Amazing Facts About Processed Food

Many processed foods are made with a derivative of coal tar that has been linked to hyperactivity in children.

 

Would you knowingly feed your children an ingredient derived from coal tar? That’s exactly what you may be doing, if you let them eat any orange or yellow artificially colored products including sodas (e.g., Mountain Dew), cheese-flavored products (e.g. Kraft Dinner), flavored chips (e.g. Doritos), pickles or a myriad of other foods and beverages. The industrial waste-derived coloring tartrazine is a common ingredient in all these foods, underscoring once again the need to read food labels religiously. Why would anyone put artificial colors into pickles? 

 

Tartrazine, also known as E102 or Yellow 5, was one of the colorings linked to childhood hyperactivity in a landmark 2007 study conducted by the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency. As a consequence, products containing it  must carry a warning label anywhere in the European Union. The United States  has no such law—even though the coloring has also been linked to asthma, migraines and cancer.

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Amazing Fact About Most Expensive Food Items

One of the world’s most expensive food items is made from bird saliva.

For more than 400 years, bird’s nest soup has long been one of the most expensive foods in the world, and even today a single bowl of it costs between $30 and $100. You can’t just make it out of any bird’s nest. Only the edible nest of the cave swiftlet will do, a nest made entirely out of the bird’s saliva. These nests are high in calcium, iron, magnesium and potassium. They are hard when harvested, but partially dissolve into a more jelly-like consistency when boiled into soup.

Cave swiftlets nest high up on sheer rock walls inside pitch-dark caves, where they build sticky nests out of their own saliva. Traditionally, these nests could be harvested only by climbing on ladders up into the heights of these caves, a difficult and fairly dangerous undertaking. Today the swiftlets are encouraged to build their nests in artificially constructed concrete nesting houses. Even so, the harvested nests still sell for as much as $10,000 per kilogram.

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Amazing Fact About Coca~Cola

U.S. law grants the Coca-Cola company a unique exemption to import coca leaves while prohibiting anyone else from importing what might otherwise become a popular super food.

Coca leaves have been chewed and consumed as tea for thousands of years in the high Andes.They are rich in many essential nutrients; they ease respiratory and digestive distress and are a natural stimulant and painkiller. Indigenous tradition and scientific studies have both confirmed that in their natural form, the leaves are completely safe and non-addictive—it takes intensive processing and toxic chemical ingredients to produce cocaine. That’s why more and more coca containing products have started to hit the market in Andean countries in the past few years.

Yet the United States still aggressively pursues an eradication policy that encourages Andean governments to spray their forests with toxic chemicals to eliminate this medicinal crop. It is illegal to import or possess the leaves under U.S. law—unless you’re the Coca-Cola company. 

In an effort to preserve the traditional flavor of the best-selling drink, the company long ago convinced the U.S. government to exempt it from the law. But don’t worry: the chemicals that can be used to make cocaine—and that provide many of the leaves’ benefits—have all been removed from Coca-Cola. 

Coca-Cola, by the way, used to literally contain cocaine in its original formula. The practice was halted in 1903, but the name persisted. The “coca” part of “coca-cola” is derived from the coca plant, and the “kola” comes from the kola nut which also flavored the original beverage.

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Amazing Fact About Banana.

Common bananas are all genetically identical, because they come from trees that have been cloned for decades.

Have you ever noticed that while there are a plethora of varieties of nearly all common fruits such as apples, oranges and peaches, each banana seems identical to every other? When someone says “banana,” you probably think of a large fruit with yellow skin and a soft, pale middle.

That’s because only bananas of the “Cavendish” variety are sold in stores. And while there are indeed many species in the banana genus “Musa,” those species are drastically different from the “banana” in taste and texture. Fruit corporations long ago decided that it would best serve their profits to train consumers to expect all bananas to be identical.

In order to preserve their distinctive properties, Cavendish bananas are never allowed to reproduce sexually. That means they all have the exact same genetic code as the first Cavendish tree selected by United Fruit Corporation in the 1950s to replace the Gros Michael banana.

The Gros Michael banana—another genetically identical cultivar—was so devastated by disease that it could no longer be supplied to the global market in any quantity. Now the same disease is targeting the Cavendish variety, exposing yet again the folly and non sustainability of monoculture.

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Amazing Fact About Coffee

The world’s most expensive coffee, kopi luwak (literally, “civet coffee”) is brewed from coffee beans that have been eaten and partially digested by the Asian palm civet, a catlike wild animal. The beans are harvested from the droppings of the civet and washed, and can be brewed into an aromatic coffee renowned for its low bitterness and excellent flavor.

According to coffee critic Chris Rubin, “The aroma is rich and strong, and the coffee is incredibly full bodied, almost syrupy. It’s thick with a hint of chocolate, and lingers on the tongue with a long, clean aftertaste.” A pound of kopi luwak can cost anywhere from $100 to $3,000, and a single cup may cost as much as $80. 

Traditionally, the coffee was so rare because harvesters had to scour the rainforest floor looking for civet droppings that contained coffee beans. In recent years, some people have started caging wild civets and feeding them the beans directly.

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Amazing Facts About Foods (Page 3 of 3)

Amazing Fact #21
The chemicals in garlic are so potent that you can suffer severe burns just by placing a garlic clove against your skin.
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Amazing Fact #22
Marketers didn’t like the name Chinese gooseberry, so they renamed the fruit “kiwi” after a bird that it resembles.
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Amazing Fact #23
When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the Americas, they forbade the cultivation of two of the world’s best sources of vegetable protein.
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Amazing Fact #24
Many processed foods are made with a derivative of coal tar that has been linked to hyperactivity in children.
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Amazing Fact #25
The entire meat supply is widely contaminated with mad cow disease. Avoiding meat is the only reliable way to protect yourself.
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Amazing Facts About Foods (Page 2 of 3)

Amazing Fact #11

The main ingredient in tapioca pudding is a tropical tuber that provides more of the world’s carbohydrates than any crop beside rice or wheat.
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Amazing Fact #12

One of the world’s most expensive food items is made from bird saliva.
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Amazing Fact #13

Microwave popcorn gives off a toxic, lung-damaging gas when cooked.

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Amazing Fact #14

Rosemary oils can be used as a natural meat preservative. It works better than chemical additives.
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Amazing Fact #15

Cherries ease inflammation and gout; and they may even help prevent arthritis.

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Amazing Fact #16

Canola oil used to be called RAPESEED oil but the name was changed for marketing reasons.

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Amazing Fact #17

Planted in your garden, parsley attracts predatory insects that will eat many pests that would otherwise target the rest of your plants.

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Amazing Fact #18

Sauerkraut is so full of vitamins and probiotics that ancient sailors would eat it on long voyages to keep healthy!

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Amazing Fact #19

Unless they’re organic, nearly all corn or soy products or byproducts on the U.S. market are genetically modified and may place your health at risk.

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Amazing Fact #20

The antioxidant content of oregano is higher than that of blueberries. 

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Amazing Facts About Food (Page 1 of 3)

Amazing Fact #1

The most expensive coffee in the world is brewed from beans partially digested and defecated by the Asian palm civet.    

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Amazing Fact #2

Common bananas are all genetically identical, because they come from trees that have been cloned for decades.    

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Amazing Fact #3

U.S. law grants the Coca-Cola company a unique exemption to import coca leaves while prohibiting anyone else from importing what might otherwise become a popular super food.    

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Amazing Fact #4

The common bread ingredient L-cysteine is derived from human hair.    

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Amazing Fact #5

Chicken McNuggets contain an industrial chemical.    

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Amazing Fact #6

There were no tomatoes in Italian food, peanuts in Thai food, or chili peppers in Indian food in the year 1450.    

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Amazing Fact #7

High-fructose corn syrup, found in many foods, is made using a toxic chemical catalyst.    

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Amazing Fact #8

The seed inside a peach contains an almond-like nut which holds a potent anti-cancer medicine called laetrile.    

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Amazing Fact #9

“Confectioner’s glaze”—a common coating on candies and pills—is made from the bodily excretions of an Asian beetle.    

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Amazing Fact #10

Red grapes are famous for resveratrol, but they only produce it in response to a FUNGAL infection during their growth. So organic grapes have more resveratrol because they’re not sprayed with anti-fungals.    

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