Tags
artificial flavours, butter flavour, FDA, food additive regulation, food additives, food labels, ice cream, ingredients, natural flavours, strawberry flavour
As nutritionists, we confess to be compulsive label readers. Even now, when we are avoiding packaged and barcoded food, we can’t help picking up items and studying the ingredients lists wherever we go. We recently highlighted a bread(-like substance) here with over 20 ingredients, but were even more stunned by our hosts in the U.S. who dug out an ice cream from their freezer with no less than 45 ingredients. This is after eliminating all double counting (e.g. cottonseed and soybean oils appear in various components of this concoction) and after counting “natural flavours” and “artificial flavours” as just one ingredient each (see Barcode Alert below).
We’ll leave a discussion of the over 10,000 chemicals allowed in food and the lack of regulation for a future post. Also the discussion of why any kind of vegetable oil, soybean, cottonseed or other, should be in what is nominally a dairy product. In the meantime, we encourage readers to email us legible labels of barcoded food items with more than 45 different ingredients to zerobarcode@gmail.com. The top three qualifying entries (using the counting method above) will be published here and have an open invitation to an al fresco, locally sourced, barcode-free, real food meal with us, should they make it to our part of the world.
“Artificial flavours” could theoretically mean the addition of just one substance, but in reality these are cocktails of undisclosed chemicals. E.g. this website claims that one “artificial strawberry flavour” alone consisted of 49 different chemical sub-ingredients. The reasons for using flavourings rather than the real thing are very clearly stated on one (random) flavouring manufacturer’s website: reduce costs, mask unwanted flavours, enhance ‘mouth-feel’ to simulate the original real ingredient, in this case butter. A recent study links butter flavourings (also present in the “ice cream” pictured above and in most popcorns) to beta-amyloid plaques, found in Alzheimer’s disease.