you, along with your olive oil and your honey that might mostly be corn syrup. Today I'm exposing the 3 most commonly faked foods, and I'll show you exactly how to find the real stuff. So quick backstory, I've been working through some digestive issues lately, so I decided to try something called a low FODMAP approach, which is basically eliminating a lot of things that tend to cause like bloating and indigestion in the first place. Most bread tends to be on that list of high FODMAP foods, so that went out the window. But there's a a specific type of bread that tends to be okay on the low FODMAP diet, and that is our lovely sourdough bread. So I went hunting for some good sourdough. So I go to the store, grab a sourdough loaf, and my stomach was not happy that day. So I flip the package over and start reading through the ingredients, and I see things like commercial yeast and dough conditioners and sweeteners. And I never saw much in the ingredient list that indicated that this was actually sourdough, but the front of the package says sourdough bread. So I fell down the rabbit hole. Lo and behold, it is incredibly common for sourdough bread to not actually be sourdough bread at the grocery store. So while I was betrayed, I was not shocked, but it got me thinking. A lot of people consume things that they think are sourdough and that they think are olive oil and they think they're getting the health benefits of those things and they're not. And that is called food fraud. Hence this video doing a deep dive into 3 particular items that are typically fraudulently marketed as something when they actually aren't that. So to further clarify, food fraud is purposeful deception for profit. Of course, in the food market in particular, we're talking counterfeits, dilution, substitution, or even just mislabeling. It's estimated to cost around $40 billion a year, and it's clustered around highly priced items in particular, things like olive oil and spices and fish and honey. So basically, food fraud wastes your money and it can impact your health and your trust in the global food market. So while we can't cover over all the fraudulent food out there, we're going to cover 3 specific items that are very commonly bought and thought of to be real: sourdough, olive oil, and honey. Essentially the most commonly faked. And then go over a simple checklist that you can run through so you can shop with confidence knowing that you're getting the real thing ultimately. So let's start with sourdough. So what is real sourdough? Real sourdough is slow fermented with a wild yeast starter. Typically this process takes 24 hours or more. This time allows for microbes to produce things like lactic and acetic acid, which do a couple of things when we're talking about the context of sourdough. They make minerals in the flour more bioavailable and readily absorbed into our bodies. They slow the glucose release when the bread is consumed, which then helps to lower the glycemic index of that food. And lastly, those microbial byproducts help to predigest some of the gluten in the bread, which many people who are gluten sensitive tend to find sourdough easier to eat and digest for that reason. Also, this process is what gives sourdough that true sour flavor. Now, those benefits that I just mentioned do not get reproduced if somebody tries to speed up that process using commercial baker's yeast and dough conditioners. So luckily, if you know what to look for in the ingredient list, you'll be able to spot the fakes and find the real sourdough. So one thing you should be able to note is on a fake sourdough, the ingredient list might be a little bit longer. On a true sourdough bread, the ingredient list is gonna be fairly short. There's usually gonna be flour, water, salt, and some sort of sourdough starting culture. That's usually all that needs to be in the bread. Sometimes you might find a little bit of like malted barley flour, but that's it. You're not getting any kind of crazy preservatives, dough conditioners, baker's yeast, that sort of thing. Which brings me to point 2. Some red flags that you can point out in the ingredient list would be yeast, dough conditioners, vital wheat gluten, added sugars and syrups, and enriched flours. Now, another thing you can look for in sourdough bread is the texture. Real sourdough bread usually has a very irregular texture, meaning there's a lot of holes and spaces where there's air pockets in the dough section of itself if you're slicing it. And then the outer part of the dough where there's, you know, the crust should be kind of crispy. Factory loaves often miss that kind of texture detail, and they're pretty uniform through and through. The other thing that can clue you in on how to differentiate between real and fake sourdough is its shelf life. A bread that can sit on the shelf at room temperature for longer than a week and not grow mold probably isn't real sourdough and it probably has some preservatives in there because of that. So where can you find the real sourdough? You can definitely go to your normal grocery store and go to the bakery section and ask about their sourdough. You know, the type that they bake there that's in the grocery labeled bags and ask them about the fermentation time and if they know anything about the dough. The second place to look if you want to shop local is some local bakeries. There are a lot of mom-and-pop bakeries out there that would love to tell you about their sourdough bread and that make them from scratch and they do a great job. Lastly, there are some companies that you can order from directly and have them shipped to you. I'll make sure to list those down below in the description. Personally, I found a local baker who makes it fresh on Sundays, delivers on Mondays, and I'm so excited about it. I've already tried a bunch of their sourdough and it's delicious and my stomach does not get irritated whatsoever. They're called Organic Bread of Heaven and they only deliver in the Chicagoland area and parts of Indiana. But, uh, if you are in the Chicagoland area, highly recommend checking them out cuz they make sourdough pasta, sourdough bagels, and sourdough tortillas and muffins is so good. So, so good. All right, so next let's talk about olive oil. In particular, I'm gonna talk about extra virgin olive oil. It's very delicate to produce. You need high quality olives and they need to be milled pretty quickly, no heat or chemicals to process them. Then it needs to be stored away from light and heat pretty rapidly and then ideally used within 18 months. And because of that, it commands a premium price, which makes it a prime target for fraud. Fraud with extra virgin olive oil tends to come in the form of mixing in old or low-grade oils that aren't even olive oil to completely mislabeling the origin of where the olives were from. And tests have repeatedly shown that a chunk of imported extra virgin oil routinely fails sensory and chemical standards. So how can you make sure that you're actually getting extra virgin olive oil? Here's a simple buying checklist to use. First thing, try to find a bottle where you can see the harvest date and try to make sure that you're getting that within the 12 to 18 month range of when it's been harvested by. The harvest date will be a better indicator of its quality over the best by date. Secondly, only get extra virgin olive oil if it's in dark glass or tins only. You're going to want to usually avoid clear bottles, especially if they're sitting under bright lights. Try to find an extra virgin olive oil that has a specific origin of olives and isn't just a mishmash of a region. Something you can look for on the bottle that will help with this will be the PDO or PGI, helping you to specify where those olives are from. The next thing to note is that the price isn't necessarily gonna be as cheap as you want it to be. True extra virgin olive oil is gonna come at a little bit of a cost. And lastly, when you brought the olive oil home, you can always do a taste test. Fresh extra virgin olive oil should be vibrant, grassy, a little bit bitter, and with a peppery finish at the back of your throat. So let's move on to another common one we probably all have in our kitchen, honey. Honey seems simple, like how can it really be that adulterated? Well, to understand honey adulteration, a little breakdown here. There's C3 sugars and C4 sugars. C4 sugars basically have a different carbon isotope than C3 sugars, and C4 sugars are in things like sugarcane and corn. And if C4 sugars are found in honey, that means it's been adulterated. So when testing honey, it's unfortunately very common that there are C4 sugars in there, meaning corn syrup or cane syrup has been mixed in. Actually, a European Commission report found that 46% of honey that was imported into Europe was adulterated in some way. So how do scientists actually detect the dupes? They do something called a stable isotope analysis. C4 plants, like the ones I mentioned earlier, corn and sugarcane, tend to have a different carbon-13 signature than C3 plants, which are like nectar sources. When you cut honey with corn syrup, for example, that unique carbon fingerprint shifts, and something called a mass spectrometer can detect that. So how can you ensure that you have real honey on your hands? Well, one of the best ways is to just buy local from a local beekeeper that you know, you know, because everyone knows a beekeeper. Just kidding. But if you have a farmer's market or something like that in the community that you trust, you can talk to them and understand their process. That might be a good step. And yes, crystallization is normal. If your honey crystallizes, that doesn't mean that it's a fake source necessarily. And again, similar to olive oil, it's going to be a little pricier if you're getting the real stuff. So beware of rock bottom prices. All right. So let's do a quick rapid fire checklist for finding the real things. And I'm going to put this up on the screen so you can screenshot it and keep it as a resource. For sourdough, green flags would be if the ingredients are only flour, water, salt, and a starter culture. Meaning it has long fermentation. Another green flag would be that it has irregular consistency on the inside, nice big pockets. It's not all uniform and it has a nice crisp crust. Red flags for sourdough would be if you see commercial yeast, dough conditioners, added sugars, and it lasts forever and ever on your shelf. That's a red flag and probably a dupe. Moving on to olive oil. Green flags would be that they list the harvest date on the bottle. The oil is in a dark bottle or tin. There's a specific origin country, not region, and there might be a quality seal that says PDO or PGI or COOC, and the oil has a peppery kind of bitter taste. Okay, so olive oil red flags would be if it's bottled in a clear bottle, if there's vague terms around where it is produced or where the olives are coming from, and if it's suspiciously cheap. Green flags for honey: transparent sourcing, reasonable but little higher price tag, and produced locally. Red flags would be ultra cheap honey, vague origin, not really clear where it's coming from, and that's pretty much it. Okay, so this is some lovely honey I just got from my farmer's market. So this one is pumpkin honey. It has such a nice flavor. Mm, it's delicious. So you gotta find a beekeeper that you trust. So I don't want you to necessarily worry. I just want you to optimize where you're spending your money and making sure you're getting the benefits that you're promised to get. Now, like I said, these are just 3 commonly faked foods. There are plenty more on the list that I could cover over. And if you want a part 2 to this video where I cover over things like other commonly faked foods like coffee, fish, and some spices, then make sure to comment part 2 down below in the comments and tell me which food you want me to investigate into next. And if you like this video and you learned something new, please give this video a thumbs up to help the algorithm, hit subscribe, and send to a friend who might find this interesting. Thanks again for watching, and I will catch you guys on the next one. Bye! All right, so we are doing a little taste test of the different olive oils here that I have. We've got an Amazon Fresh olive oil, Colavita olive oil, and then we have a Baluchi. So those are the three we have here. I'm gonna taste all three, um, and I've put labels on the bottom of these glasses. And what I'm gonna do where I've like named where each of them are from. I'm going to mix them up as I'm talking to you guys. So I'm terrible at this, obviously multitasking. I am not going to look and see where any of these are going. That one's really bitter, which Olive oil is supposed to be very peppery, like very acidic-y peppery in the back of the throat. It almost tastes like Greek olive oil, a little grassier maybe, but oof, that is strong. Almost unenjoyable. Let me grab the second one. It's smooth. It's very smooth. It definitely has a peppery finish, but it's in a different place of my throat than The other one was like in deep in my throat. This one's like at the top of my mouth. The top of my roof of my mouth is a little spicy. It's bitter, but not unbearably bitter. That's also really spicy, but not bitter. Oh, this is hard. Let me smell. I feel like because this one was so pungent, but like in a bad way, that this might be the Amazon Fresh one. It is! This is the Amazon Fresh one. So that leaves Colavita and Bellucci. This is not like kicky enough. I feel like maybe Colavita. I feel like this might be the middle ground one, and this might be Bellucci. Hmm, I don't know, guys. All right, let's see. No, this one's Bellucci. The middle one's Bellucci. This is Colavita. So it's kind of hard to tell. The only one that was very obvious was this one, which was super harsh. Again, olive oil is supposed to be bitter and peppery, but this was like to an nth degree. There you have it. It's kind of hard to detect, to be honest, but pretty interesting.