Plumped Breasts?

I usually buy this bag of chicken at Costco. I would prefer to buy the not-frozen chicken but never do because I always thought it was way more expensive.....Until....

....Derek sent me this link to an article in Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124148395729085669.html

I guess I had never actually read the package to realize that some chicken is pumped with up with salt water, up to 8% of the weight in my bag of chicken can be salt water!

If you read the front of the bag it says "All Natural Ingredients" but I have never wondered why my chicken even has ingredients except CHICKEN. This "plumped" chicken has about 10 times as much salt as a normal chicken breast. In the article it says most plumped chicken has as much salt as fast food french fries per serving. AND there are two servings in each breast. So if you eat a whole one yourself, you are ingesting some serious sodium.

Also, get this:
The chicken companies make about 2 billion a year off of the salt water they pump into the chicken. Once its in the chicken they are essentially selling it by the pound at chicken prices. Who knew?

And in case you are wondering here is how the price breaks down:

The fresh chicken is $2.99 /lb but is not plumped with salt water.
The frozen chicken turns out to be about $2.61/lb but when you consider that not all of that weight is actually chicken (figuring 8% is salt water) the actual chicken costs $2.84/lb. Not too far off the unplumped chicken plus its not as good for you.

Now that I know this, I noticed that other things are plumped with salt water too, like this fish.

The article also has many other things to watch out for. Did you know that if a package says 0 trans fats that it doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any? The manufacturers get to round down. So sometimes they can manipulate the service size so that there are .49 grams of trans fats and then they get to say there are zero! If you truly want to know if there are trans fats you have to read the label and look for ingredients that say "partially hydrogenated oil, hydrogenated oil or shortening." If the food contains any of these ingredients it can't be completely trans fat free.

I could go on, but if you want to know more the article probably does a better job of explaining this than me!

Did you know this already or is it just me that doesn't read the package? Anyone know of any other secrets or things to watch out for in our seemingly "healthy" processed foods?