How food companies fool consumers with food coloring ingredients made from petrochemicals

[Guest guest]

How food companies fool consumers with food coloring ingredients

made from petrochemicals Friday, March 21, 2008 by:

Mike Adams

Have you ever wondered why companies use artificial colors? You might

think it's because they want to make their food look good, but there's

another reason -- a far deeper reason -- why companies use artificial

colors to make their foods more appealing to consumers. Keep reading to

learn what that is.

Why do foods with more vibrant, saturated colors look more appealing to

consumers? Why does a bright-red apple look more appealing than a

dull-red apple or a green apple? Why are foods sold to us in neon green,

yellow and orange packages? The reason is that of the color of food

speaks to humans' innate perceptions about the value of food

items.

Humans are born with brains that are preprogrammed with the ability to

learn language; or to recognize certain inherent dangers such as falling

off a ledge. We also have all kinds of behaviors built in for survival.

One of the survival strategies our ancestors developed was the ability to

recognize foods containing usable energy or

nutrition. They

could walk through a field and instantly spot foods that contained

potent, healing phytonutrients and calories that would give them usable

energy, healthy brain function, boost immune function and boost overall

survivability. The natural medicines found in food often appear in bright

colors, and calorie-rich foods designed to appeal to primates (such as

apples or berries)

are also brightly colored. It is these colors that appeal to our built-in

perceptions about the value of food. (Birds have a similar system and

also tend to judge food by its color.)

Color is a reliable indicator of the healthful quality of foods. An apple

that has red in its peel, for example, actually sends a message:

" Hey, I'm here. I have some healing medicine in my skin. "

That's why humans are naturally attracted to more vibrant-looking

apples. Berries,

fruits, root vegetables and other foods broadcast similar messages

through their own coloring.

 

Eating the rainbow dietYou may have

heard of the rainbow diet, in which you eat foods of different colors. It

is based on the idea that different foods carry different energies and

provide different types of nutritional medicine. There is a real science

to that, and an art as well. You can examine phytochemicals and their

healing effects, and categorize them by color. There are foods that are

purple, blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown -- all the colors of the

spectrum -- and each food has a different medicine. Our ancestors learned

to recognize foods by their color, and they also learned that foods with

more vibrant colors in their natural environment contain a lot more

medicine.

For example, a red

cabbage that is

actually a dull grey doesn't look very appealing, but a purple cabbage

with a saturated, bright-purple color looks fantastic. That's because we

have an innate perception gauge telling us we should be attracted to

these foods -- they are healthier for us, and the health quality is

indicated by the saturation of the color.

This is what food-manufacturing companies are exploiting when they

enhance colors artificially.

 

Food makers use harmful dyes to get you to

buyWhen you shop for

oranges, you're

looking for a bright, deeply colored orange. You don't want a yellowish

orange, because that tells you it's not ripe; if it's not ripe, it hasn't

developed all its medicine. (That's one reason why so much of the produce

available in grocery stores lacks real nutrition these days -- it's all

picked before it has a chance to ripen on the plant.)

Growers know about this color preference, so some of them -- in Florida

for example -- hijack that instinctual process by dipping some of their

oranges in a cancer-causing red dye that makes the peel look more orange.

The FDA has banned that dye from use in foods, because it is a

carcinogen, but they say it's okay to dip an orange in it, because people

don't eat the peel. If a consumer is comparing two oranges -- one of them

is yellow, and one of them is deep, rich orange -- most consumers are

going to pick up the deeper, richer looking orange.

Food manufacturers use

artificial

colors because, when they make their foods more colorful, it turns on

the light switch in our brains that says, " This is good stuff. "

We've been fooled; we've been drawn like a moth to a flame. If you took

one nacho chip with flavors but no color and put it beside another nacho

chip with the exact same flavors but lots of artificial colors to make it

look more orange, and you asked people to pick which chip they think

would taste better, almost everyone will choose the chip with the color.

The color can actually fool your mind into thinking that these foods

taste better.

 

Food colors are made from

petroleum

Coal tar and petrochemicals are the sources of the

artificial colors that go into our foods, and these artificial coloring

ingredients are dangerous to our health. The human body was not designed

to eat petrochemicals. You don't see people digging up petroleum and

drinking it with a straw. That's not the kind of energy we're designed to

run on. So why are we putting petrochemicals in our foods?

The food

companies are doing it to sell a product and generate a profit,

regardless of the health effects on consumers -- and the health effects

have been worrisome. In fact, more than one artificial color has been

banned and pulled off the market over the last several decades because it

was ultimately found to cause

cancer. The safety

of those still allowed on the market is highly questionable.

Eventually, artificial colors used in the food supply will likely be

outlawed because they contribute to all sorts of health problems, the

most notable of which are the symptoms diagnosed as attention deficit

hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a behavioral pattern often brought on by

Yellow #2 food dye. Children are being fed these chemicals in such large

quantities that they begin to have

nervous

system malfunctions that ultimately are misdiagnosed as ADHD,

learning disabilities, or violent behavior.

If you want to reverse these so-called diseases in your children, one of

the best things you can do is stop feeding them petrochemicals. That

means you, as the parent, have to understand that your very instincts are

being hijacked by food companies' use of artificial colors to sell their

garbage products. It's automatic, it's innate and it's unconscious. You

look at foods and you instantly evaluate them by their color. It's

something that you can't stop doing because it's part of your perception

hardware. Food companies know this and they exploit it to sell you

unhealthy foods artificially colored to look nutritious.

 

How to defend yourself against dishonest food

companiesSo what's your defense against this? How

can you take control over your own mind and make better decisions at the

grocery store? You're taking the first step right now by

reading this:

you're educating yourself. All you have to do is take this information

and apply it by reading ingredient labels. Look for artificial

food coloring

ingredients like Yellow #2, Red #5 or Blue Lake #40, and then avoid them.

Don't buy those products. It's as simple as that. Instead, you look for

natural food coloring ingredients. There are products colored with beet

juice, a much healthier way to color food; annatto, a very healthy plant

source; or turmeric, a fantastic herb with anticancer, anti-inflammatory

and antioxidant properties.

With a little checking around, you will discover that all the cheap,

low-grade, disease-promoting products in the grocery store tend to use

these artificial colors. You will also find that the same snack chips,

processed foods, boxed dinner meals, and

junk food made by

the biggest food companies also contain refined

white flour,

MSG and hydrogenated oils. It's really no surprise they mostly all

contain an artificial color of one kind or another.

Also, you should watch out for artificial colors in fruit drinks and

candy. There are

loads of artificial colors in candy, which makes for a very bad

combination -- especially for children. If you give kids a load of

sugar and

petrochemicals together in the same meal, their nervous systems go crazy.

That's why you have kids climbing the walls after feeding them candy and

sugary drinks with artificial colors.

Another repeat offender in this category is " sport drinks, "

which are loaded with petrochemical artificial colors that have no

purpose other than to make the beverage visually appealing to consumers.

There's no nutritional value whatsoever to using artificial colors, which

means most sports drinks are a complete waste of money: they're just salt

water with sugar and

artificial colors added. If you want a real sports drink, you should

juice some celery and cucumber, or just drink coconut water. That's real

replenishment.

The confectionery industry relies heavily on artificial colors to make

its foods -- like cake and icing -- look appealing as well. Icing is

usually made of hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a nerve toxin,

combined with

refined

sugars, which are dietary poisons that cause

diabetes. The

petrochemical-based artificial colors are used to top it off. If you

really want to commit nutritional suicide, eat a lot of icing. Get

yourself some iced doughnuts, cakes and pastries, and load up.

You'll notice artificial colors in foods like blueberry muffins or

blueberry bagels, too. Read the ingredients on blueberry bagels at your

local grocery store next time, and you'll find that there are really no

blueberries but

plenty of artificial blue and green colors to create the impression of

little blueberry bits. They can't even put blueberries in their bagels.

They have to trick you with artificial colors.

Do you know what liquid they're using to hold the color? Propylene glycol

-- the same chemical you put into your RV when you want to winterize it.

It is antifreeze. You're eating antifreeze and petrochemicals -- and

that's just the blueberry part. We haven't even gotten to everything

else, like refined

sugars, chemical

preservatives and refined bleached white flour, which has

diabetes-causing contaminants. A blueberry bagel is no longer a blueberry

bagel. When you really understand what's in the foods, it's mind blowing.

 

 

Artificial colors sometimes find their way into

salmon before it

even becomes foodArtificial colors turn up in a lot

of interesting places. Many salmon farms are adding artificial color to

their food to make the salmon flesh appear more red because that's what

consumers will buy. They'll buy red or pink salmon over grey salmon any

day of the week because their instincts tell them deeper, richer colors

are healthier. Imitation crab meat has artificial colors added to make

part of the meat look red -- but at least the label includes the word

" artificial, " so you can avoid it if you read labels.

The biggest form of dishonesty across the entire food industry is the use

of artificial colors that influence you to buy and consume foods that

actually harm your health (such as snack chips made with

MSG). The food

companies have figured out how to hack into your perception hardware.

They send one message to your eyes, but they manufacture foods out of

something entirely different. The bottom line is that foods, through the

use of artificial colors, are sending an incongruent message: " I'm a

healthy

food. " But the reality is, " I'm harmful junk food. "

 

These companies employ tens of thousands of food scientists in the

United States

alone. They figure out how to make foods more palatable and less

expensive by using the cheapest ingredients possible while prettying them

up with artificial food colors made from petrochemicals.

 

Food coloring from

insects

I have one more interesting tidbit I'd like to share with

you. You may be familiar with a red color ingredient called carmine; it

can be found in strawberry

yogurt and a variety

of other products. Carmine is sourced from a mash made by grinding up

beetles grown in Peru and the Canary Islands. The mash is strained out to

obtain a red liquid. That liquid, made from insects, is then shipped to

the United States to food companies, where it is dumped into the yogurt

to make it look like there are strawberries in there. Folks, it's not

strawberry. It's insect juice. That's what's in your yogurt (and a lot of

candy and children's foods as well).

Some people have a dangerous allergic reaction to this ingredient. They

can go into anaphylactic shock, which puts them in a coma (or worse!). As

this demonstrates, some of these color additives can be extremely

dangerous, but you'll notice companies don't put this information on

their labels. " Insect juice " is never listed on your yogurt.

They merely list " carmine, " and they leave it up to you to

figure out what that means. Ninety-nine percent of people in this world

have no idea what carmine really is, but now you do.

 

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