14 Disgusting Secrets About Your Groceries

Red-colored products are typically dyed with cochineal extract. So what is cochineal extract? The bodies of crushed-up teeny insects.

The cochineal insect is native to Mexico and South America. They’re tiny and live on cactus plants. Cochineal dye comes in two basic forms — cochineal extract (the bodies of the pulverized bugs) and carmine, which is further processed to create a more purified coloring. Cochineal extract is also sometimes listed as carminic acid or carmine. It is also used in pink-colored products like grapefruit juice and strawberry flavored yogurts, too.

This is how the ingredients for those delicious packaged veggie burgers get mixed together:

That’s right – it’s all done with shovel and barrel. It’s almost as if it was dirt…

Those delicious hot dogs your kids love are typically filled with a blend of meat trimmings, fat, and cereal filler.

Cereal filler is basically bread crumbs, oatmeal, or flour. Yummy, right?

Most brands of commercial milk you can buy at any grocery stores are made by combining, heating, homogenizing, and repackaging the milk of hundreds of cows.

The milk is standardized, fortified, pasteurized and homogenized. Translated, this means that it will be taken apart and put back together again, not always in the same proportions. Then it will be cooked and emulsified.

Greek yogurt manufacturing produces millions of pounds of toxic acid whey waste every year.

The sad part is – no one knows what they do with it! “For every three or four ounces of milk, Chobani and other companies can produce only one ounce of creamy Greek yogurt. The rest becomes acid whey. It’s a thin, runny waste product that can’t simply be dumped. Not only would that be illegal, but whey decomposition is toxic to the natural environment, robbing oxygen from streams and rivers.” via Modern Farmers.

If the orange juice is not-from-concentrate, it is processed with “flavor packs” to artificially ensure that each bottle tastes exactly the same.

These mixtures are added to replace the natural flavors lost when juice is chemically stripped of oxygenso that it can be kept in storage tanks for over a year without oxidizing. That cannot be good to put into your body.

Shredded cheese is packed with refined wood pulp.

Cellulose, made from broken-down plant fibers like wood, is a common food additive that can also make ice cream creamier or salad dressing thicker without adding calories. Even if the package is labeled as organic, it can still be included.

To make bacon, it gets hung up in this weird carwash closet machine and covered in liquid smoke.

The liquid smoke also includes dyes to give the pork that bacon color.

Many of the imported and expensive extra-virgin olive oils are actually cut with cheaper seed and nut oils.

If you want to find out more, read Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller.

The canning process for soup is so intense that companies grow huge, super-strong carrots for the soup so they won’t disintegrate in the process.

Scientists describe these carrots as baseball bats.

Coffee creamer is made of corn syrup and vegetable oils.

Those vegetables oils may not sound bad, but they are hydrogenated and trans-fatty oils. if you enjoy that in your coffee, just ignore this.

Not that you need another reason to stop using creamer, but this is the texture you get when all of the ingredients on the previous page are mixed together.

Most of your favorite ice creams are thickened and stabilized a seaweed extract.

Food scientists use this seaweed extract because:

1. They thicken things: Ice cream, marshmallow fluff, pancake syrup, etc., all benefit from thickening.
2. They emulsify things: They help liquids to stay mixed together without separating.
3. They change the texture: Generally, a gum will make something thicker or chewier.
4. They stabilize crystals: A gum might help prevent sugar or ice from crystallizing.

Maraschino cherry producers bleach the fruit with chemicals and then marinate it in huge vats of corn syrup and dye to turn the cherries red again. Yummy!

 

Sourced from lifecheating.com