Top 10 Scariest Food Additives

Top 10 Scariest Food Additives

By David Zinczenko with Matt Goulding

There was a time when "fruit flavored" and "cheese flavored" meant "made with real fruit" and "made with real cheese." Today? It's artificial everything. Most of the food at your local supermarket is no more authentic than Snooki's tan. Our fruit comes packaged in Loops, our cheese delivered via Whiz. Sure, it's edible, but there's no way your great grandparents would recognize this junk as food.

The problem with additives runs deep. The FDA currently maintains a list of ingredients called Everything Added to Food in the United States (EAFUS), which features more than 3,000 items and counting. Thankfully, most EAFUS ingredients are benign, but a few of them do have potentially harmful effects. Why they're legal is a mystery to us. Some of them might be backed by powerful lobby groups, while others probably survive simply because some guy at the FDA has too much paperwork on his desk and hasn't made time to adequately review the data.
Below are 10 of the most dubious ingredients hiding in your food, compliments of Eat This, Not That! 2011. Even if you're not convinced of their danger, you have to admit this: The more filler ingredients you cut from your diet, the more space you have for wholesome, nutritious foods.


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