I recently decided to stop buying ChaCheer brand of sunflower seeds, which have minimal ingredients but which Walmart also sells in the centre aisle—telling me there’s something else going on there that’s not showing up on the label!
I came across them last year. They come in several flavours, but I only liked the salted ones. The ingredients were sunflower seeds and salt, which isn’t quite a “whole food” but still a pretty clean label. The sodium content wasn’t even that high, and they only tasted a little bit salty.
But here’s the thing. Whenever I eat them, I eat the whole bag. Always right before bed, usually staying up way too late watching TV until I finish them off.
And each time, I notice my legs twitching in bed, which they do when I overeat junk food right before bed.
I figured this product was not UPF because it doesn’t have any UPF ingredients.
But then it dawned on me: Walmart stocks cases of them in the centre aisle of the grocery section. That’s primo retail space. That’s the space that companies pay high premiums for so they can be more visible.
One thing that’s great about the NOVA classification of UPF is that it’s not all about ingredients. Non-food additives are sufficient to designate a food as UPF, but they’re not necessary.
Products can also be classified as UPF if they’re manufactured with the intent of maximizing profit, regardless of the ingredients.
Arguably all foods are sold for profit. Of course. But not all foods are sold to maximize profit, otherwise no one would grow broccoli or turnips or chickpeas.
In the case of this product, the way it behaves in my body together with the prime placement at Walmart, tells me that this product is UPF even though it only includes sunflower seeds and salt.
My suspicion is that they’re very industrially farmed in poor soil, such that they contain an incredible dirth of nutrients. Upon finding no nutrients, the body wants to keep eating because it’s looking for whatever it expects to find when it eats enough sunflower seeds.
Of course, I haven’t done a chemical analysis on them and I’m pretty much just throwing out theories. But the bottom line is that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, don’t be fooled by the goose mask it might be wearing. It’s a damn duck.