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Loading...7 Unexpected Ingredients You Might Be Eating For Lunch Today
Have you enjoyed any juice from a beaver’s butt lately? If you’ve been drinking any fruit-flavored drinks, then the chances are that you have. Castoreum, which is extracted from a beaver’s anal glands, is used to make artificial raspberry flavoring. Products using this flavoring include cheap ice cream, Jell-O, candy, fruit-flavored drinks, teas and yogurts.
In a recent fascinating segment of 60 Minutes entitled “The Flavorists: Tweaking tastes and creating cravings,” Morley Safer examined the multibillion dollar flavor industry, whose scientists create natural and artificial flavorings that make your mouth water and keep you coming back for more.
Specifically, he looked at Givaudan, a Swiss company that employs almost 9,000 people in 45 countries, providing tastiness to just about every cuisine imaginable. Food companies know that flavor is what makes repeat customers. So they commission Givaudan to create what they hope will be a taste that people love, but that doesn’t linger too much, so that consumers will keep coming back for more.
As Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says to Safer:
“We’re living in a food carnival. The flavors are so stimulating, they hijack our brains.”
And he goes on:
“We’re eating fat on fat on sugar on fat with flavor. And much of what we’re eating with these flavors, you have to ask yourself, ‘is it really food?”
In addition to beaver butt juice, here are seven other flavorings and additives you may want to know about:
1. Aspartame: More popularly known as Nutrasweet and Equal, aspartame is found in foods labeled “diet” or “sugar free.” Aspartame is believed to be carcinogenic and accounts for more reports of adverse reactions than all other foods and food additives and flavorings combined. Aspartame is a neurotoxin and carcinogen.
Found in: diet or sugar free sodas, diet coke, coke zero, jello (and other gelatins), desserts, sugar free gum, drink mixes, baking goods, table top sweeteners, cereal, breathmints, pudding, kool-aid, ice tea, chewable vitamins, toothpaste.
2. Estrogen: Did you know that regular milk is full of hormones used by the milk industry to keep the cows knocked up and lactating all year round? So when you drink regular milk, you take a shot of hormones with it.
Found in: All non-organic dairy.
3. Sodium nitrate (or sodium nitrite): This is used as a preservative, coloring and flavoring in bacon, ham, hot dogs, luncheon meats, corned beef, smoked fish and other processed meats. This ingredient, which sounds harmless, is actually highly carcinogenic once it enters the human digestive system.
Found in: hotdogs, bacon, ham, luncheon meat, cured meats, corned beef, smoked fish or any other type of processed meat.
Read more: 60 minutes, artificial flavors, aspartame, butane, castoreum, estrogen, food additives, food flavorings, Givaudin, natural flavors, sodium nitrate, spinach, transfat, vanillin
Photo Credit: thinkstock
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may
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+ add your own"Tertiary Butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ ... which is a form of butane" - In the same way glucose is a form of carbon dioxide?
TBHQ:
Butane:
yes... I can see the similarities
There are also new flavors being concocted out of fungus and companies have grown up that cultivate the fungus just for that purpose. As kids didn't the phrase "there's a fungus among us mean something undesirable?" Now physicians see many more fungal infections in patients. Wonder why?
Thanx.
Don't drink the stuff so not worried!
butane? so we run around telling our kids (and eachother) "don't put that in your mouth", "don't sniff that", "don't smoke that", "don't drink that" and then feed them straight out poison and that's fine?
thanks (again)
Thank you
Ah. They would be the anal gland milker’s Dorothy and don’t worry about the beavers; they like it!
Thankfully, I don't eat any of that stuff- just nice safe boring homemade healthy food...
omg.... those guys are killing us......
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