This article has a lot of unnecessary mentioning of other uses for some ingredients for the sake of sensationalism.

This reminds me of a flour commercial a while back that advertised that they were organic, blah, blah, blah...but there was one thing that was totally useless for nothing more beyond the "gross/sensational" factor. It was how they went about saying that their flour was not bleached. Ok, fine. So they mention that Benzoyl peroxide is the primary bleaching ingredient in most consumer available flour brands. They also mentioned, and this is the irritating part here, they mentioned that Benzoyl peroxide is also used in acne face wash...I think there was a pimply faced teen and an audible "ewww" voice over for added effect.

Yes Francis, a lot of ingredients in food are also used in totally different applications. Wow.

I am in no way advocating for or praising the food scientists and huge corporations for coming up with some of these bizarre, zombie ingredients, but I am pointing out that sensationalizing something and using a red herring for the sake of the "eww factor" urks the everliving shiat out of me.

This article is endless in its ability to sensationalize any ingrident.

Take Soy Lecithin for example: Used heavily as an emulsifier in chocolate, also a fantastic nonstick spray and it is also used in paint, glue, asphalt, rust protection, etc.

How about water? It is used in soup, bread, pasta, beer and can also be found IN POO FILLED SEWERS!!!!

I know I am ranting here. So I am going to stop. But I am sure most of you see my point here.

Pesticides, additives and so forth are present in foods in minute quantities. I found the recipe for a famous brand of cake blowing in the wind once (one of the guys on my parent's street worked in the R&D department of the company in question) and it contained tonnes of some ingredients (flour) and minute sub-gram quantities of others (additives). One gram in a 1,000,000 is not a lot, these additives were present in smaller quantities.

And it's true we know nothing whatsoever of the interactions between the tens of thousands of man-made chemicals to which we are exposed every day. On the other hand, we are living longer and healthier than ever, and we know that cancer is largely a disease of old age that we are getting more of because we are dying less of other, earlier killers, such as childhood disease.

In short, the ingredients in food that really make you sick aren't the new, the unfamiliar, the outlandishly-named, the dubiously sourced, etc. They are the familiar old grandfathered ingredients which I call the white deaths: salt, sugar, oil, fat, starch and other processed, bleached carbohydrates, and so forth. You're more likely to choke on a chicken bone eating a whole roast chicken than you are to die from eating pink goo.

Organic foods can have some benefits (such as not using a lot of natural-gas based fertilizers and not being shipped from 5,000 miles away--usually). Whole foods are definitely better than processed. But if food was as dangerous as people think it is, we'd be dying young and very, very sick indeed.

Researchers looked into why maple syrup didn't taste like it used to and discovered the reason was that the new ways of producing it--with plastic pipes collecting the maple syrup directly from the trees and taking it to the boiler instead of open buckets as is traditional, meant there was a lot less bark, twigs, dead leaves, mouse turds, etc., in the syrup, leaving it tasting blandly of maple syrup instead of accidental additives in small quantities. In short, the modern product was too pure. It was the filth that gave the product that extra bit of "natural" flavour you get from mouse droppings and urine.

Tough shiat. Industry will never be able to replicate the complex impurities which give the artisanal old world product its flavour and richness. Meat (especially game) is hung for a certain period of time to "ripen" a bit. That gives the meat its flavour and tenderness. Freshly killed meat can be tough and bland. Basically you need tiny bit of spoilage to enhance the flavour--spoilage being different from contamination with toxins or microbes in that it seldom is poisonous. You can eat a lot of spoiled food and do--beer, cheese, pickles, etc., are all spoiled by fermentation but they are not made much more toxic, even when bacteria or mold are involved.

In short, natural old-timey food was often horribly dangerous. Before the FDA, anything you ate was probably adulterated unless you made it yourself, from the purest, freshest ingredients and then stored or consumed just so.

I recommend the P.T. Barnum book, Humbugs of the World, because it is entertaining, fascinating and one of the first books to debunk all kinds of fraud, cons, and crooked dealings.

You will learn how manufacturers and merchants increased their profits before the modern corporation:

sand in salt, sugar, flour; poisonous colourings, flavourings and exteneders in spices, condiments, meats, etc.; watering of meat, milk and other foods, and so forth.

Things which we associate with China and other unregulated or uncontrolled markets today, things like chalk water sold as milk (with resultant malnutrition and deaths among infants) were common in the West a century ago. It was only government regulation that put an end to these practices, and it is only government regulation that can, except in some cases where an industry will regulate itself in order to avoid the damage done to sales--but that is only possible where the industry is concentrated and where the sales are really threatened by public disgust or anger.

In short, don't trust anybody absolutely when it comes to nutrition--they all have something to sell and mostly it is misinformation. Even doctors have their little ways of Bullshiatting you, although they often mean well or have been mislead by pharmaceutical companies or others, including cranks.

Knowledge does not entirely take the place of common sense, it merely informs and supplements it.

Hydrogen Dioxide is a common ingredient used in many fast food restaurants and is a known killer.

Dead for Tax Reasons: 7. Beetle juices

Don't you hate it when that happens?

That & the wood pulp were the only ones I was aware of. Anyone who bakes from scratch knows that confectioner's glaze is made of beetle carapace. I only recently learned that packaged shredded cheese uses the wood pulp to keep the shreds from squishing together & forming a giant lump o' cheese during shipment. I'll shred my own, thanks.