Posted on 05/26/2007 11:56:28 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
We often think of food additives as complex chemical substances produced by modern society. However, food additives date from ancient times. Early people used salt to preserve meat and fish, herbs and spices to season foods, sugar to preserve fruits, and vinegar to pickle cucumbers.
Today American food manufacturers use about 3,000 direct food additives. Some of these additives sound familiar: salt, sugar, yeast and vanilla. Others have complex scientific names that may sound unfamiliar: ascorbic acid, butylated hydroxyanisol (BHA), sodium benzoate, sodium erythorbate and carrageenan. Whether familiar, all food additives are useful and must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration before they can be included in food.
What are food additives? A food additive is any substance that becomes part of a food product either directly or indirectly during processing, storing or packaging. Additives can be derived from naturally occurring or synthetic materials. Direct additives are purposefully added to food in small quantities as a result of growing, processing or packaging.
Food additives can only be used for specific purposes. They must serve a useful function. Manufacturers cannot use additives to deceive the consumer by disguising faulty processing or concealing damage or spoilage, nor if alternative manufacturing practices are available that are both safe and economical. Nor can food additives be used if they significantly decrease the nutritional value of the food.
Why are food additives used? Food additives perform several functions. In general, they can be divided into five categories:
Preservatives help to keep food fresh and prevent spoilage by controlling bacteria, mold, fungi, yeast or chemical changes.
Nutrients maintain or improve the nutritional quality of food.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
Amazing that they don’t mention China...
No mention of delicious foods from that vast industrial waste site and open toilet called China?
Eliminate foods from your diet that contain high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oils and you will be better off.
What would our food system and, indeed, our world be like without food preservatives. By the standards of even a hundred years ago, our worst food problems are luxury problems that our forebears wish they had had.
Never before in the history of mankind have such a high percentage of people had such access to such quantity, quality, and variety of food at such a low cost in terms of hours of labor.
Yes we have some problems but they are trivial comparied to the problems we have already solved.
'La bonne cuisine est la base du véritable bonheur.' - Auguste Escoffier
(Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Better known as Vitamin C. Yup, a real dangerous chemical.
Why wouldn't you also advocate eliminating sugar from your diet as well? Sugar and HFCS are made up of the same two ingredients in almost identical proportions. If one is bad for you the other must be too.
and hydrogenated vegetable oils and you will be better off.
Why wouldn't ridding your diet of saturated fat make you even better off? The average American gets less than 2% of their total caloric intake from trans fats while saturated fat comprises, on average, 12-15% of our total diet. All fats contain 9 calories per gram and consuming 12-15% of your total diet in saturated fat is going to be much worse for you than anything that 1-2% of trans fats could do to you. The entire trans fat issue is a calorie distraction foisted on us by alarmists, food Nazi's and wanna be nanny staters.
This is true. As with many foods, the presence of trace amounts of metals which catalyze the reaction, vitamin C produces free radicals that can convert benzoate into benzene. Like all toxins though it's the dosage that makes the poison. The whole benzene scare in soft drinks is just more alarmism from people who benefit from an alarmed public.
Benzene occurs naturally from many sources: Forest fires, volcanoes and in many of the foods we eat. Several years ago the FDA tested seventy different foods and found that all but two of them contained benzene. Hamburgers and bananas were, IIRC, high in benzene. The FDA also recently tested just about every soft drink on the market using ascorbic acid and sodium benzoate. Of all the tested products only five of them showed traces of benzene and even then, the amounts were less than 10 parts per billion. Sinc enumerous studies show that 1 part per million is not harmful in an occupational setting, it's hard to get worked up about parts per billion.
British researchers even admitted that a person would need to drink more than twenty quarts of a beverage with ten parts per billion of benzene to equal the amount one would breathe from city air in one day. That's right, you get more benzene in your body from breathing the air in most cities than you would from drinking unconsumable amounts of soda where a benzene producing reaction had taken place.
If you really want to get benzene out of your system the best thing you can do is stop breathing.
Very funny! I suppose that there are people out there (millions?) that would fall for that...
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