Meet the Foods That Are Trying to Murder You This Weekend

By Doug Barry | September 7, 2013 | 6:30pm

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Food is good, except when it’s BAD, as in stabby-stab-stab in your pancreas and colon bad. Some foods have been masquerading as good, when in fact they are murderous psychopaths, determined to trick you to ingesting them so they can perforate your internal organs. The safe eater is the paranoid and over-informed eater, which is exactly why we’re going to run through a list of this weekend’s most murderous foods, to keep you SAFE. Hungry, perhaps, but who needs food when you have relentless phobias to nourish your imagination?

Moldy Yogurt

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As if small, plastic cups of yogurt weren’t already cesspools of supposedly good bacteria (health tip #1: the only good bacillus, is a dead bacillus), The Upstate New York Greek Yogurt Federation known as Chobani recently identified the type of mold responsible for the recent recall of everyone’s favorite protein goo from grocery stores.

Yes, precisely, yogurt cat — your cup of yogurt has betrayed you. In an effort to downplay the seeming grossness of this mold discovery, Chobani sought out the erudite opinion of Cornell University food science professor Randy Worobo to patiently explain to the panicked public how the mold Mucor circinelloides really is “not considered a disease-causing foodborne microorganism,” and that yogurt connoisseurs can continue to dribble yogurt all over their faces if they are so inclined:

This mold should not pose a health risk to most consumers. Very rarely, it can act as an opportunistic pathogen, but not through food and usually only for people with compromised immune systems through inhalation. The organism is regularly used for the production of natural flavor compounds that are widely used in the food industry.

Ah, but contrarian food safety scientist David Mills from the University of California said that the mold shouldn’t have been in the yogurt, because it isn’t “one of the bugs used to make yogurt.” One of the bugs used to make yogurt. ONE OF. Repeat those words to yourself and see if your yogurt cup tastes any different.

Murder efficacy: 2.5 out of 10

Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls

If you watch this gif long enough, you’ll swear that the Pillsbury Doughboy breaks character briefly, holds up a small hatchet, and mouths the word, “Redrum,” before returning to his joyful hiccuping. On Friday, General Mills announced a voluntary recall of a “limited quantity” of refrigerated bludgeon of Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls, the kind that come with a little packet of gooey jizz icing and, as of recently, shards of jagged plastic. According to a company statement, the recall is merely a

precaution because the dough may contain fragments from a broken piece of plastic on the production line. These products are sold in grocery stores nationally. No other Pillsbury dough products are being recalled.

This warning probably comes too late for all those people enjoy a late Saturday morning cinnamon roll/stomach laceration, but information can only travel so fast.

Murder efficacy: 4.5 out 10, with extra points for the Doughboy’s dead eyes

Fruit Smoothies

If the Pillsbury Doughboy is the stab-happy slasher movie villain, then fruit smoothies are the cool, calculated Hannibal Lecters of the food world, playing a long game with their prey by convincing unwitting consumers that they’re not the murderers they really are. But don’t let their wild claims of daily fruit serving fulfillment fool you — according to a recent article in The Guardian, fruit smoothies are loaded with sugar, and sugar, as we’ve all come to learn in the last few diabetes-panicked years, is the worst.

Sensing that the public is getting wise to their vast soda conspiracy, soft drink companies like Coke and Pepsi have been snapping up smoothie and juice brands in an effort to peddle cloying drinks that, unlike soda, have the veneer of healthiness. This smoothie contains 57 apples, four grapefruits, eucalyptus essence, a fossilized banana digested by a triceratops, and four mangos — it must be good for you, right? Wrong, says Barry Popkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s department of nutrition. Even smoothies loaded with fruit can have the same amount of sugar as a large Coke, with only a fraction of all those salubrious fruit vitamins you get when you actually masticate a piece of fruit.

Plus, the comforting phrase “natural sweeteners” is, according to Popkin, pretty misleading. Most people think “natural sweeteners” means cane sugar, or maybe even healthy-sounding beet sugar, but it probably means…

fruit juice concentrate coming out of China. It has created an overwhelming supply of apple juice concentrate. It is being used everywhere and it also gets around the sugar quotas that lots of countries have.

Those concentrates, says Popkin, are the cheapest sweeteners on the global market, and the second most common sweetener in everything from baby formula to soft drinks. YUM. Not only are fruit smoothies bad for you, they’ve managed to gaslight a whole lot of health-conscious consumers.

Murder efficacy: 12 out of 10, for the scariness of the long con.

Smoothies and fruit juices are a new risk to health, US scientists warn [Guardian]

Pillsbury recall: Bad batch of cinnamon rolls [Christian Science Monitor]

Chobani identifies mold in yogurt, says it’s not a risk to most [NBC]