Deadly Ingredients in Grocery Aisle

Copied from website cell-biology.org.....chilling :-(

Usually when you’re strolling down the bread aisle at your local grocery store you’re not thinking that poisonous ingredients could be lingering all around you. But this modern world that supplies us with meals that can be made faster than it takes for the oven to even preheat, and where food has become such a commodity for capital gain, it is hard to know exactly what you’re eating.

For example, did you know that MSG, despite all the research that has come out that proves it can cause migraines and other neurological disorders, might still be masquerading in your food under other names like yeast extract or torula yeast?

Or have you heard that many Florida oranges are actually dipped in an artificial orange dye that has been banned for use in foods because it has been linked with causing cancer? A lot of ingredients are added to our favorite foods by the corporate food industry without us even knowing. It might sound scary, but it doesn’t have to be, if we just take a second to educate ourselves. Let’s start with the top three most dangerous ingredients that you might put in your mouth without knowing:

Sodium nitrite
This has been known to cause cancer without any doubt. There aren’t any juries out on this, one, sodium nitrite is a complete enemy to the cells in your body. It is usually found in processed meats like hot dogs, bacon and sausage because it gives meat a “healthy” red color. So over this holiday weekend remember how dangerous that American hot dog could be.

Hydrogenated Oils
Luckily these have recently gotten some bad press and have been labeled as “trans fats.” They have been found to cause heart disease more readily than any other fat out there. They are usually found in any processed, baked good out there, but also in crackers, margarine and anything else that wants to use a fat with a little longer shelf life.

Excitotoxins
This is the category for artificial flavorings like aspartame and monosodium glutamate. These chemicals have been found to directly harm nerve cells, overexciting them to the point that the cells start dying off. You’ll often find them in diet soda, canned soup, salad dressing, breakfast sausage, and even many manufactured vegetarian foods. Because of their effect on receptor nerves, they are often used to add flavor to foods that have been over-processed or had the life cooked out of them.

Hopefully you’ll be able to use this knowledge to your advantage the next time you’re in the grocery store or at a summer BBQ. The food you eat should make you live longer, not cut your life shorter.

I buy all organic now, even as a struggling college student, living in a rural ill-health informed South Carolina, so if I can do it so can others! :0

ItsAlwaysSomething,

thanks for posting this!

Very useful info.

 

While we are on the subject of hidden grocery store ingredients here's an excerpt about the chlorine used to wash carrots and other vegetables in the supermarket. It's from the website www.carrotmuseum.com. There are a lot of other websites out there that contain this info as well.


After harvesting, the carrots are mainly washed in chlorinated water, just like our drinking water, and cleaned to remove dirt and mud. Some finished baby carrots are washed, or dipped, by a further chlorine solution to prevent white blushing once in the store. There is no evidence that this is harmful, but it is worth knowing about!. However organic growers use a citrus based non toxic solution called Citrox (The ProGarda™), the natural alternative to synthetic biocides for the decontamination of fresh produce, food and beverages. Citrox technology incorporates a truly holistic approach designed to increase the effectiveness and profitability of food and beverage production processes.

All Citrox products are made from natural extracts or naturally derived compounds. Some of them are permitted for use in organic production (e.g.: fruit & vegetable decontaminant) or certified organic (e.g.: pre-harvest treatment products). All the Citrox derivatives are completely non-toxic, non-carcinogenic, non-corrosive, and non-tainting in use. They can actually be added to foodstuffs. They are formed by the bioflavonoid extracts and a range of completely natural organic acids, this combination having highly synergistic effects in all their many applications. The ProGarda™ decontaminant range has been specifically formulated for the decontamination of fruits and vegetables. These products are viable alternatives to the use of chlorine (or other compounds or systems) for decontaminating fresh fruits and vegetables.

According to Randy Worobo, an associate professor of food microbiology at Cornell University, you need not worry. As reported in Prevention magazine, he says carrots are not preserved in bleach but rinsed in a chlorine wash that's recommended by the FDA to kill bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli. Most pre-cut produce, including frozen vegetables and fruit salad, is washed with this or similar sanitizers.

Baby Cut and Peeled Carrots are treated with chlorine. It is used as an anti-microbial treatment to control potential contamination in the finished product. Carrots that are treated with chlorine are subsequently soaked and rinsed with potable water to remove the excess chlorine before being packaged.

Sanitizers that can be used to wash or to assist in lye peeling of fruits and vegetables are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in accordance with the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act as outlined in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, Ch. 1, Section 173.315.

Chlorine is routinely used as a sanitizer in wash, spray, and flume waters used in the fresh fruit and vegetable industry. Anti-microbial activity depends on the amount of free available chlorine (as hypochlorous acid) in water that comes in contact with microbial cells. The effectiveness of chlorine in killing pathogenic microorganisms has been extensively studied." For more information on the use of Chlorine as a routine anti-microbial sanitizer, you can visit the following government web site;
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol3no4/beuchat.htm


More on the Chlorine scare

What about the chlorine? Some carrots are washed with chlorinated water. This water must have a pH (acidity) between 6.0 and 7.0. The concentration of chlorine in the water should be between 100 and 150 ppm (parts per million). The time of contact between the carrots and the chlorinated water should not exceed 5 minutes. This must be removed from the carrots by rinsing with potable water or using a centrifugal drier. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the use of chlorine as a antimicrobial treatment is a current accepted practice in the processing for all fresh cut ready-to-eat vegetables.

This ‘Chlorine’ is most likely sodium hypochlorite also known as chlorine bleach. It is used a a disinfectant and antimicrobial in many industries. It is made by reacting a sodium hydroxide solution (also know as caustic soda or lye) with elemental chlorine gas. All of these chemicals are made from sodium chloride, also known as salt. Next time do some research look up cholera if you want a glimpse of what the world was like before the wide availability of chlorine disinfection!

Like other ready-to-eat fresh vegetables, baby-cut carrots are rinsed or sprayed with very diluted chlorine to reduce the risk of bacterial contamination, and then thoroughly washed and bagged. This process is approved by the FDA and accepted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, with strict rules for what concentration of chlorine can be used and how long the carrots can be exposed. Chlorine is similarly used as a disinfectant in public water supplies and sometimes in poultry processing. It is toxic at high concentrations, but there is no evidence that trace amounts left on food and in water are harmful to health.

Is this dangerous? Chlorination is a well-known and well-tested way to disinfect food products. Our tap water is chlorinated as well. When you disinfect something, that means that you kill the bacteria that are present. Chlorine kills bacteria. It can also kill us, or be very bad for us. The bleach you use to clean and disinfect your toilet, contains chlorine. Do not drink it. This will kill you because it is far more concentrated than we can safely ingest. The diluted chlorine in your tap water and in your baby-carrots, presents no proven danger whatsoever. It is precisely to make the carrots safe that the chlorine is used.

As a side-note, it is interesting to know that the term "chlorine" is something of a misnomer. Chlorine, in its natural state, is a highly reactive gas that forms compounds with other products. When chlorine is added to other products, it will react virtually immediately to form compounds such as hypochlorous acid (when chlorine is added to water) and sodium hypochlorite (when chlorine is added to a sodium hydroxide solution). These compounds in turn disinfect the water. When we talk about chlorine, and even about free chlorine, these compounds are usually what we are referring to.

Note: there are certain compounds of chlorine that do cause cancer. Does chlorine cause cancer? No. While medical science is not an exact science, and we must always be vigilant, there is at present no evidence whatsoever that chlorine causes cancer or could be a facilitator for cancer. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have not classified chlorine as to its human carcinogenicity.

The solution used to wash carrots is NOT the same as in swimming pools.

It is not easy to sift even knowledge. The information posted by the OP may sound like a reliable website and may be even it is, but here are few points of concern.

In the recent past, MSG has gotten a really bad rep, mostly because most of the information that comes on MSG is from word of mouth (or popular science). In the US, there is a really bad practice in the medical system to gauge your pain, on the scale of 1-10. This may be really good for the medicos to give good 'impression' of the patients' pain. Many a times this information translates in 'not so correct manner' in other literature. Most likely, MSG got bad rep from such thing. How? Here it goes. MSG contains Sodium apart from glutamate. Due to my migraine issues, I searched quite a lot on migraine and MSG connection. I learned that majority of glutamate that goes in from MSG doesn't really go up in the brain but the sodium that it contains gets into the blood stream. So my conclusion is, the migraine/headache as a result of MSG consumption is not because of that glutamate moiety but as a result of sodium. The counter claim is, why subjects don't get headache as a result of eating salty food. I could not find any reliable information on how the body plays with sodium when it is released from glutamate moiety as opposed to chloride moiety.
Plus, loads of South East Asians have been eating MSG for ages, why that population does not represent larger percentage of headache or migraine, if MSG is the bad guy?
I know this debate could go on and on but at least for MSG, I think the evidence presented in the literature is not reliable enough to give it a bad rep. Everyone should make their work and figure out if its really bad for them. I did MSG dosing by gradually stepping up the amount of MSG I eat and noticed that MSG doesn't trigger my migraine. Yet, there could be someone else who gets migraine on one packet of Top Ramen..

Aspartame, yes, there is enough scientific evidence that it is a neurotoxin. That is the main reason why Splenda took off.

Florida Oranges dipping in an orange dye or covered with an antifungal or coated with wax. Honestly, I wouldn't worry as majority of that stuff does not seep though the skin and I do not use the orange skin, not even as zest. If I have to do so, I scrub lemon and orange with dish washing liquid (yeah, really). So really, don't worry, Let Florida farmers make money for their hard work :) If you do want to worry, do so about your OJ. With the recent antifungal controversy and many of the OJ producers claiming no preservatives, squeeze your own OJ and keep it in the fridge, see how long it lasts. Now, think over it if you should worry about OJ in the box or that dye on orange.

Hydrogenated oils, this is what concerns me over everything. No matter how much FDA or other agency tries to streamline food labeling, food companies will always come up with dubious ways to confuse the consumer. The tendency here is, spend more time in litigation than fixing the system/product. As a result of this, whenever I get suspicious, I don't buy the product. I note the bar code and check it on http://www.fooducate.com/ They also don't get it perfect all the time but at least you have one pointer.

One more things that worries me is the dyes. I noticed that many of the dyes, banned in the EU, are regularly used here in the US. The worse part is, the names are different across the ocean. Plus, US regulations do not force the manufacturer to publish the ingredient if its less that 0.5-1%, depending on the ingredient. This clause skips majority of the dyes. As a result, eating food in the US is EXTREMELY tricky.

My solution to all this mess is, buy organic as and when you can afford and try to cook at home from scratch. THINK when you cook, just don't follow recipes. Keep Paula Dean out of your bookshelf and get some OLD recipe books from your local library sale. If you compare calorie count of the new and the old recipe books, you will be surprised how healthy old recipes are.

trojen,

Totally agree with you.

The FDA losts its credibility with me, when they started having drug company employees sit on their "board" to help them decide which drugs get approved... give me a break, talk about conflict of interest!