Carlos Ríos and the "real food" business: can a cocoa cream be healthy?
Thursday, October 7, 2021. A day that for nutritionist Carlos Ríos "marks the beginning of a REVOLUTION in our food system." The reason? A cocoa cream "without added sugar" and "without sweeteners" manufactured by the Shukran Foods company that bears his signature has been presented.
“We are going to develop more good processed foods together with @shukran_foods and other manufacturers of real food in our country to win the game against ultra-processed products”, assures Ríos on his Instagram profile, which is followed by more than a million and a half people. “We are going to show that a healthy and pleasant diet is possible. Because the most important thing is quality ingredients, food at the service of people's health, under this mission we will create the realfooding supermarket”.
Ríos presented his cream in an Alcampo supermarket, where long queues formed among the followers of his “movement”, the realfooders, who took away the signed cream. Since he introduced the product, hundreds of thousands of fans have celebrated his arrival, but some of his fellow nutritionists quickly raised the alarm: the product, they say, is incorrectly labeled.
Without added sugars?
"To put 'without added sugars', the legislation tells us that food cannot contain monosaccharides or disaccharides, or any ingredient added for its sweetening properties," explains the technologist food Beatriz Robles. "This means that we cannot add sucrose, glucose, lactose... But neither can we add ingredients such as honey, brown sugar, juice, concentrated fruit puree, or date puree."
Several nutritionists believe that cocoa cream cannot be labeled as "no added sugar"
Carlos Ríos' cocoa cream contains chestnuts, cocoa and dates, a product that Robles claims is actually “added sugar”.
As Robles explains, the food industry usually adds ingredients of this type to many products and alludes that they are adding it for another technological purpose than to sweeten it –because it gives color, texture or fiber–, which gives them Allows you to circumvent the law. But it is that Ríos himself acknowledges on the packaging of his cocoa cream that "the main ingredients are chestnuts, cocoa and dates, to sweeten naturally."
“The moment you declare that you use it to sweeten, you are skipping this part of the legislation”, says Robles. "It is that it openly declares that the technological end is that." The label also does not include the percentage of dates that the product contains, which, in Robles' opinion, should be indicated since "it is highlighting these by means of a graphic representation."
Carlos Ríos, in a conversation with Directo al Paladar, defends himself against the accusations: “The clear date that has a sweetening power due to natural sugars, just like chestnuts, but it is one more ingredient. What we are looking for with this cream is a final result, which is as healthy as possible and is appetizing. The date also provides fiber, protein, antioxidants, texture and color to the product, it is one more ingredient in the formula”.
“Changing the industry from within”
Robles posted on Instagram his doubts about the labeling of the product and Ríos himself answered him, asking him to “declare your conflicts of interest so that people know where you come from this absurdity”. Immediately, Robles says, she received a barrage of messages from Ríos's followers, describing her as working for the industry – although she, in reality, works for communication media such as El País or RTVE.
My grandmas the cutest. 💖 “Carol i don’t know how to work Venmo, so we have to go open up a joint bank account this week okay?” 🥲
— Carol Ross Mon Feb 01 20:31:43 +0000 2021
“There are large multinational companies that are going to lose a lot of money with this launch,” says Ríos
On Instagram, his main means of communication, Ríos has described the criticism of Robles and other nutritionists as "a reaction from the ultra-processed industry." But there are already many who have amended the plan. And not only when it comes to labeling.
“There are no white sugar mines like there are salt mines”, explains nutritionist Juan Revenga. “The sugar comes from the beetroot, and it comes from the beetroot because it is the most profitable, but you can get it from other places, such as dates. But it is the same".
For Ríos, "you don't have to be very smart to know that there are many economic interests behind it." In his opinion, "everyone can have their criteria", but his purpose is "to make people eat healthier" and "there are large multinational companies that are going to lose a lot of money with this launch."
Between processed foods, the game goes on
Carlos Ríos' cocoa cream is no worse than many others on the market. It may even be the best. The problem, according to the nutritionists consulted, is that they are trying to pass off a food that is neither as healthy or unprocessed.
“The worst food choice is the one you make mistakenly believing that it is healthy,” says Robles
“The worst food choice is the one you make in the mistaken belief that it is healthy,” explains Robles. “It is what the industry always wants. Because you are going to eat them convinced and if you are not aware that it is a mistake you are not even going to try to change it”.
In the end, according to Revenga and Robles, a cocoa cream is a cocoa cream, just like a sponge cake is a sponge cake, no matter how good the ingredients used to make it are. “It is as if we make confectionery in our house, where we control the quality of the ingredients and the quantities, but the food that you have in the end is a cake, a cream or a cake, highly palatable, which has free sugars, and is an imitation. of some products that are already on the market”, says Robles. "It's not better, it's a little less bad."
The product is also being promoted by a well-known character who has built a media empire on the basis, precisely, of criticizing ultra-processed foods; Going so far as to write “ultra-processed” in hundreds of posts on Instagram from companies that advertised one release or another.
“If we can make pizzas that remove palm oil or refined flour, we will do it,” says Ríos
In recent times, it has also been very aggressive with the Nutriscore labeling, which does appear voluntarily on its cocoa cream. In this system, classification A is obtained, the highest, but, as Revenga explains, in other classification systems it would do worse: in the Nova system it would be labeled as "ultra-processed" and the Chilean authorities would place a warning, "high in sugars”.
For Ríos, it is important to offer the population processed foods that are healthy and improve what is available in the market: “The objective is to bring out a range of products that improve the ultra-processed products that exist, changing the ingredients and creating good processed products. The goal is to change the food system and that's why we want to create a supermarket by introducing new products that make people change. And for people to change and stop buying those ultra-processed creams, you can't persuade them just by saying they eat lettuce, you have to give healthy alternatives within a context in which we recommend basing your diet on real food. If we can make pizzas that remove palm oil or refined flour, we will do it”.
The future of 'realfooding'
Carlos Ríos is a dietitian-nutritionist, but also, as he usually defines himself, “creator of the Realfooding movement”.
In just a decade, this man from Huelva, who has just reached his thirties, has built an empire around the Realfooding brand that includes personalized nutrition consultations, a mobile app that rates food, two best-selling books published by the Phaidon publishing house and all the work that surrounds an influencer – including collaborations with brands, which number in the dozens.
In just a decade Carlos Ríos has built an entire media empire
The appeal to the consumption of “real food”, with proclamations such as “more markets and less supermarkets”, is nothing new. Most of the messages that have made Ríos famous can be found in best-selling food publications such as The Supermarket Detective, by Michael Pollan, published in Spanish in 2009 –Ríos opened his Instagram account in 2016–, and long before in academic environments, which have been warning for decades about the pernicious influence of ultra-processed products on our health.
The controversy began to surround Ríos when he radicalized his message, criticizing not only the companies that manufacture “shitty” food, but also the people who have not yet seen the light of day and continue to consume them, something that some warned psychologists, could help promote eating disorders (TCA).
“He even made duets of Tik Tok videos of people who eat high-calorie things, criticizing them without anyone asking him, pointing out all the calories they are eating…”, explains Liliana Fuchs, a partner at Directo al Paladar. “All of this fosters guilt, obsession, and a bad relationship with food. It is breeding ground for TCA. It seems that the only problem is being fat and that all the ills are from the industry. He said that ultra-processed foods are the cause of eating disorders, when from experience I know that one thing has nothing to do with the other. I binged on fruit, oatmeal and nuts, for example, and pastries or sweets or snacks never entered my house”.
“I understand the success of the movement, and it must be valued, because in one part it may have made people aware of the problem that ultra-processed foods pose to our health, but at the same time, as far as I know, from the outside , I think it is taking on certain sectarian overtones that can be worrying," concludes Robles. “A series of ideas that always revolve around his figure, as if they were his own messages and that no one else had ever given. And his followers no longer buy the message, they keep what he says with that message.
Crème de cacao is not the first processed product to bear the stamp of Carlos Ríos. He already tried it in 2020 with a cocoa cream named Ambrosía, which also had dates, manufactured by the Paleobull company from Palencia, which continues to sell it but without the Realfooding seal. Since then it has given its endorsement to other products such as mutabal, hummus, gazpacho or guacamole. All of them products manufactured in collaboration with the food industry, to which Ríos wants to continue selling his label – last week he was at Fruit Attraction, the largest fair in the fruit and vegetable sector, looking for new clients.
“We are going to give visibility and support to these healthy products so that people can consume them, we are going to change the food industry from within”, concludes Ríos.
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