you are what you eat?

Hmm.. I am linking to another blogger's post because it is really enlightening and a bit discouraging. I have to admit in the past I have delighted in the fact that the "buttery" popcorn from the movies contained no dairy at all so it was ok for me to eat. Looks like I have to broaden my guidelines.. actually I have been for about the last year but still. If you haven't caught on yet, there are some crazy things in our food! For that matter, they are in your body products, too, unless you are a careful label reader or shop at strawberryhedgehog.com. ;c)

From Lab to Lunch: Chemicals They Call Food

By: Brie Cadman (Little_personView Profile)

The other day I was snacking on some bright orange “nacho” flavored tortilla chips when I decided to do something very stupid. I flipped the bag over and read the ingredient list. Given the color, I wasn’t expecting to find nature, distilled, but the double-digit list of ingredients, many of which I hadn’t seen since working in a lab, was still disconcerting. In fact, some of the chemicals were the same ones that drove me out of the lab. (You can only read “extreme neurotoxin” and “mutagenic” so many times before pondering a career change.). What were they doing in my chips?

A tortilla chip seems so simple (corn, oil, salt) but the intersection of synthetic chemistry and food manufacturing has taken us far away from simple and much closer to complex. Instead of nacho cheese, we eat synthesized substances meant to approximate the flavor or texture of cheese, no milk products involved. Preservation, emulsification, hydrogenation, distillation, and esterification has resulted in some good things (like reduced spoilage and food borne diseases), but has also resulted in some questionable food additives like the compounds below.

Read more..

[I will note that there actually are milk derivatives in Doritos if those are what she was eating and there are milk derivatives in most chips, sadly since they are delicious and thankfully since they are full of all kinds of other crazy stuff.] Snack safely! :c)