What Are You Eating?

What did you have for breakfast, lunch and dinner today? No matter what foods your list contains, you can guarantee that everything you have eaten is not within it. Taking a quick look at the back of any food packaging will reveal an extensive ingredients list with all sorts of letters and scientific words that very few people actually understand. If you are one of the millions of people that do not understand them then ask yourself the question – what are you eating?

There are so many additives and preservatives added to food today that it is importable to keep up to date with that we are putting into our systems. Preservatives are used to ensure that foods last for as long a time as possible by preserving their color, scent and taste, although it can be argued that some preservatives alter all three artificially. Some decades ago, preservatives were natural because they often took the form of salt and vinegar. However, today they tend to be artificially created in laboratories.

Additives are also created in much the same way and can be used for the same purposes. However, they also enhance the flavor and lower the overall price of the food, meaning that we benefit from reduced costs in the supermarket. This may sound like a good thing right now but it is not so good when you realise that some hidden additives and preservatives actually have serious adverse effects in some individuals.

Visiting the FDA website can be incredibly insightful if you want to know more about the specific hidden and unknown preservatives and additives that are mixed in with our food today. There is currently more than a thousand different approved additives listed and you can find them all within the products on supermarket shelves. However, the FDA is a little less forthcoming about the side effects. Some are known to cause migraines, organ damage, cancer, allergies and even birth defects should an individual have an adverse reaction to them.

Unfortunately, the above information is not the scariest of that available on the unknown additives that we eat. Instead, that honor goes to the fact that food companies are not legally obliged to list everything that is contained within their products. According to an article by Dr William Rice, entitled “The Dangers Of Food Additives”, there are 93 different additives that do not have to be declared in bakery goods, 31 in cheese products, 76 in drinks and 58 in any desserts that are frozen. This is scary given that we can have absolutely no idea exactly what we are eating unless we make it ourselves or go organic.

It is time that everyone started looking a little more closely at what they eat on a daily basis because all of us should have absolute knowledge about what we put into our bodies. As technology has progressed, we have lost sight of that but now is the time to take back the power and make our bodies much happier and healthier as a result.