You Could Be Eating These Terrifying Ingredients Every Day!
When you get home after a long day there’s usually one thing on a lot of people’s minds: dinner. Who doesn’t love relaxing with a delicious, hot meal at the end of a long and stressful day? There’s nothing like the comfort that you feel cooking something for you and your family, then sitting down together to enjoy your dinner as a group. Of course, many of us are also very careful about the kinds of things that we put into our food. Many people try to avoid overloading the food with salt, sugar, or any other potentially unhealthy ingredients. There are hundreds of recipes that can help keep your family and yourself fed and happy without sacrificing their health. But there is a problem with that, one that the majority of people don’t realise and that would very likely shock them if they found out. That’s the fact that even the most healthy meals that you’re consuming might contain some pretty scary stuff. This is because a lot of the ingredients that you’re using contains certain things that most of us would be horrified to discover in our food. To help you stay informed on the kinds of things that you could be feeding to yourself and your family, here are some truly terrifying things that could be making it into your food and that could well be eating every day.
Partially hydrogenated oil
Pretty much all of us are aware of the dangers of trans fats in our foods. Many restaurants are now banned from using them at all because of the awful, artery-clogging effect that they can have on your body. The problem is that partially hydrogenated oils are the primary source of trans fats and many manufacturers use it in a lot of their foods. They do this for a couple of reasons, for one, it greatly increases the shelf life of their product. Not only that but it also stabilizes the flavor of the food. The problem is that trans fats are incredibly difficult for the body to dissolve and have been shown to be a key active agent of heart disease, not to mention nutritional deficiencies. Plenty of food items that claim to be trans-fat-free can actually contain up to 0.5g per serving. Remember that fully hydrogenated oils, like the kind found in peanut butter, don’t contain trans fats but have also been shown to have some pretty unpleasant effects like reducing blood flow which can cause problems in everything from sexual function to brain function.
Potassium Bromate
There’s nothing like a soft, full loaf of bread right? Surely there’s nothing more natural in the world! Well, sadly not. A lot of bread loaves and rolls actually contain the ingredient, potassium bromate. This rather scary sounding additive is actually banned pretty much everywhere throughout the developed world other than in the U.S.A and Japan. Why is potassium bromate considered dangerous enough that it’s been banned? Because when it breaks down in your body, most of it converted to bromide, but any left over bromate simply sits around in your body and has been shown to cause cancer in various lab animals! There are even foods like crackers that contain this terrifying ingredient since it’s sometimes used to create certain forms of malted barley. This is the kind of thing that you’ll have to look pretty closely at the label to be sure about, but there are plenty of food manufacturers who have now stopped using this product in favor of safer alternatives.
BHA and BHT
You’ve probably heard all of the hype over the last few years about antioxidants, right? Antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables can be absolutely fantastic for your body, assisting in eye health, heart health and more! The problem is that not all antioxidants are quite as good for your system as others. BHA and BHT are actually preservatives that are used in various different foods including potato chips and cereals. This is often the ingredients that allow these products to have such an amazingly long shelf life without going to completely and totally rotten over time. Once again this additive has been proven as a known carcinogen, and yet somehow it’s still legal for companies to include them in their foods! Not only that but these additives have been linked to a whole host of other problems, including hair loss, behavioral problems, and even kidney failure!
Arsenic
If you’re not careful about where you buy your chicken, you could be ingesting some seriously dangerous stuff. A lot of chicken feed includes arsenic that is then passed on when humans eat the bird. Arsenic can have some seriously terrible effects on your body when consumed. It’s yet another ingredient that is known to cause cancer, particularly skin cancer when ingested, but it’s also been shown to cause infections in humans that are resistant to antibiotics. Not only that but it can cause problems with your nervous system and even reduce red blood cell production that can cause an enlargement of the liver and even brain damage!
Azodicarbonamide
This stuff often ends up in boxed pasta and other flour based products. But there’s one place you would have come across it as well: the yoga studio. No really, this is stuff that they put into yoga mats, and there’s a pretty solid chance that you’ve been eating it every week for years. Azodicarbonamide is actually bad in some places throughout the world and has been linked with asthma as well as, yep you guessed it, cancer. It’s used to improve dough and bread texture, making them softer, much like a yoga mat presumably! There has been a fairly widespread backlash against this ingredient over the last few years, and the sandwich chain Subway actually announced recently that it intends to remove this ingredient from its bread entirely.
Cocaine
No, really! A group of researchers recently found that a large quantity of salmon fished from Puget Sound in Seattle actually contained cocaine when they analyzed its flesh. And if you thought that was bad then just wait! Because when the researchers analyzed this fish they found that, alongside the cocaine, the flesh of the salmon contained more than eighty other drugs as well including oxycontin, nicotine, caffeine and even valium! And these aren’t farmed salmon either; these are wild caught salmon. The ones that you will probably find yourself paying extra for because they are considered to be both the safest and the healthiest that money can buy! This is down to the sheer levels of pollution that have found their way into the water that these fish were caught it. Much of it being the runoff from sewage treatment plants, releasing huge amounts of toxins into the water. The other problem is that people are simply using too many of these contaminants on a day to day basis that treatment plants simply aren’t able to remove them all from the water. Here is another article if you want to read it by The Alternative Daily that gives much more insight into not only the research that the scientists did but how you could potentially avoid eating such awful, contaminated fish.
Hopefully, this list hasn’t scared you to the point where you don’t feel safe eating anything anymore! You’re never going to be in a position to avoid every single unhealthy or dangerous additive in your food. Not only that but it’s important to remember that if you slip up and end up eating something that isn’t exactly great for you every once in awhile, it’s not the end of the world. As long as things are eaten in moderation, and these kinds of ingredients don’t form the main bulk of your diet every day, then you probably don’t have anything to worry about. The idea behind this list is to help you be as informed as possible so that you can make responsible decisions about the food that you and your family are consuming. Hopefully, you’ll now be in a better position to limit the amount of dangerous additives and ingredients that you put into your body as much as possible. The best thing that you can do is to take care to always pay close attention to exactly what is in each piece of food that you’re eating. If you’re not sure what a particular ingredient is or contains, then it’s always worth hopping onto Google and doing a little research. You might even want to go out of your way to contact the company itself if you’re genuinely concerned. You might find that an ingredient you weren’t familiar with is completely fine and that you had nothing to worry about, but still, it’s better to be safe than sorry isn’t it?