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Beef broth with "organic caramel color" or "organic natural flavor"


eileenwithane

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I swear I searched and am not seeing it. I stared at all the beef broths at Whole Foods today for like 20 minutes and the few that didn't have sugar or cane juice if various kinds all had caramel coloring (which I'm trying to figure out if it counts as an added sugar) and "natural flavor". I know making my own is recommended, but this is my first week and it isn't happening. The only one that didn't have either of those had red wine so it was out. I'm going to try another store tomorrow too. Also WHY are they putting sugar in beef broth???!!!!

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Caramel coloring is sugar. It is unclear what organic natural flavor is, but I would not worry about that. 

 

Finding compliant broth is very difficult. The Imagine brand has had several varieties, but most of their broths include sugar, so you have to check the labels on any package you buy.

 

Sugar is added to foods to improve the taste of cheap quality ingredients. I used to work in the grocery business, so I occasionally examine most products in a section of a store. What I have noticed is that you often have to pay more for higher quality foods to get something without added sugar. What that means is that vendors are adding the sugar to lower quality foods to make the taste more competitive with the better stuff. 

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Congratulations.  Your eyes have been opened.  There is sugar in almost everything.  Look at your box of table salt.  I can almost guarantee there's sugar in your salt, too.  It keeps it free-flowing.  It isn't until you try eating this way that you become aware of how insidious the sugar problem is in this country.  And soy is almost as bad.  It is in most vitamins, teas, all kinds of places you would never imagine.  If nothing else, this journey has been an education for me. 

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Just as a practical solution for now - depending on the recipe, it's likely you could sub chicken stock for the beef stock, and people seem to have more luck finding compliant chicken stock. And whenever you have a few minutes, making it really is easy! I do mine in the crockpot.

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If you have a slow cooking, making your own broth is really easy :) I throw my bones in the freezer, so there's always some ready. I tend to cook it on the weekend

 

In Australia "caramel colouring" is a way to get around labelling rules where sugar needs to be labelled, but some are actually trying to add colour, not flavour and are avoiding using something more artificial (brown dye or something). 

 

Although a sugar is a sugar, the food labelling laws here allow some products to label only colouring and not specify sugar (tea is one that causes a lot of complaints). I'm not sure what the scope of the law is here, but all the references I've seen are for liquids, or items consumed as a liquid, even if the packaging is in another form before preparation.

 

This is very unpopular with diabetes groups (colouring is not the same as sugar -> for blood sugar) and an ongoing discussion which has yet to be resolved locally.

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Caramel coloring is sugar. It is unclear what organic natural flavor is, but I would not worry about that. 

 

Finding compliant broth is very difficult. The Imagine brand has had several varieties, but most of their broths include sugar, so you have to check the labels on any package you buy.

 

Sugar is added to foods to improve the taste of cheap quality ingredients. I used to work in the grocery business, so I occasionally examine most products in a section of a store. What I have noticed is that you often have to pay more for higher quality foods to get something without added sugar. What that means is that vendors are adding the sugar to lower quality foods to make the taste more competitive with the better stuff. 

I found that the Imagine Chicken broth was compliant, but the Beef from the same brand wasn't. So frustrating. 

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Congratulations.  Your eyes have been opened.  There is sugar in almost everything.  Look at your box of table salt.  I can almost guarantee there's sugar in your salt, too.  It keeps it free-flowing.  It isn't until you try eating this way that you become aware of how insidious the sugar problem is in this country.  And soy is almost as bad.  It is in most vitamins, teas, all kinds of places you would never imagine.  If nothing else, this journey has been an education for me. 

Ha, I just looked at my salt. I mostly use Kosher or Sea Salt, they were fine. The Morton's I have on hand for baking only had a few things in it.

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  • 2 years later...

I made a large batch of rustic beef, tomato and cabbage stew yesterday, which was day 3 for me and I used Imagine beef broth which has natural caramel for color in the ingredients.  Do I need to start over and throw out the stew.  I was going to use it for this whole week for lunches and other quick meals.  Now what do I do?

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