Food additives - piog

[DestMasters]

~taken from Feingold Association

Where do food dyes come from?

Those pretty colors that make the "fruit punch" red, the gelatin green and the oatmeal blue are made from petroleum (crude oil) which is also the source for gasoline.

You will find them on the ingredient labels, listed as "Yellow No. 5," "Red 40," "Blue #1," etc. The label may say "FD&C" before the number. That means "Food, Drug & Cosmetics." When you see a number listed as "D&C" in a product, such as "D&C Red #33" it means that this coloring is considered safe for medicine (drugs) and cosmetics, but not for food.

What are artificial flavorings?

They are combinations of many chemicals, both natural and synthetic. An artificial flavoring may be composed of hundreds of separate chemicals, and there is no restriction on what a company can use to flavor food.

One source for imitation vanilla flavoring (called "vanillin") is the waste product of paper mills. Some companies built factories next to the pulp mills to turn the undesirable by-product into imitation flavoring, widely used in many cookies, candies and other foods

Food additives are not new.

Artificial colors have been around for more than 100 years. (Originally they were made from coal tar oil.) And children have been eating artificially colored and flavored products for decades.

But then . . . most children ate these additives infrequently. They got an occasional lollipop from the bank or barber shop. Cotton candy was found at the circus. Jelly beans were given at Easter, orange cupcakes at Halloween and candy canes at Christmas.

Today . . . the typical child growing up in the United States is exposed to these powerful chemicals all day, every day.

What the child growing up in the U.S. in the 1940's got:	What the child growing up in the U.S. today gets:
White toothpaste	Multi-colored toothpaste, perhaps with sparkles
Oatmeal	Sea Treasures Instant Oatmeal (turns milk blue)
Corn flakes	Fruity Pebbles
Toast & butter, jam	Pop Tarts
Cocoa made with natural ingredients	Cocoa made with artificial flavoring, & some with dyes.
Whipped cream	Cool Whip
No vitamins (or perhaps cod liver oil)	Flintstone vitamins with coloring & flavoring
White powder or bad-tasting liquid medicine	Bright pink, bubble-gum flavored chewable or liquid medicine
Sample school lunch: Meat loaf, freshly made mashed potatoes, vegetable. Milk, cupcake made from scratch.	Sample school lunch: Highly processed foods loaded with synthetic additives, no vegetable. Chocolate milk with artificial flavor.
Sample school beverage: Water from the drinking fountain	Sample school beverage: Soft drink with artificial color, flavor, caffeine, aspartame, etc.
Candy in the classroom a few times a year at class parties.	Candy (with synthetic additives) given frequently.

 

Plus, at our school, if they request baked goods for a birthday or holiday celebration, they cannot be homemade. They require it to be store-purchased. WHAT???

 

 

[ziff130]

That is about the scariest thing I've read in a long time!

[smurfy88]

 I did not know this, thanks for posting!

[DestMasters]

 It is freaky, isn't it? I'm all for moderation. However, I think our sense of moderation has really been skewed.

[DestMasters]

BUMP!