The shocking truth about processed foods
Posted on Feb 17th 2010
Filed under: Food for thought
We all think we know how bad processed foods are for us, but do we really know what does, or in some cases doesn't, go into making them? We reveal some shocking facts about processed and junk foods. 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.
Chips 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Almost everything contains beefIt 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.
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.
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.
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.
Chicken nuggets
Chicken nuggets actually contain little or no chicken at all. And the white meat they do contain is made up of around 16% pulped chicken, bulked out with water, chicken skin, proteins removed from bone, hide, poultry feathers and mechanically retrieved meat.
They also contain bulking agents used to soak up the water that's injected into chicken to increase the weight. And next time you order your child a happy meal, think about the fact that carcinogenic antibiotics and recycled cat food have both been found in chicken nuggets in the past.
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Tuesday 23 February
By Eminem
this is very interesting. i wonder what all this means to those who claim to be vegetarian, yet all along we have all been eating the good old beef. it proves the fact that we can survive eating anything, anything at all!!! so food freaks, get on with it, we've been eating maggots, yum...
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Wednesday 24 February
By Elaine
There are always vegetarian alternatives to things like Worcester Sauce which does not contain anchovies. It might just take a while to find them which is where the internet and specialist food shops could prove useful.
Tuesday 23 February
By dinners served!
This isnt confined to "junk" foods..... bagged salads are washed in bleach, then bagged with gas to keep them fresh, Bleached white flour, vacuum packed "fresh" foods, irradiated foods as in radiation, "fresh" fruit is often years old, salads and veg grown hydroponically in vats of water filled with nothing but chemicals, the water you drink is fluoride treated, this is nothing but industrial waste, EU beef can be 15 years old and full of growth hormones and antibiotics, salt and sugar stuffed into everything, GM frankenstien foods.....
it goes on and on and on, people buy this filth and eat it without question, as long as it tastes okay to your palatte which is trained to respond to processed muck. Wonder why so many people are fat and getting weird cancers? all these other health problems? these companies only care about profit, ask no questions of these scoundrels and you will get exactly what you desrve.
google "the meatrix" - some fun for you.
You'll eat anything in a pretty cardboard box that the telly tells you to. Go on, eat up, yum yum.
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Saturday 27 February
By susan
I should not be shocked by what I read, but if these additives are allowed to be put into the foods we eat and are being allowed by government under food production guidelines as acceptable then should we not then question all the money the government spend on advertising of how we all should eat healthily to prevent ill-health within its population as a total waste. Sorry for the cycnical attitude but who are they kidding. I will now do my part as a parent and grandparent to read labels of ingredients and yes my short shopping jaunt will now take me a slight longer. Hopefully I will get back at those who try to mislead us through advertising.
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Wednesday 24 February
By Rupert
YUMMY ! ........ I can't wait to get down to Mc Donalds. Since time began the human being has eaten and digested just about every type of maggot, grub, fish, animal, germ and bacteria. The original members of our Homo Erectus clan has in fact just been declared as a bunch of tribal scavengers feeding of dead maggot ridden carcases and NOT as we would like to believe the proud pre-historic monster killers of popular myth.
As for seaweed it's one of THE most nutritious natural products on the planet which supports half the worlds sea life. Full of fibre, complex cabohydrates and iodine.
The fact that there are currently so many of us on the planet seems to point out that there are ZERO people actually suffering terminal complications from eating Big Macs or Chicken Nuggets washed down with Coke (and normally diet coke at that). Apart from those who get fat by eating such items every single day the odd Mc Donalds 'multi cow burger' never killed anyone.
When was the last time you went to the doctor's office and he said "Im afraid the news is very bad, you are suffering from terminal Worcestershire sauce poisoning following an anchovy overdose ?
So come on, enjoy your life and don't become a dietary obsessive based on the fact that once you may have eaten a section of some poor bulls left testical in a supermarket haggis !
Rupert, " Living Gastonomic Life To The Full"
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Wednesday 24 February
By Chris Beeching
Although very interesting, this report may shed some light on why some unfortunate people with confirmed allergies continue to display symptoms even after they THINK they've eradicated the cause from their diet. Unless the manufacturers actually state on (for instance) the worcestershire sauce bottle that it contains anchovies (I don't know whether they do or not, by the way), then the poor sufferer would have no knowledge that they are in fact still ingesting the very product they are seeking to avoid - no hope of a cure there then! I do wonder what our food would be like if we were to ban all additives and insist that everything had to be 'what we thought it was', ie strawberry ice cream would be simply ice cream with pureed strawberries in it.....??
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Wednesday 24 February
By Martin Hill
Worcestershire sauce does indeed state amongst its' ingredients; "Anchovies (Fish)".
Why a fantastic fish, much used on pizza's and in other cooking, should be singled-out for comment in this article about food horrors, is beyond me.
It is also quite usual to cook anchovies until they disolve completely, particularly in sauces.
Wednesday 24 February
By trev
Then why, I wonder is Mc donalds so popular with kids?
Personally I would never go in one, I do not trust processed food.
The fast food industry has a lot to answer for.
You try cooking a homemade burger from pure ground beef, if it is not prime cut
it will go as tough as leather. The supposed Prime cuts one is supposed to get from certain establishments must be chemically treated to make it seem as if it is prime beef.
However, Everything you eat nowadays even the fresh produce has been grown with chemicals that we know little about,and it's long term effects.
Even so called Organic! may have absorbed certain things from soils, or the atmosphere. The food industry is a mind boggling crime infested organisation
which can legally call certain foods what they do. i.e Chicken nuggets, never seen the parsons nose never mind the breast.
But I guess being vegetarian is as safe as it gets nowadays.
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Wednesday 24 February
By Pagan Man
For those that smoke the tobacco industry adds sugar to the cigarettes. Sugar is in most processed food. The reason is simply people like sweet things and it is addictive it starts when we are babies unless mum breast feeds you get sugar in baby milk and later in baby foods so by the time baby is on solids they are hooked on sugar.
Breast feed and make your own baby food is the only answer not to get baby hooked on sugar.
Sugar is a modern day poison best left as far out of your diet as possible.
And you think this is bad nothing like as bad as the artificial sweetener in most soft drinks, sweets and processed and the nasty stuff is Aspartame.
http://www.sweetpoison.com/aspartame-sweeteners.html
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Wednesday 24 February
By Susan
Pagan man... it starts with Mother's own actually! Human breast milk does have a natural sweetish taste .... which is WHY human's as a whole tend to prefer sweet things. It's there to make us want to suckle as a baby along with the instinct to suck.
I agree about the aspartame and sweetners - nasty stuff! I even tried Stevia myself - but still found it to be a bit bitter.
I thought that in the UK ... EVERYTHING had to be declared on the label?