7 Disgusting Hidden Ingredients You’re Eating On A Regular Basis
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A hundred voices echo across social media these days, demanding clearer and more honest food labelling. Simultaneously the movement to produce and consume more natural and preservative free food continues to gain momentum. Truly this decade seems to be the time where we might find our way back to eating food, and not food like products. But if giving up on your yummy delicacies and indulgent goodies is too a great a challenge on the mere principle of healthy eating, let’s try a slightly different approach. Ever wondered what really goes into your favorite snacks, drinks and meals? The truth about what you are eating might put you off it for good. But if you think you have the stomach for it (pun intended), here is a list of 7 utterly disgusting ingredients that slip into your body through the most common and commercial of food products. 1. Carmine A common red color dye used to color food products, carmine was first used by the Aztecs 70,000 years ago. But here’s the problems- the Aztecs never put it in their food; we do. Carmine is made from the cochineal bug; sundried and crushed, the dead bus are dunked into an acidic alcohol solution to produce carminic acid that is then processed into carmine or cochineal extract. Hey, it’s a natural product but yet there is nothing natural about it. No wonder allergies to it are quite common. 2. Castoreum All you vanilla fans brace yourself. The real vanilla pods are not always the source of your vanilla flavoring; manufacturers sometimes turn to the beavers. Beavers secrete a fluid to mark their territories, and it just happens to smell exactly like vanilla. The scent glands are located near their
anus and therefore castoreum- a natural food flavoring- is not always the most hygienic or palatable of secretions, but hey it makes your food smell so good! 3. Cellulose For all the indulgent food stuff you buy, you might actually be eating paper- quite literally, cellulose, used in manufacturing paper, is derived from cotton and wood pulp and is added to cheese strings to keep them from sticking, as well to ice cream. While it may not be the most disgusting of ingredients, it is definitely a lot more than you bargained for when buying cheese or ice cream. 4. Human Hair You know how we throw a fit if we find a hair in our food at the restaurant? Well you might actually be consuming a lot more hair than you ordered. L-Cysteine is a flavor enhancer commonly used in food products and is made from human or hog hair and duck feathers. Either way, we don’t think it belongs in our food. 5. Anti-Freeze Propylene glycol, the less lethal cousin of ethylene glycol, is a chemical commonly used as antifreeze. We can understand why you wouldn’t want to drink antifreeze, but you might not be aware of just how commonly it is used as a thickening agent in your food, especially in salad dressings. 6. Liquid Smoke Burn a little sawdust and capture that lovely smell and flavor in some water and vegetable oil, and you have liquid smoke- a common and commercially available magical potion to give your food that oh so lovely smoky flavor. Nothing natural about that flavor for sure! 7. Borax A fabulous cleaning agent, borax may be cleaning you from the inside out as well. A commonly used preservative in caviar, it is banned in many countries but a lot of the imported caviar still contains it. You might want to watch out and check your can of caviar before shelling out your precious dollars; you will find it labelled as E285 preservative in the list of ingredients.