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Supermarket Invasion: Food Additives
 

Photo: Kelly Abbott

MIND MAGAZINE | You go out to the grocery store, and you buy the weekly groceries you need. Of course, you don’t have all the time in the world to cook, so you buy prepared products like soups, pizzas, salad dressing, pasta sauce, etc. Then you look at the ingredients list. There are a lot of things on there that you didn’t think you’d paid for: like weird extracts or Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) and ascorbic acid. These are all food additives, and everyone consumes them, because they are in almost every product in a supermarket. The real story of what you eat is not on the pretty picture in front of the box. The truth is out there… on the label that is.

Food additives are everywhere in your kitchen. From vegetables to meat, almost all foods are filled with a certain quantity of additives. Those chemicals have different roles, but the main types are used for colouring, flavouring, freshness prolonging, stopping oxidation (used on fruits so that they don’t turn brown after the first bite) and substitutes to fat and sugar. All additives have to go into a standardized process for approval to human consumption. The tests are conducted by government agencies, and their purpose is to eliminate harmful additives that cause diseases and allergies. The problem is that those tests can’t simulate all of the possible “real-life” effects, like long-term consumption or combination with additives from other food. Dangerous food additives are often spotted by external research, motivated by illnesses caused by food consumption.

Still, most food additives are 100 per cent safe for you, and some are just plain essential: ascorbic acid (a.k.a. Vitamin C) in apple juice and iodized salt has saved millions of children from bone malformation in third world countries. Some colorants, although hardly ever used, are still unsafe. Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3 and Red 3 are all colorants suspected to cause diseases like brain and bladder cancer or thyroid gland malfunctions. Those colorants can be found in various candies and baked goods.
 

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Artificial Colorants are special chemicals that have no taste and have the only purpose to give the food you eat a more attractive presentation. But some of them can be cancerous if consumed in excessive quantities. Some products containing artificial colorants causing cancer on test animals are widely found in supermarket because there are no sufficient proofs linking to human health hazards. For example, sodium nitrite – used to colour and preserved bacon, ham and sausage – have been linked to cause cancer for children and pregnant women. Although the risk is relatively small, having a better diet is even more appropriated, since sodium nitrite is used in unhealthy food to start with.

One well-known additive is Olestra, now infamous for its tendency to make people run to the washroom after finishing a bag of chips. It is the not-so-magic ingredient in fat free chips and cookies. Everybody knows about the long warning at the back of the bag saying things like “this product can cause diarrhoea and abdominal pain”, etc. However, even though the product is perfectly safe, it has almost vanished off the shelves of supermarkets because Olestra made people sick. It was also noticed that Olestra makes it hard for your body to absorb vitamins and other nutrients from fruits and vegetables.

Yet, above colorants and fat substitutes, sugar substitutes are the most harmful to your body. By far the most common sugar replacement on the market, Saccharin, is known for having high ties with cancer. Research was conducted in the seventies in the Unites States and it was proven that it caused cancer to animals. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) then decided to ban the production of Saccharin - which is a product nearly 350 times sweeter than sugar - for general consumption. Yet Congress intervened and annulled the FDA’s decision, but mandated that a warning must be on every bag of saccharin. The decision to authorize widespread consumption of Saccharin seems rather not logical given all the bad reputation of artificial sweets, yet today’s most popular sugar substitute –Sweet N’ Low- is made of saccharin.

The fact that so much artificial content is found in our daily alimentation should raise a bit of attention to us all; food is after all essential, and making sure it is as safe as possible is a serious matter. So make sure you check the side of the boxes you are putting in your grocery bag next time you are at the grocery store, just to make sure you know what you are getting into.


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