Here at Mother Raw, we have a full-on obsession with plants and we’d never insult them by using anything artificial. Unfortunately, not all dressings are created equal, even when they’re labelled as natural, organic, or vegan. When you’re trying to eat clean, it’s easy to be misled by labels like these and we are not here for it. Some dressings and ingredients aren’t as healthy or as natural as they seem - that’s why we’re exposing the raw truth about dressings that pose as healthy.
We want to help you look beyond the label and let the ingredients do the talking.
Zooming in on ingredients
Let’s take a look at the plant-powered ranch dressing from a popular salad dressing brand. Its packaging claims that it’s dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, and made with plant-based ingredients, but we spotted several ingredients that don’t quite add up.
Their dressing contains:
- Phosphoric acid, an additive commonly used in processed foods to add flavour and maintain freshness, which uses a chemical manufacturing process (Healthline)
- Xanthan gum, a food additive made in a lab that’s often used to thicken or stabilize foods. It’s also used in industrial products like wallpaper glue (Healthline)
- Modified food starch, a chemically altered ingredient made from starch, used in food products as a an emulsifier, thickener, or to change a product’s texture (lovetoknow.com)
- Calcium Disodium EDTA, a food additive and preservative used in food, cosmetic, and industrial products and commonly used in salad dressings, sauces, and spreads (Healthline).
Watch out for “natural”
As if ingredient lists weren’t confusing enough, some products claim to be natural or plant-based, but suffer from over-processing to achieve this. Natural flavours, for example, “could actually come from the bark or roots of a different plant containing a chemical that tastes similar” and then go through a lot of processing to become the desired flavour (Forbes). In simple terms, it might taste like banana, but not come from a banana at all. Many fillers, preservatives, and additives are considered vegan because they’re derived from a plant source, but they’re actually highly processed. To us, that’s not natural, and that’s not the way Mother Earth intended.
Mother Raw stands for keeping it real
You won’t find any of these ingredients or others like them in any Mother Raw products, because all of our products are made from nature, not from a lab which means you can recognize and pronounce all of our ingredients and find most in your pantry! At Mother Raw, we display our ingredients because we are proud of them and we have nothing to hide! Check out the ingredient list for our Mother Raw Ranch Dressing below. You won’t find anything artificial or processed in there - and that’s a Mother Raw promise.
At Mother Raw, we believe you should always feel good about the food you put into your body, without having to worry about sneaky synthetic ingredients. There are short-cuts and cheaper alternatives, but that will never be an option for us. We only serve up the best - that means plant-based, vegan, non-GMO, organic, cold-blended, and free from all preservatives, fillers, and artificial ingredients.
We encourage you to Put Good on Good™ and enjoy the goodness of plants freely and in abundance. Keep an eye out for ingredients you can’t pronounce and label claims that may be misleading. We’ll be back with more Raw Truths to get real about unreal ingredients!
Written by: Victoria Ehgoetz