Exposing the Sea Salt Phonies

Thrilled to see more companies following in the footsteps of SmartBalance by including Omega3 in their buttery spreads, I was particularly excited to see Fleishmann's new spreadable with a large disclaimer reading "now made with sea salt for exceptional flavor." It is not just for the flavor that I insist on sea salt, but because it is presumably not laced with aluminum and then the obligatory sugar they add to hide the taste of the aluminum. Not that aluminum tastes good, but in my opinion it should never have been put in food in the first place.

Remembering Campbell Soup's recent sea salt sells soup campaign, however, where although a huge fuss was made about the fact that their new soups contained sea salt, a quick look at the label confirmed that the main seasoning was regular salt, and then sea salt was buried far down on the list of ingredients, I now read the whole label.

Sure enough, Fleischmann's "made with olive oil" offering contains regular salt, too, only in a lesser quantity, the label says, than sea salt. Someone recently asked me, "Why does ConAgra do that?" That reminded me of another question I recently heard: "Why do the manufacturers of tube feeding food given to hospital patients contain corn syrup?"

I think these are questions we need to direct to the manufacturers. But in the case of regular salt instead of sea salt, one presumably needs to follow the money. Yes, things that are not good for us usually do cost less, and whereas that may account for only a few pennies per serving, for the large scale manufacturers it must make a huge difference in the bottom line.

So what does "made with olive oil" mean? Another glance at the label tells us, whether it is Fleishman's or the other easily melted spreadable, it means that after the soybean oil, which makes up most of the product, then they have also added a little bit of olive oil.