First-edition launch · $17 instead of $27 for the first hundred copies · then it goes to $27 and stays there

The Fake Food Bible Ed. 01 · 100 Entries

A shelf-side manual · 100 foods

You already suspect it.

The honey that never crystallises. The chicken that shrinks to half its size in the pan. The olive oil that tastes like nothing at all.

You were right. And it is worse, and more deliberate, than you thought.

$17 $27 Launch price

Get the Fake Food Bible Test five tonight — if nothing surprises you, keep it and I refund you

Instant PDF · 140 pages · reads on phone, tablet or paper
Nothing to order. Nothing to wait for. Start before bed tonight.

A spoonful of pale cream on dark slate with a blue-black iodine stain blooming through it.
Two drops of iodine on supermarket sour cream. Blue-black means starch.

There are two kinds of careful shopper

One of them is being charged for it.

The first

Reads the label and trusts it

Buys the better brand. Pays more, on purpose, to be safe. Has no way of knowing whether any of it worked, because every check available to them was written by the seller.

The second

Knows the twelve that matter and checks them

Spends five seconds in the aisle on the things that get faked, and thirty seconds at the counter on the ones that can be tested. Pays less. Is right more often.

The difference between them is not money, and it is not effort. It is knowing which twelve foods are worth checking, and how. That is a twenty-minute gap, and it is the entire subject of this book.

$10the entire test kit — most of it already in your kitchen
100foods, ordered by what the adulterant does to you
50home tests, each graded for how strong the evidence is
50entries that tell you no home test exists
0claims without a named source under them

All of this is on an ordinary shelf, in an ordinary shop

None of it is visible from the outside.

Two identical jars of honey side by side on dark slate.
Two jars of honey. One of them is nearly half sugar syrup. There is nothing on the outside — not colour, not clarity, not price — that tells you which.

That invisibility is not a side effect. It is the specification. An adulterant that could be seen would not be worth adding.

Show me how to check — $17Launch price · regularly $27

On the record

460

American children were lead-poisoned by applesauce pouches.

US Food & Drug Administration, 2023–24 · the cinnamon carried 2,270–5,110 ppm lead · fda.gov

It was not an accident. Lead chromate is put into spices on purpose, because it makes them heavier and brighter, and spices are sold by weight.

Those pouches sat on ordinary shelves, in ordinary stores, with an ordinary label.

Which is the part that should make you angry

Those parents did everything right.

They read the label. They bought the better brand. They paid more, on purpose, to be safe.

None of it helped, because none of it was checkable. You cannot see lead. You cannot taste starch. The label is written by the same people doing the adulterating.

This is not a story about people who were careless. It is a story about care being made useless.

Two heaps of ground spice side by side: one a natural muted ochre, the other an unnaturally vivid orange-red.
Same spice, same shelf, same price bracket. One of these was coloured to look like the better buy.
Make your effort count — $17Launch price · regularly $27

The part that is never printed on the label

What these things actually do.

This book is about whether food is what it says it is. It is not medical advice and it makes no health claims about anything you might buy.

But the substances being added are not mysteries. They are documented, and every agency that documented them is named below. You can check all of it without buying anything.

Lead

“No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.” — CDC, which lowered its reference value to 3.5 µg/dL in 2021. Even low levels are associated with reduced IQ, attention and academic achievement. It goes into spices because lead chromate is bright and heavy, and spices are sold by weight.

And after

Over 95% of absorbed lead is stored in bone, where the half-life is thirty years or more. In pregnancy it is released back into the blood, and lead crosses the placenta — toxicologists call bone “a persistent source of exposure long after the external source is gone.” Cumulative bone lead is associated with resistant hypertension in adults. Read that chain once more: the spice a woman ate as a child can reach the child she carries. The exposure does not end when the jar does.

Cadmium & arsenic

Both are IARC Group 1: carcinogenic to humans, with no qualifier. Both have been found in baby food and protein powder sampling by Consumer Reports and by a 2021 US Congressional staff report.

Industrial dyes

Metanil yellow, Sudan dyes, rhodamine B, malachite green. These are not food colours. They are textile and industrial dyes, banned in food everywhere. Azo dyes break down into aromatic amines that are toxic and potentially carcinogenic; published work links long-term metanil yellow intake to damage to heart and nervous tissue.

Argemone oil

Delhi, 1998: over 3,000 people affected and at least 60 deaths from mustard oil cut with argemone oil. The syndrome has its own name — epidemic dropsy. Argemone seed is used because it is cheap, available, and mixes perfectly.

Undeclared allergens

The number one cause of FDA food recalls — 63% of them in 2023. US surveillance attributes roughly 30,000 anaphylaxis episodes and about 150 deaths a year to food allergies — and for those households the label is the entire defence. In 2015 peanut shell used to stretch ground cumin pulled over 500 products from more than 30 companies.

And here is the one that cuts the other way.

The 300,000 infants harmed by melamine in 2008 is the case that opens this book. But twelve-month follow-up studies found the kidney damage was temporary, and renal function returned to normal in the children who were followed.

I am telling you that because a page that gives you only the frightening half is not a page you should trust. That is the same reason Chapter 11 exists.

None of this is about one jar. You do not eat turmeric once. It goes into dinner twice a week for thirty years — and the half-life of lead in bone is thirty years. Those two numbers meet.

A spice habit — dinner, twice a week

Lead’s half-life in cortical bone

Year 01530
Learn what to check — $17Every figure above names its source

The part that is genuinely unfair

The more careful you are, the more of this you buy.

Your carefulness is the product being sold to you.

That is not a reason to stop being careful. It is a reason to make the care land somewhere it counts — on the twelve foods where it actually changes the outcome, instead of spread evenly across a hundred where most of it is wasted.

Make the care count — $17Launch price · regularly $27

The whole problem in one sentence

You cannot eat well if you don’t know what you’re eating.

No supplement, workout or meal plan corrects for food that isn’t what the jar says it is. Every other careful thing you do is stacked on top of that jar being honest.

This book is the knowing part. What you build on it — the cooking, the choices, the care — stays yours. But it finally stands on something checked.

Which is a strange thing to have never been taught how to do.

Why official testing misses it

They didn’t just fake the food.
They faked the test.

In 2008, Chinese dairies watered down raw milk. Diluted milk fails the protein test — so they added melamine, an industrial compound loaded with nitrogen. The standard protein test measures nitrogen. The milk passed.

About 300,000 infants were harmed. Six died of kidney failure. Every batch carried certification saying the protein was fine. · World Health Organization

That is the pattern under every case in this book. An industrial test measures one number. The adulterant is selected to satisfy exactly that number. The certificate comes back clean.

A kitchen test wins because it measures something else — colour, density, how a thing behaves in water, what happens when iodine touches it. Nobody engineered the food to survive that.

Entry 22 · Sour cream Tincture of iodine, 2 drops
Starch detected
Iodine goes blue-black on contact with starch. Real cultured dairy stays brownish-yellow. Method: FSSAI DART, Test 3.

The question I get most, and the one that deserves an answer

“Show me these facts without using AI.”

It is the right question — the exact one a book full of tidy claims deserves to be asked. So here is precisely what is and is not inside this book.

Every figure

is published by a food safety agency or a peer-reviewed journal, and is named on the same page it appears on. You can check any of them without buying anything.

Every method

comes from a government household manual — chiefly Detect Adulteration with Rapid Test, a public manual of more than fifty methods from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India — rewritten and re-verified, never invented.

Every result image

is a drawn diagram, printed with the words “Diagram, not a photograph” beside it. Not one image in this book claims to show the outcome of a test.

That last one costs me something and I am doing it anyway. A picture captioned “this is what adulterated cinnamon looks like”, generated by a model that has never seen adulterated cinnamon, is invented evidence. A book arguing that you should not trust unverified images is the worst possible place to publish some.

What you get instead is the result described in words, and your own glass of water. Your own result is the only test photograph worth anything.

How the book is ordered

Not all of it deserves the same amount of your attention.

Most guides hand you an alphabetical list and let you drown in it. Watered-down juice and lead-laced cinnamon do not belong in the same paragraph. One takes your money. The other takes something you don’t get back.

So the entries are ordered by what the adulterant actually does to you:

The shape of the book — 100 entries

Tier 1 · can hurt you 20
Tier 2 · robs you 50
Tier 3 · fools you 30
Tier 1

What can hurt you

Heavy metals in spices. Industrial dyes. Allergens that never reached the label. Oils that are not food. Every entry carries a documented case with an agency name attached.

20 entries · 12 with a home test · start here
Tier 2

What robs you

Water pumped into meat. Starch bulking out dairy. Syrup cut into honey. Cheap oil poured into expensive oil. You are paying premium prices, by weight, for filler.

50 entries · 35 with a home test
Tier 3

What fools you

The fish that is a different fish. The origin that is not the origin. The “extra virgin” that stopped being extra virgin somewhere between the press and the bottle.

30 entries · 3 with a home test

From opening the file to knowing what is in your cupboard

Here is how it actually works.

Not a course. Not a programme. Four things that happen in order, the first of them tonight.

Step 01Tonight · 20 minutes

Run the pantry audit

Open to the first chapter. It names five things already in your kitchen — turmeric or cinnamon, sour cream, honey, coffee or tea, black pepper — and gives you one test each. Water, salt, iodine, a freezer. Nothing to order.

Most people find something in the first three items
Step 02This week · 5 seconds an item

The shelf check becomes automatic

Every entry gives you the aisle check before the home test, because a test you run after paying is a receipt, not a defence. Whole not ground. Two ingredients not nine. A named origin not “product of more than one country”. After a fortnight you stop looking them up.

The twelve that matter fit on one fridge card
Step 03Next shop · one aisle

Replace only what failed

Not a purge and not a project. The Buy List gives you what to buy instead, by certification rather than by brand — True Source, NAOOA, COOC, PDO — so it is still true next year and in your country.

Ordinary shops, ordinary prices
Step 04From then on · no effort

You become the one who checks

Not the paranoid one. The one who can look at a jar and say why — and who gets sent photographs of labels by their sister, their mother, the group chat. When a new case breaks, your copy gets the update.

A small kind of authority, and it keeps
Start step one tonight — $17Delivered instantly

Chapter one is not for reading

Night one:
the pantry audit.

Twenty minutes. Five things already in your kitchen. Nothing to buy and nothing to wait for.

Most books hand you knowledge and hope you use it eventually. This one puts you in front of your own cupboard on the first evening.

  1. Pull five items off the shelf — the book names exactly which five, and why those.
  2. Run one test each. Water, salt, iodine, a freezer. Nothing you have to order.
  3. Write the verdicts on the printable audit sheet, in pen, so it is real.
  4. Whatever failed, replace it that week using the Buy List.

460 poisoned children is news. Your own cinnamon is a Tuesday. The second one is what actually changes how you shop.

Start tonight — $17Instant download · nothing to order · nothing to wait for

What you actually get out of it

You become the one in the family who checks.

Not the paranoid one. Not the person who read something on the internet and won’t stop talking about it. The one who can look at a jar and say why — and who gets sent photographs of labels by their sister, their mother, the group chat.

That is a small kind of authority, and it is worth more than seventeen dollars.

And it is what looking after people actually looks like. Not worrying more — checking better. The care you already put into feeding your family finally lands on food you have verified, instead of on a label you have trusted.

The part where a page like this usually shows you testimonials

I don’t have any. This is a first edition.

Nobody has had time to write me a review, and I am not going to manufacture one. What I have instead is the reason this book exists at all, and the reason every claim in it can be checked without buying it.

140pages, one food per page
6agencies cited by name on this page alone
100entries, every one sourced
12viral tests checked against the method — none survived

The two questions readers ask before any other — which brands are actually real, and whether these facts stand up without AI dressing — are both answered on this page, and both answered in the book.

Case history

None of this is a theory.

2023

Lead in cinnamon applesauce · United States

460 children with lead toxicity. Recalled pouches measured up to 5,110 ppm lead. The FDA later issued a warning letter to the manufacturer.

US Food & Drug Administration

2019

Lead chromate in turmeric · South Asia

Samples up to 483 ppm lead, hundreds of times the legal limit. The pigment is added because it makes the powder heavier and brighter, and turmeric is sold by weight.

Stanford University · npj Science of Food

2015

Peanut in ground cumin · United States

Over 500 products from more than 30 companies recalled. Peanut shell had been used to stretch volume. For a peanut-allergic child that is not a pricing question.

FDA · USDA–FSIS

2008

Melamine in infant formula · China

About 300,000 infants harmed, six dead. The compound was in the milk for exactly one reason: to make a watered-down product pass a protein test.

World Health Organization

2023

Honey at EU border control

46% of sampled consignments were adulterated with sugar syrups. Honey is the third most faked food on earth, after milk and olive oil.

European Commission Joint Research Centre

2021

Snapper, nationwide DNA sampling · United States

Of 120 samples sold as red snapper, seven were red snapper. Across all species tested, roughly one in five pieces of seafood was something other than its label.

Oceana

Sold as one fish, found to be another — nationwide DNA sampling

Snapper87%
Tuna59%
Sea bass55%
Salmon41%
Halibut28%

Share of samples mislabelled · Oceana, US retail and restaurant DNA testing

Every figure here names the agency that produced it. Every entry in the book does the same. If a claim cannot carry a source, it does not go in.

Every entry, same shape

One food. One page.
Read it standing up.

Entry 02 · Tier 1 · Spices Shelf only

Ground cinnamon

The trick

Lead chromate and lead oxide, added to deepen the colour and add weight — and cinnamon is sold by weight.

On record

In 2023, 460 children in the United States were found to have lead toxicity traced to cinnamon applesauce pouches; the cinnamon measured 2,270–5,110 ppm. In March 2024 the FDA issued a further public health alert covering ground cinnamon sold in ordinary US stores.

So do this instead — the shelf check is the whole defence

  • Buy whole quills and grind them. Bark cannot be cut with powder.
  • Prefer Ceylon cinnamon from a named origin over unlabelled “cinnamon”.
  • Skip loose, unbranded, bulk-bin ground cinnamon. Every product recalled in the 2023–24 alerts was ground.

Prove it — at your counter

You can’t. And neither can anyone else. Lead is invisible, tasteless and odourless. There is no colour change, no float test, no sediment that reveals it. Any video selling you a home test for lead is guessing with your family’s health. This is one of fifty entries where no reliable home test exists — and saying so is why you can trust the fifty that have one.

Buy this instead

Whole Ceylon quills, single origin, from a seller who states the country of harvest.

Shelf check first. Home test second. That order is the whole book. A test you run after you have paid, carried it home and put it in the cupboard is a receipt, not a defence.

Because most of what circulates online is folklore repeated until it sounds like chemistry

Every test carries a grade.

Proven

Documented chemistry, or a method published by a national food safety authority. 33 entries.

Reliable

Widely confirmed in practice, without a formal published protocol behind it. 16 entries.

Folk test

Traditional, approximate, and labelled as such. It appears exactly once. 1 entry.

Shelf only

No home test exists, and the book says so instead of inventing one. 50 entries.

Half of this book tells you the test you were hoping for does not exist.

50foods with a graded home test
50where none exists — and the book says so

That is not a gap in the research. That is the research. Fifty times, a plausible-sounding test exists somewhere online and was thrown out — and what you get instead is what to do at the shelf, which is where the decision actually happens.

The question we get asked before any other

“Just tell me which ones are real. I don’t want to go through this process.”

Fair. Here is the honest answer, in two halves.

I will not publish a list of brands that are fake. Brands change suppliers, reformulate and get bought. A list like that is wrong within a year, and a lawsuit in the meantime. Anybody who hands you one is selling you confidence, not information.

I will publish who is being tested by somebody other than themselves — because that list is checkable, it is not mine, and it does not go stale the way a brand list does.

Honey

True Source Certified — traceable to a named beekeeper, tested to the same standard in every region.

Olive oil

NAOOA and COOC seals. Their members consent to being sampled off the shop shelf at least twice a year, by an independent laboratory, against International Olive Council standards. PDO and PGI for European oils.

Cheese, ham, feta, champagne

PDO and PGI. The name is a legal instrument, not a marketing word, and the register is public.

Spices

Whole, not ground, with a stated country of harvest. Nine of the twelve entries that matter most collapse into that one habit.

Plus the words on a label that mean something, and the ones that legally mean nothing. That is The Buy List, and it is the section people ask about before they have read anything else.

Reasonable objections, answered before you have to ask

Why not just…

Watch free videos

A video shows you one test. It cannot tell you which of them are wrong — and twelve of the most popular are. Chapter 11 takes them apart against the published methods — starting with the most shared one of all, which is exactly backwards.

Use a scanning app

Scanning apps read the label: additives, nutrition, a score. Adulteration is the part that is not on the label. No barcode in the world declares the syrup in the honey.

Buy another food book

Other books tell you what to eat. This one tells you whether the thing in your hand is what the container says it is. Those are different questions and only one of them is checkable in your kitchen.

Send it all to a laboratory

A metals screen runs about $155 a sample and takes 7–9 working days. There are moments when that is exactly the right move, and the book tells you which ones they are. For most of the hundred, a glass of water settles it in thirty seconds.

What this actually changes

Two things, and the second one is the bigger one.

One

You stop paying for water, filler and words

A fifth of a chicken. Cellulose in the grated cheese. Syrup in the honey. A premium for “artisan”, which is not a defined term anywhere. None of that is a health question and all of it is money, every week, on a shop you were going to do anyway.

A jar of real saffron costs more than this book
Two

You stop having to trust anybody

Right now every decision in the shop runs on faith — in a label written by the seller, in a brand, in a video. Trust is what gets exploited, and it is exhausting. A check you can run yourself replaces all of it. That is a different feeling entirely, and it does not wear off.

Including not having to trust me: every claim names its source

Read this before you compare us to wellness pages

The promise this page refuses to make.

You will not find a line here about saving on doctors or pharmacies. Not because it would not sell — it would — but because nobody can honestly promise you that, and a book whose entire argument is check the claim cannot open with an uncheckable one. The imprint inside says it plainly: no health claims, none.

And the health question, answered honestly: this book does not make anyone healthier, and it says so in print. What it does comes earlier. Every decision you make about food — what to cook, what to avoid, what goes into a child’s lunchbox — is built on an assumption about what is actually in the jar. This book is where that assumption stops being an assumption. Knowing what you are buying is not a health claim. It is the thing every health choice stands on.

What this book will promise you outright is arithmetic.

One year · worked examples

Water, sold as chicken$ 91
Words, sold as food$ 120
Ground spice, binned$ 18
Paying for nothing$ 229 / yr

From labels · not promises · redo it with yours

≈ $91 / year

The declared added water in one year of supermarket chicken, at the calculator’s worked example — $8/kg, 18% brine, a kilo a week. The percentage is printed on the pack. Entry 29.

≈ $120 / year

The premium for one unverified word — the worked example prices “organic” at a $5 gap, twice a month. Some of those words are audited and worth paying. Ten of thirty mean nothing. The Label Decoder tells you which.

≈ $18 / year

Ground spice binned at expiry against whole spice that keeps — the smallest line on the receipt, and the one that also closes eleven entries of risk.

Your numbers

Those are worked examples, not promises. The calculators are in the Verifier — put your own shelf prices in and the receipt becomes yours, checkable against your own labels, in about two minutes.

A three-figure yearly number, from labels, before this book claims anything else at all. That is the only kind of saving an honest page can print — and it is bigger than the invented ones.

See the arithmetic — $17Every line above is redoable with your own labels

What comes with it

The book is the smallest part.

Every file in the package, fanned out, with the Verifier running on a phone.
Not a mock-up: every page in this picture is a real render of the files you receive, and the phone is running the actual Verifier.

The Bible — 100 entries

140 pages

Ordered by risk. Shelf check, home test, what to buy instead, and a documented case behind every Tier 1 entry. One food per page.

Night One · The Pantry Audit

20 minutes

A guided first session on five things you already own, with a printable audit sheet to write the verdicts on.

The Buy List

most asked for

Products carrying real third-party certification, and the exact words to look for on a label.

The Kid Shelf

8 foods

The eight things children eat most that get adulterated most. The applesauce case was a children’s case. This section exists because of it.

Chapter 11 · The tests that don’t work

12 myths

Twelve viral tests taken apart against the published methods — starting with the upside-down peanut butter jar, which is backwards.

The Recall Feed

lifetime

Food fraud does not stop, so neither does the book. When a new case breaks, your copy gets the update. No extra charge, ever.

Tier One fridge card & pocket shelf cards

8 cards

The twelve that genuinely matter, on the fridge. Six aisle cards for the shop — one per zone, printed to cut out and carry.

The Never List

30 forms

Thirty things I stopped buying and the thirty I buy instead. Not brands — forms. Ground, grated, minced, unnamed: the processing steps that destroy the evidence before the product reaches you.

The Label Decoder

30 words

Thirty words on a package and what each one legally means, graded three ways: audited, defined, or nothing at all. Ten of the thirty mean nothing.

The Seafood Card

1 page

The DNA mislabelling rate by species, from nationwide sampling. Snapper 87%. Tuna 59%. One page, no opinion, every number attributed.

Test five things in your kitchen tonight. If not one of them surprises you, keep the book and I’ll refund you in full.

Not “if you are not satisfied”. Something specific, that you can settle before bed.

I can offer it because I know what happens when the iodine goes in. Most people find something in the first three items, and it is usually the one they paid the most for.

A jar of real saffron costs more than this book. So does one bottle of the olive oil you think you are already buying.

Take the test — $17Keep the book either way

Chapter 11

Twelve viral tests that are wrong — including the internet’s favourite.

The most shared food test on the internet — the upside-down peanut butter jar — is exactly backwards. Nobody checked it against the published method, because on the internet checking is nobody’s job.

In this book it is somebody’s job. All twelve are taken apart in print, each one against the published method it pretends to follow:

×

Plastic rice. The burning and bouncing tests prove nothing. Real rice burns and bounces too.

×

The upside-down peanut butter jar. Backwards. The runny one is usually the real one.

×

The fridge test for olive oil. Refined olive oil and several seed oils behave the same way at fridge temperature. It does not distinguish grades.

×

Nine more, each with an explanation of what the test actually detects, if anything at all.

A jar of peanut butter balanced upside down on its lid.
The upside-down jar — the internet’s favourite test, and it is exactly backwards. The runny one is usually the real one. Eleven more like it are taken apart inside.

A free video with a mistake in it costs a comment. A paid book with a mistake in it costs the reader. This chapter is the reason the other hundred pages can be trusted.

Everything, one price, one file

Get the Fake Food Bible for $27 just $17

The Fake Food Bible — 100 entries140 pages
Night One · The Pantry Audit+ audit sheet
The Buy Listcertified picks
The Kid Shelf8 foods
Chapter 11 · the tests that don’t work12 myths
The Recall Feedlifetime updates
Fridge card & pocket shelf cards8 cards
The Never List30 forms
The Label Decoder30 words
The Seafood Card1 page
You pay today$27 $17
Get the Fake Food BibleTest five things tonight — keep it either way

Delivered instantly. 140 pages. Reads on phone, tablet or paper. Want to see it first? Six real pages, no email asked.
Test five things in your kitchen tonight. If not one of them surprises you, write to me, keep the book, and I refund you in full.
For scale: the declared water in one year of supermarket chicken runs about $91. Entry 29 shows the arithmetic on the pack.
The launch price covers the first hundred copies. After that the book is $27.

Questions

Before you decide.

What exactly do I download?

One folder: the 140-page book, The Never List, The Label Decoder, The Seafood Card, eight printable shelf cards, and a one-page START HERE that tells you what to open first. PDF, no app, no account, yours permanently — and when an entry is corrected or a recall changes one, you re-download the updated files free. Six real pages are here if you want to look before anything.

Do I need to buy equipment?

Tincture of iodine, table salt, baking soda, a glass of water. Under ten dollars, and most of it is in your kitchen already. The full kit is listed on page one so you can check before you start. If a video tries to sell you a device for any of this, look closely at what it claims to measure.

Will this make shopping take forever?

The opposite. Shelf checks are built to take about five seconds, and after two weeks you stop looking them up — you just know which jar to reach for. The fridge card covers the twelve that genuinely matter.

Are the images AI-generated?

The cover and the section artwork are illustrations, and they show subjects — a jar, a spoon, two heaps of spice. Every PURE / ADULTERATED pair in the book is a drawn diagram, printed with the words “Diagram, not a photograph” beside it. No image in this book claims to show the outcome of a test, because a book telling you not to trust unverified images cannot publish invented evidence.

Will you name brands?

Only in one direction. The book names products carrying independent third-party certification — True Source, NAOOA, COOC, PDO and PGI — and quotes official recall notices by the agency that issued them, with the date. It does not publish a list of brands I claim are fake. That list would be out of date in a year and defamatory in the meantime.

Where does the information come from?

Government food safety manuals, FDA and EU testing data, and published food fraud research. Every entry names its source and carries a grade for how strong the evidence behind it is.

Isn’t this just scaremongering?

Every number in this book was published by a food safety agency or a peer-reviewed journal, and is cited so you can check it yourself. Chapter 11 exists specifically to throw out popular claims that do not survive checking against the published methods. Half the book tells you no test exists, which is not what scaremongering looks like.

Isn’t this going to frighten me about food?

It frightens you about six substances, which is the correct number of things to be frightened about, and it names the agency behind every one. It also tells you that fifty of the hundred entries have no home test, that the melamine kidney damage in 2008 turned out to be temporary, and that twelve popular tests are wrong. A page that gives you only the alarming half is not one you should trust — and neither is a book.

Is this medical or nutritional advice?

No. This book is about authenticity — whether what is in the container matches what is on the label. It does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition, and makes no health, dietary or weight-loss claims. It is the step before those things: whatever you decide about eating — with a doctor, a dietitian, or on your own — those decisions assume the jar contains what the label says. This book’s only job is to make that assumption checkable.

What if I find a mistake in it?

Write to me. If a test in this book is wrong it goes into Chapter 11 of the next edition, with my name on it and the date of the change. Your copy gets the corrected edition at no charge.

Get the Bible — $17Regularly $27 · instant download
The Fake Food Bible · 100 foods · keep it either way Get it — $17