NYT Wirecutter Loses Its Way, Recommends Toxic Food
Apr 9, 2025
In Wirecutter’s March 27 article, The Best Boxed Cake Mix, the author’s “top pick” was Betty Crocker Super Moist Yellow Cake Mix. How do the ingredients in this food product affect human health?
It fails 11 of WISEcode’s 14 quality ingredients codes (that’s a lot even for normally processed food). This one product contains:
sketchy ingredients
super ultra-processed ingredients
emulsifiers
artificial colors and preservatives
and seed oils (specifically palm oil)
But most importantly, this product contains sodium aluminum phosphate, a synthetic ingredient associated with nerve damage and development issues in recent studies. NYTimes Wirecutters brand promise is to deliver rigorous, honest, and unbiased product recommendations to its readers. What happened with the best boxed cake mix?
Perhaps the NYTimes overlooked their readers' health. It would have taken the author two seconds to use the WISEcode app to conclude that Betty Crocker’s Yellow Cake is full of really, really bad ingredients.
Or perhaps this was overlooked because Betty Crocker’s parent company, General Mills, advertises on the NYTimes?
WISEcode launched a free app that instantly detects these harmful ingredients and dyes in any food item — helping Americans everywhere make informative decisions.