A mere pinch of salt, so to speak.
Today’s mass-market foods contain far worse, with the general rule being that the more highly processed the food product, the wider the variety of hard-to-pronounce compounds inside it. In actuality, what we are increasingly being forced to accept as “normal” fare includes a witches’ brew that would make Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, cackling over their cauldron of “double, double toil and trouble,” blanche.
The list of additives, pollutants, adulterants, and poisons is so long, and due to so many different causes, that no single explanation can cover them, or rank their importance. Perhaps the best method is the one Hollywood uses to list the stars in a multi-star epic–alphabetical order. Here are some of the “star” ingredients in the stuff that is becoming our food.
ACRYLAMIDE The organic chemical compound acrylamide, a derivative of acrylic acid (CH2=CHCOOH) used industrially to make adhesives and textiles, wasn’t thought of as a problem in food until April 2002. That year, Swedish scientists studying a group of tunnel workers who had been accidentally exposed to the compound on the job, revealed that they’d found high acrylamide levels not only in the red blood cells of the exposed workers, but also in people who hadn’t been exposed.
The source for the latter group was traced to their food.7
Because acrylamide had been identified earlier by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a probable cancer-causing agent, the Swedish results caused an international stir, and a hunt for an explanation of how the chemical got into the food chain.
The hunt didn’t take long. Acrylamide was found in varying levels in potato chips, French fries, crackers, breakfast cereals, and other processed foods whose manufacture includes heating, especially frying or baking. Scientists deduced they were formed by the amino acid asparagine and glucose sugar during the heating process.
Will this chemical “starlet” just breaking onto the scene prove a truly dangerous contaminant? The scientific jury is still out. Although acrylamide in high doses has been proven to cause genetic mutations in mice that lead to cancer, the level of the chemical in the average human’s body at present is less than that in the lab mice. As the Washington Post reported:
So far, officials say, they have not found acrylamide risks great enough to recommend that consumers avoid any groups of food or specific products. It remains uncertain whether people consume enough acrylamide in their food for it to be harmful, and whether the substance–which causes cancer in laboratory animals at high doses–is similarly hazardous to people, they said. But Terry C. Troxell of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition said yesterday, at a two-day advisory committee meeting on acrylamide, that the agency agreed with the WHO’s conclusion that the discovery of acrylamide in many foods is a major concern and needs to be aggressively researched.…
Troxell and other speakers stressed that ... its presence must be treated seriously. 8
ADDITIVES (COMMON) Unlike acrylamide, which was not deliberately–or in most cases even knowingly–introduced in foods, there is a long list of chemicals in what we eat which have been put there on purpose. Most of these additives, though not all, are there legally. That is, the manufacturers who put them there are not breaking any laws when they do so. These compounds include antioxidants intended to prevent food from going rancid, chelating agents put in to prevent discoloration, emulsifiers to keep water and oils mixed together, thickening agents, and flavor enhancers. There are hundreds of them, far too numerous to mention here, and as food manufacturers continue to experiment with new processes, more are being added every year.
In the U.S., the federal Food and Drug Administration is charged with regulating additives and assuring they are not dangerous. The laws and regulations the FDA goes by, however, are full of loopholes, as are the testing processes supposed to assess safety. For example, any additives that were considered safe by the FDA or USDA before the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was amended in 1958 are exempt from regulation.
That is, if scientists working with the facts and testing processes available in 1938—three years before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor—thought a substance safe, then it is deemed safe for all time, regardless of what present-day research may have to say about it. Among these exempt-from-examination items are sodium nitrite (see below) and potassium nitrite, which are used to preserve cold-cuts and lunch meats.
At its “Chemical Cuisine” website (www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm), the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has posted a list of 73 common additives, rating them according to safety and describing their possible side effects. Anyone interested in the safety of the food they eat can download the list, print it out, and take it with them to the supermarket. You may have to squint a bit to read the fine print on some processed food labels, and not all labels on the shelf provide a comprehensive list of ingredients, but at least you can look up what is there and compare it with the CSPI’s rankings.
For example, under sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, you’ll find this entry:
Meat processors love sodium nitrite because it stabilizes the red color in cured meat (without nitrite, hot dogs and bacon would look gray) and gives a characteristic flavor. Sodium nitrate is used in dry cured meat, because it slowly breaks down into nitrite. Adding nitrite to food can lead to the formation of small amounts of potent cancer-causing chemicals (nitrosamines), particularly in fried bacon.
Several studies have linked consumption of cured meat and nitrite by children, pregnant women, and adults with various types of cancer. Although those studies have not yet proven that eating nitrite in bacon, sausage, and ham causes cancer in humans, pregnant women would be prudent to avoid those products.
The meat industry justifies its use of nitrite and nitrate by claiming that it prevents the growth of bacteria that cause botulism poisoning. That’s true, but freezing and refrigeration could also do that, and the USDA has developed a safe method of using lactic-acid- producing bacteria.” 9
The CSPI website also has pretty harsh words for most artificial food colorings and artificial flavorings, as well as for the sugar substitute aspartame, the flour “improver” potassium bromate, and various sulfites.
Among the various food colorings that have made it into the news media in recent years are Tartrazine (E102), Sunset Yellow (E110), and Ponceau 4R (E124), dyes used to impart the typically orange-red hue to Indian dishes such as chicken tikka masala, served in Indian tandoori restaurants around the world. The three coloring agents, if taken over extended periods, are believed to be linked to hyperactivity in children, as well as to a list of other serious ailments, including asthma and cancer. As the British newspaper The Guardian noted:
Random tests ordered by Trading Standards officers in Surrey suggest 57 percent of Indian restaurants in the county use “illegal and potentially dangerous” levels of dyes to give the sauce its distinctive orange-red hue.…
Out of 102 curry houses sampled, only 44 were using the colorings within legal limits. 10
ANTIBIOTICS Most of us think of antibiotics—biochemical substances produced by benign microorganisms that can inhibit or destroy harmful bacteria— as one of our best defenses against disease. After Alexander Fleming first isolated penicillin (produced by the mold penicillium) in 1928, and other scientists developed it for use as an antibacterial agent in 1941, the very word antibiotic