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Surprising junk food facts

French fries are full of sugar

What many of us don't realise is that while most fast food french fries are drenched in fat and salt, they are also dripping in sugar.

Restaurants like McDonald's dip their fries in sugar to give them that nice golden brown colour when they're fried. It also helps to develop the crispiness that only junk food chips have.

Surprising junk food facts

There's no strawberry in strawberry-flavouring

The artificial flavours you see in so many foods can often contain every chemical known to man, and this is particularly true of strawberry flavouring.

Strawberry milkshakes or other mass-produced strawberry flavour desserts, contain an artificial flavouring made of more than 50 different chemicals, including amyl acetate and solvent. And not so much as a sniff of strawberry.

Surprising junk food facts

Ice cream contains seaweed

Little do most of us know, but many mass-produced ice creams have seaweed in them. A seaweed extract called carrageenan is used as a stabilizer to prevent the ice cream from getting over-frozen, or from turning into a runny mush.

Surprising junk food facts

Worcestershire sauce is made of anchovies

Worcestershire sauce is one of our favourite condiments in Britain, but not many people know that the main ingredient used to make it is anchovies. Yep, as in fish.

The whole of the little fish, bones and guts included, is soaked in vinegar until it dissolves and is then mixed with molasses, garlic and chillies. Tell that to your vegetarian friends.

Surprising junk food facts

Many foods contain bugs

In a restaurant, finding an insect in your food is cause for a refund. In the mass-produced food industry, it's sometimes a necessity. Any pink foods, such as pink grapefruit juice and strawberry yoghurt, include a food colouring called cochineal extract that gets its red colour from an insect called Dactylopius coccus Costa, which feeds on red cactus berries.

The insects are dried and ground up into powder, which is then inserted into many pink, red and purple foods.

Surprising junk food facts

Some cheese doesn't contain any cheese

Unless you're buying proper lumps of cheddar or mozzarella, many 'cheese products' in the supermarket, namely cheese strings or processed cheese slices, hardly contain any cheese at all.

This kind of cheese product is composed of less than 51 percent cheese and more than half the product is ingredients such as emulsifiers, carrageenan (the seaweed-extract found in ice cream) and flavourings like citric acid (which gives it the cheese-style tanginess).

Surprising junk food facts

Peanut butter has maggots in it

Scary as it sounds, some products are allowed by law to contain a certain amount of insects and mites. One product, canned mushrooms, is allowed to have up to 19 maggots per 100 grams of mushrooms.

That same portion can acceptably contain up to 74 mites. Lots of other mass-produced foods, such as our beloved peanut butter and hot dogs, are also allowed by law to include bugs.

Surprising junk food facts

Frozen food can be healthier than fresh

Contrary to popular belief, sometimes frozen food is better for you than fresh. Frozen veg, particularly peaches or peas, can actually be more nutritious than the fresh versions. The reason for this is because fresh produce travels so far to get to shops; it is often picked before it is ripe so that it doesn't go rotten along the way.

Frozen produce, on the other hand, can be fully ripened before it's picked since it's getting frozen immediately afterward so there is no worry that it'll go bad before you can buy it.

Surprising junk food facts

Almost everything contains beef

It may surprise you to know that almost all fast food products contain some kind of beef extract, even the chicken, fish and salads. The simple reason for this is that beef makes things taste better, apparently.

Just a few surprising areas where you'll find beef in extract or essence form include McDonald's Chicken McNuggets and KFC's Grilled Chicken Sandwich. It also used to be in McDonald's french fries.

Surprising junk food facts

Fizzy drink cans cost more to make than the actual drink

If you're reading this drinking a can of Diet Coke, Fanta or Sprite, take a second to think about the fact that the metal can that holds your drink actually cost more to produce than the actual drink it contains.

Fizzy drinks are primarily water mixed with additives, sugar or sweetener, and caffeine. And just to remind you, a can of coke contains 10 teaspoons of sugar.

Surprising junk food facts