Philips - Big fat food fraud: confessions of a health-food hustler

65 Bleecker Street

New York, NY 10012

Copyright 2016 by Jeff Scot Philips

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Regan Arts Subsidiary Rights Department, 65 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012.

First Regan Arts hardcover edition, October 2016

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939708

ISBN 978-1-942872-87-0

ISBN 978-1-942872-88-7 (ebook)

Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.

Interior design by Nancy Singer

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Front jacket photograph by Terry Wild / ImageBrief

Images .

I control what you eat, I control how much of it and how often. I dictate how your doctor advises you, as well as what your dietitian and personal trainer recommend to you. I plant the health articles you read in your newspaper, and the messages you hear when you watch the news or your favorite daytime doctor personality.

Im even manipulating the ingredients in that healthy meal you bought at your gym and the label you read to make sure it is good for you; after all, everything you know about reading food labels, I taught you. Everything you think you know about nutrition and weight loss comes from me.

My name is Jeff Scot Philips. Im the founder and CEO of a health-food manufacturer that prepares meals for national gym franchises, medical weight loss facilities, grocery stores, and fitness celebrities all across the United States. In fact, if youve ever eaten a healthy prepackaged meal (think Lean Cuisine, but tastier) you might have eaten my food and not known it.

You would be horrified if you knew all the ways I can manipulate my ingredients and food labels. For example, did you know that according to the United States Department of Agriculture, salmon isnt a lean, healthy food because of its high fat content? So guess what companies like mine do to get around this: we add refined sugars, usually in the form of pastas and bread, to increase the total calories while keeping the grams of fat the same, which legally makes salmon a lean, healthy meal.

And if you think thats deceptive and irresponsible, you probably wont want to read the next sentence.

When our food labels say No HFCS (high-fructose corn-syrup), that doesnt mean theres no HFCS ( wink ). Once weve added sugar to make our seafood healthy, the USDA doesnt care what we do with it nextwe dont even have to mention any of the ingredients! We can take a crab cake and pump it full of gluten and HFCS, and we dont have to mention either one on the nutrition label. Could people with allergies to gluten get sick? You bet! But these ingredients are very cheap for us, and if you, the health-conscious consumer, dont know that theyre in there youll buy more, and well profit more!

As a food manufacturer Im totally out of control, I dont answer to anyone, and I manipulate whatever I have to, to sell product. But even that isnt the truly scary part. This is:

Im the one educating you on health.

The reason baby boomers think egg yolks are high in cholesterol and lead to increased chances of heart attack is thanks to John Harvey Kellogg, founder of Kelloggs Corn Flakes, who claimed that in an ad campaign. If youve ever heard that chocolate has health benefits, thats because the Mars, Incorporated (Snickers, M&Ms, Twix, Milky Way) funded the research on it. Did you know that calories were creatednot discoveredby two guys named Merrill and Watt in 1955? And when Elisabeth Hasselbeck sparked the gluten paranoia in 2009, she empowered food companies like mine to slap a gluten-free label on chips and cookies that people started buying more than ever, which lead to a rapid increase of obesity in America.

I pay big-name fitness celebrities to endorse my food, I publically intimidate politicians to push my competitors out, I travel the country sleeping with personal trainers so that theyll promote my meals, and when my on-site USDA agent wouldnt approve my questionable nutrition labels I had to bribe him, though not with money; I did it by bringing a Miss America contestant friend of mine to spend the afternoon with him. My labels got approved the next day.

Business is good. But the kicker is: all of this corporate corruption, ingredient deviancy, and food label fraud keeps me up at night. I dont want to do this to peoples food. Im not happy about making people fatter and lying to their face about it.

But, as youll see, I cant stop either.

My head was in the back of a hot, dust-filled commercial oven, and there was a man tugging on my shirt and screaming at me at the top of his lungs. My eyes were watering so bad I could barely see, and every time I tried to breathe, my lungs filled with soot and I started coughing violently. The oven had just finished auto-cleaning and I was scraping out the burned ashes to make it look brand-new.

The man yelling at me was the owner of the kitchen space I was rentingwell call him Christopherand he had a lot of money to lose if we failed the inspection, so he kept screaming, Hurry the fuck up! Come on. Come on. Come on! Every thirty seconds, he stopped shouting at me only long enough to direct the chefs, who were running in and out of the room with their arms full of kitchen equipment. They were transporting all of our abused cooking utensils across the hall to be locked in the office and then replaced with our display utensils, the equipment we never used (health code violation 3.2-5110). We were down to twenty minutes before the health inspector would arrive, which meant we had fifteen minutes to get the place looking like a showroom kitchen and to get the hell out of there.

I was a virgin in the food service industry. I hadnt worked in a real kitchen before; I hadnt even done any research before starting my healthy meal delivery company. I had no clue what the health codes were, other than the common sense ones, like always washing my hands and keeping food off the floor. Christopher, however, owned numerous properties, so he knew that we were in violation of various health code laws, and if he wanted to keep us as tenants, we had to cover up those violations to avoid getting shut down.

I guess I should have known that everyone handling food was required to be trained in food safety, which they werent (health code violation 5-421-70 [12]), or that the staff needed an operational bathroom, which they didnt have (health code violation 5-421-2240), or that we were supposed to have three side-by-side sinksone for washing, one for rinsing, and one for sanitizing (health code violation 3.2-5106). Had I done my research, I would have known that we were required to have an industrial strength dishwasher, properly elevated food storage units, and grease traps for the sinksnone of which we had (health code violations... well, you get the idea). Rather than correcting all these things at the last minute, Christopher thought it would be easieri.e., cheaperto make it look as if the space wasnt being used as a commercial kitchen at all, which would change the rules that applied to us. And, thanks to the health department, it was very easy for us to do this.

Health inspectors schedule their visits weeks in advance (which is nowhere near as lazy as the USDAs approach, which is to review detailed reports of our operationsthat we create!). Even better for us, they actually let the kitchen owner choose the time and date of the appointment, which gave us plenty of time to create a pristine kitchen. So my crew and I spent the forty-eight hours leading up to the inspection scrubbing countertops, painting the walls, bleaching the refrigerators, Krud-Kutting the mountains of soot caked at the bottom of the ovens, steaming the floors, pouring gallons of grease into emptied plastic containers to be tossed into our neighbors trash can, and hiding all the equipment we actually used to prepare food.