What's the problem with food additives? Food additives, also known as excipients, are inactive ingredients found in packaged foods that offer no nutritional value or benefit. These are often synthetic agents that can have adverse health consequences. To date, the FDA has approved approximately 4,000 food additives, many of which are banned in other countries.
Why Do Food Companies Use Food Additives?
The most common types of food additives are fillers and artificial ingredients. Fillers are typically inexpensive ingredients that are used to bulk up the weight of a product, to give it more perceived value. Therefore, companies are able to charge more for less of the good stuff.
Artificial ingredients are synthetic chemicals that are added to food to give it a perceived color, taste, or texture.
How Can Food Additives Impact Health?
There are some concerning health implications associated with food additives. Some people, for example, have an immune response, resulting in an allergic reaction. Others have neurological side effects. In children, food additives can result in behavioral issues. And many additives are carcinogenic, resulting in impaired immune function. There are a whole slew of potential negative health consequences and long-term use effects from many of these food additives, which is why they are best avoided.
How To You Spot Additives In Your Food
The most important thing you can do as a consumer is to read food labels. As a general rule, most foods that are sold packaged usually contain a filler, preservative, or artificial ingredient. Food additives are typically easy to spot under the ingredients section of a food label. They are often the unfamiliar or hard-to-pronounce ingredients like maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, carrageenan, dextrose, silicon dioxide, and soy lecithin - to name a few. Avoiding food additives goes hand-in-hand with healthier eating in general, resulting in an increased awareness of what you’re putting in your body.
Unlike most of our competitors, we don’t use food additives in any of our baking mixes. We use only the good stuff - the stuff you can actually pronounce. For example, in our original pancake and waffle baking mix, there are only five ingredients. They’re all recognizable and each one has a very specific health-promoting purpose.
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