Food Preservatives Part 1

After researching food additives and their affect on the body for my recent speech I thought I would indulge you guys with some information 🙂

Now as you all probably know I hate preservatives. They are one of the main reasons I turned to raw vegan foods. I personally find it scary and disturbing to read the back of food labels and not actually be able to identify what I’m eating.

“But Bianka it’s so hard to not eat ANY food additives, I mean they’re in EVERYTHING and sometimes I’m in a rush and need food on the go.”

Look guys, I know it’s a hard thing to do to completely eliminate these things from your diet and I’m not saying you have to go cold turkey to be healthy, but you are honestly doing your body sooo much good to at least cut out as many chemicals and preservatives as possible and to at least cut out the realllllly bad ones.

So onto the facts: why are food additives in our food and why are they so bad?

1. I guess the most obvious reason for them is to preserve our foods. By adding compounds like sorbic acid, foods are able to prevent spoiling by inhibiting the growth of fungi and bacteria. Although this is good for convenience sake when you think about it, this is actually going against what nature intended. For example, Roger Bennati, a teacher at George Stevens Academy, decided to start an experiment to test the shelf life of a Twinkie. Although the makers of Twinkies claim they only stay fresh for 25 days, Bennati hung a Twinkie in his room for 30 years. The results? “It’s rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it’s probably still edible,” Bennatti said. “It never spoiled”. Now I’m all for saving money and having my foods last longer but when you think about…that’s just wrong.

2. They are used to improve the taste, texture, quality, etc. Due to over processing, our foods no longer have enough taste or nutritional value on their own so companies must add chemicals to make up for what is lacking (hence your enriched flours, fortified milks/OJ’s, etc.).  Take McDonald’s french fries for instance. After attempting to cut back on saturated fat, they switched to 100% vegetable oil to replace the 7% cottonseed oil/93 % beef tallow they were originally frying with. However, this decreased the beef flavor that they are known for. So what else did they add but “artificial or natural flavors”. They basically artificially create the taste since their product has been so processed it no longer naturally has any of its own (unless it’s fried in beef fat that is).

3. They are used to make you addicted to your food. Is it really that crazy of an idea? I mean look at all the things these companies are manipulating in your food. You really think it’s a coincidence that you crave a big mac but not, let’s say, an apple or celery? No, it’s not people wake up! If you go on the MSG (monosodium glutamate) Facts website written by the Glutamate Association they don’t even bother to hide the fact that it has been proven to make people eat more. In a study on elderly, nutritionally deprived individuals who need to eat more to get enough nutrients, the MSG was actually shown to “increase [in] the food intake [of] institutionalized elderly populations”. Wow that’s great right? It helped the old people get in some calcium and whatever…but what about when normal maybe even a little overweight people eat it? scary.

4. It’s used to make you fatter. Once again it’s common sense people, these parallels of obesity with processed foods aren’t a coincidence. These companies are businesses, it is their job to make profits. If they don’t make a profit they don’t stay in business, simple as that. They are also ruthless and they will do whatever is necessary. By making you fatter then they are most likely increasing your appetite. I mean wouldn’t you rather be selling big macs and cookies to a group of fat people than to a group of underweight anorexics who not only don’t want your food but also probably have the appetite of a mouse? Furthermore, in a study on exercise in obesity in Sao Paulo, Brazil, researchers used that magically MSG stuff to create obese mice to be used in their testing. Since obese mice do not occur in nature, they had to create them with this chemical. gross.

5) they cause disease. I won’t go to far into this one because of all the links surrounding this one but needless to say the connection between the food and drug industries are closer than you think and there are some very greedy people out there who will do just about anything to make money, including intentionally making you sick to get you to by drugs to “treat” the symptoms. Read Natural Cures for more of a look at the corruption behind the food and drug industries.

and for more info I highly encourage you to read Kevin Trudeau’s Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About

(Note: These are my own views and research and I was not paid to endorse Kevin or his book)

references:

1) McDonald’s Fries

2) MSG Facts

3)30 year old Twinkie

4) Obese rats

(edited to add pictures :))