Fake Foods
Vanilla flavoring, also called imitation vanilla, is made with synthetic vanillin,
which food companies sometimes
make from a secretion from the anal glands of beavers.
Below you'll see what other common foods
may not be quite what you expect.
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Fooled by Your Food?
- With so many foods available today, it can be hard to know just what you're buying.
- Many foods on supermarket shelves might not be what you think they are.
- Here are some that you probably have in your cupboard right now.
Fake Olive Oil
- Your olive oil may not be what the label claims: 100% pure olive oil.
- There’s a good chance the bottle on your pantry shelf has been mixed with other oils.
- Is that really such a big deal?
- It is if you’re allergic to peanut oil, which is commonly mixed with olive oil in an act of
food fraud. - If you have a peanut allergy, you could have a severe reaction to this sneaky substitution.
Maple Syrup vs. Pancake Syrup
- Maple syrup comes from sap from a maple tree.
- The sap is boiled & becomes the sticky stuff you know as maple syrup.
- But pancake syrup (also called table syrup) is not the same.
- Pancake syrup’s main ingredients are corn syrup & high-fructose corn syrup, & it includes
other things, like: - Coloring
- Flavoring
- Preservatives
Wasabi Or Not Wasabi
- Many restaurants, especially in the U.S., serve wasabi.
- But most of it isn’t real wasabi, it’s a mixture of horseradish & wasabi root with mustard flour,
oil, vinegar, high-fructose corn syrup & food coloring. - The real thing comes from the root-like stem of a plant related to cabbage & cauliflower.
- It naturally grows in cool, moist places & can be pretty hard to come by & harvest.
- You have to grate the root as you eat it because the flavor usually only holds for about
15 minutes after grating.
Drugs in Your Honey
- Food fraud isn’t the only reason some foods aren’t exactly what you think.
- Think about honey.
- It may benefit your health in many ways, sometimes as a wound dressing.
- Of course, it’s also a delicious natural sweetener.
- But it may have plenty of contaminants, including traces of antibiotics that beekeepers
use on their bee broods. - They won’t make you sick, but they could add to the public health problem of antibiotic resistance.
Not-So-Natural Flavorings
- There’s nothing natural about some of the 'natural flavors' in packaged foods.
- Food companies make them in a lab to mimic the flavor of real foods.
- Recently the FDA banned several synthetic flavorings in response to data that shows
health risks in lab animals. - If you want to eat healthier, stick with the original natural flavors: the ones found in real,
whole foods.
The Icky Side of Spices
- The spice jars in your cabinet are filled with more than flavorful herbs.
- The FDA allows a certain amount of insect fragments, rodent hairs & other gross things
in every jar. - For example, ground oregano can have up to 1,250 insect pieces per 10 grams before
the FDA calls it 'adulterated.' - Crushed oregano can only have 300.
- On the bright side, most products are well below the standards allowed for these
unwelcome additions.
White Chocolate
- Yummy white chocolate it's sweet & creamy.
- You can buy it in candy bar form or sprinkle chips of it into your cookie dough.
- But it's not really chocolate.
- According to the FDA, chocolate has to have at least 10% chocolate liquor.
- That's the cocoa butter & the solids you get when the cocoa bean is ground.
- The white kind is made of a mix of cocoa butter, milk solids & sugar but no chocolate
liquor.
Fruit Juice
- Often, fruit juice is not 100% real fruit juice.
- Make sure you check the ingredients list.
- If it’s a long list, that can be a clue that what you’re buying isn’t actually all that it seems.
- Even if the label reads '100% fruit juice,' it might not be what you’re expecting.
- That just means everything in it came from either a fruit or a vegetable, but it might include cheaper juices you wouldn’t expect, like white grape or apple.
Vanilla Flavoring vs. Extract
- Vanilla flavoring,also called imitation vanilla, is not the same as vanilla extract.
- The extract is made with vanilla pods & a simple alcohol called ethanol, but this is
expensive. - Also, high temperatures destroy much of the flavor.
- The flavoring is made with synthetic vanillin.
- Food companies sometimes make this from castoreum extract, which is a secretion from
the anal glands of beavers. - Even so, it's considered a natural flavoring because it comes from an animal source.
- But most of the time, it's made from chemicals found in wood pulp, which is widely available.
Orange Juice
- Orange juice that’s 'not from concentrate' is pasteurized.
- This takes the oxygen out of the juice.
- But this also takes out many of the natural chemicals that give the juice its flavor.
- Also, the producer may store the juice for more than a year.
- So they hire other companies to make flavor packs to add to the juice to make it taste
fresh. - These packs are often made by the same companies that make perfumes.
- The added flavors won’t be listed as an ingredient because they're made from orange
essence & oil.
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