If you are like us, you like to pay attention to labels – especially if they are on products going in or on your body. It’s easy to shun products that contain ingredients with some ridiculous names you have to brush up on chemistry to pronounce, but some are just chemical names for normal vitamins, minerals, and nutrients your body needs. However, many are tricky little substances ready to wreak havoc on your body over time. Let’s go through five scary ingredients that are especially prevalent in packaged food or what can seem more like ‘edible food-like substances.’ Labels are typically transparent and innocent enough. The real devil is in the details that are hiding such as what they are designed for, what they do to your body, and why we allow them in our food.
Per usual, please do your research, question everything, and be conscious about what or who you are supporting with your purchases. Remember this rule as well: if you are only consuming small amounts of these ingredients, your body will process them fine, so don’t panic. Just transition away from them.
Artificial Flavors, Colors, and Sweeteners
Artificial flavors are designed to mimic the taste of their natural counterparts and do a pretty terrible job of it in our opinion. If you have ever tasted a home cooked meal and compare it to the processed packaged/frozen version, I’m sure that you have noticed the difference as well. Some artificial flavors are blends of many different chemical compounds – for example, artificial strawberry has 49 ingredients.
Some artificial colors used in food are derived from coal tar or petroleum products, can contain arsenic and lead, and are used in non-foods like textiles, but, hey, everyone is looking to increase their risk for cancer right? No big deal. These artificial dyes are also linked to ADD and ADHD.
Artificial sweeteners are used in place of whole or other processed sugars because they are much lower in calories and marketed towards people trying to lose weight. Aspartame, Saccharin, and Sucralose have been identified as carcinogens. Your body converts aspartame to formaldehyde – you know … one of the chemicals used for embalming.
Carrageenan
Carrageenan is a naturally-derived food additive (from red seaweed) that is used in many foods and non-foods as a stabilizing agent. For example, it is used in many varieties of non-dairy milk to keep all the component parts together while they wait for you to drink them. Unfortunately carrageenan has been linked to digestive inflammation, ulcers, and even cancers. Luckily, there are plenty of other non-dairy milks that do not use it.
BHT (Butylated Hydroxytoluene)
BHT is a preservative that prevents oxidation. It is used in food products as well as jet fuel, petroleum products, and embalming fluid, hooray! BHT has been linked to liver damage and is a suspected carcinogen.
Soybean Oil and Soy Protein Concentrate
Always be careful with soy! If it is not organic, you are eating its GMO variety. This is very easy to overlook when you are buying a product with soybean oil (which can be hydrogenated and super processed) or soy protein concentrate.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
It seems like corn makes its way into everything people consume. It feeds animals that are killed to feed people and is used to create ethanol for mixing with gasoline at the pump, among many other purposes. Our focus here is on corn sugar or high fructose corn syrup. This is most commonly associated with sugary beverages like soda, but corn sugar has also made its way into virtually all processed foods to court our favorite insatiable addict: the sweet tooth. Corn sugar and excessive processed sugar consumption has been linked to obesity, heart disease, insulin resistance, and cancers. It is also typically made from GMO corn.
For better food alternatives, check out our recipe section here at One Green Planet.
Image source: Daniel Oines/Flickr
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This is SUCH shitty blogging. First, the use of the image which does not highlight "scary" ingredients, rather it shows all the different forms of sugar in a particular food. Terrible image to match up with the article, unless we\’re now considering whole ingredients like molasses and honey to be scary.
Second, there has not been nearly enough conclusive research on carrageenan. Even stores which have very strict standards for the ingredients they allow in the products they sell, such as Whole Foods, have not banned carrageenan because there just isn\’t enough good evidence that it does harm when used in minute amounts in foods. Also, if you\’re going to make claims about GMOs such as soy and corn being "scary" please back them up with some actual facts. Yes, these forms of soy and corn are questionable but giving your readers something to go on if they know nothing about what GM is would be super.
Third, for those who still want processed foods, instead of telling them to simply start cooking everything from scratch, you could give them advice useful to their lifestyle, such as searching out brands and retailers that don\’t allow these ingredients in the food they sell.
Regarding the safety of carrageenan, there has been an amazing amount of misinformation being blogged about carrageenan being unsafe as a food ingredient. In spite of this misinformation, carrageenan continues as the safe food ingredient it has always been. If it were not, the principal regulatory agencies of the world (US FDA, FAO/WHO JECFA, EU EFSA, and Japan Ministry of Health) would not approve its use, and all of them give the necessary approvals. In fact, at its 79th meeting in June of this year, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) completed an in-depth review of the science related to the safety of carrageenan and found it safe for use in infant formula, including formula for special medical purposes. After reviewing available research on carrageenan safety, particularly a new study of piglets that is representative of human infants consuming carrageenan in infant formula, JECFA concluded that “the use of carrageenan in infant formula or formula for special medical purposes at concentrations up to 1000 mg/L is not of concern.”
Why all the concern about the safety of using carrageenan in foods? Starting in the 1960s there have been research studies showing that if excessive doses of carrageenan are consumed in animal trials inflammation can be induced in the small intestine. Likewise, inappropriate methods of introducing the carrageenan into the animals, i.e. in the animals’ only source of drinking water, have induced an inflammatory response in the small intestine. However, there has never been a validated inflammatory response in humans over the seventy plus years carrageenan has been used in foods. The anecdotal “upset tummies” reported in blogs as coming from consuming a food containing carrageenan are hardly
reliable sources of information on the safety of carrageenan.
Inflammatory responses in animals only occur when carrageenan can cross the blood membrane barrier of the small intestine. This only occurs when the extreme feeding conditions mentioned above are employed. Normal feeding regimes induce no such response.
Over the last decade a group of molecular biologists at the University of Illinois at Chicago lead by Dr Joanne Tobacman have been exploring the in vitro interaction of carrageenan with various genes and conclude that carrageenan can cause inflammation in the gut via a binding mechanism involving TLR-4 receptors. This group also concluded that carrageenan degrades in the gut and the degraded carrageenan can permeate the membrane barrier. Recent studies refute both of these claims, and furthermore this recent research questions the validity using in vitro studies to mimic the in vivo events in the GI tract when a human consumes a food containing carrageenan.
The bottom line on the safety issue is that in spite of all the efforts to downgrade or question the safety of carrageenan, particularly by bloggers, carrageenan is a safe food ingredient in all of the major regulatory jurisdictions of the world.