Hey Thoughty2 here. Do you know what you’re eating? I mean, do you really know? Because
you may think you do, but you’ve been lied to your entire life. Now this may be hard
to stomach, but a lot of the food you eat is fake. Okay, this is not true for everyone
watching. Different countries have vastly different food regulations and some countries
are far, far worse offenders at dishing up fake food to its citizens, I’ll reveal the
worst countries for doing this in a minute but first let’s take a jar of harmless honey.
It’s touted as one of nature’s superfoods, it can prevent cancer and heart disease. It’s
a powerful probiotic and it boosts your immune system. And all of that is true, if you’re
eating real honey that is. Germany is the world’s largest importer of honey; those
Germans love their honey! But the world’s second largest honey importer, America tells
a different story when it comes to this supposedly wholly natural product. A study found that
over 75% of honey sold in the US doesn’t contain any honey. According to the FDA, honey
has to contain pollen, otherwise it isn’t honey. It was discovered that the vast majority
of commercial honey brands on the shelves of American stores contained no pollen at
all and therefore were not actually honey at all.
So if all this honey isn’t honey, then what is it? Well there are many different, carefully
engineered cocktails of artificial ingredients that are used to replicate real honey and
each producer uses their own unique mixture. Most are mainly made up from the infamous
high-fructose corn syrup, sometimes labelled as Maltitol syrup, cut with sucrose syrup
and water. Sometimes some plant extracts and essential oils are thrown in there, if you’re
lucky. So you thought you were being healthy by swapping your pancake syrup for honey,
but in reality it’s probably the exact same thing.
So why do American honey producers sell billions of dollar’s worth of artificial sugars labelled
as honey? Simple economics; real honey is expensive, just think about what has to happen
to make honey. Bees have to visit 2 million flowers to produce just one cup of honey,
travelling 55,000 miles in the process. And over its entire lifetime a single bee will
produce just half a teaspoon of honey.
High-fructose corn syrup and other similar ingredients are incredibly cheap to produce
and so companies can sell fake honey for much cheaper to consumers, who are non-the-wiser.
There are also no regulations in place in America concerning the actual percentage of
real honey-content required. In Europe there are very strict rules about what can be labelled
and sold as honey. European regulations dictate that anything sold as “honey” must contain
at least 60% actual honey and cannot contain more than 5% sucrose, i.e. syrups. The vast
majority of honey sold across Europe was found to be 100% honey.
Through no fault of their own American’s are also not use to the idea that honey crystalizes
very quickly and 100% raw honey will usually already be highly crystalized when you take
it off the shelf. Honey never spoils and crystallization is completely normal, after all, it is a sugar
and sugar just loves to crystalize. Europeans have always been sold crystalized honey and
so, are use to the idea. A survey found that most American’s would wrongly consider crystalized
honey to be spoilt. But when you’re selling syrups disguised as honey, you don’t have
to worry about crystallization.
2.3 Billion cups of coffee are drank around the world every day but what goes into your
cup? Let me guess, ground coffee or instant coffee (if you’re an animal), hot water,
then maybe milk or cream and perhaps some sugar. Oh and of course, let’s not forget
the wheat, soybeans, seeds, corn, twigs and dirt. Yes, you heard me correctly, your ground
coffee, which should just be coffee and nothing else, surely? …actually contains a whole
array of fillers and more often than not these fillers contain twigs and dirt. Well you did
say you like coffees with an earthy flavour.
Coffee is in trouble, big trouble. Coffee is very sensitive, it doesn’t like being
called names, but it’s also very picky about where it’s grown. The plant will only produce
coffee seeds, known to us all as coffee beans, in humid, and very altitudinous mountainous
areas. According to several experts, climate change is threatening these sensitive environments
and forecasts show that by 2050, half of the regions in the world where coffee can be grown
will be lost and by 2080 coffee could go extinct. Due to growing fears, some unscrupulous ground
coffee manufacturers have resorted to padding out their coffee using fillers such as soybeans,
acai seeds, brown sugar, barley and corn.
Some by-products of coffee production that should be removed from the final product are
also purposely being left in to fill it out. Such as wood, twigs, parchment, husks and
even soil. If you buy whole beans then don’t worry, there won’t be any fillers in there.
Brazilian scientists were so concerned about this that they developed a brand new technique
using liquid chromatography and statistical analysis that allowed them to detect exactly
what percentage of a bag of ground coffee is actual coffee. The procedure is 95% accurate.
What they discovered was that some brands of ground coffee have such a high percentage
of fillers in them that they must be purposely added in, there’s no way it’s an accident.
If coffee isn’t your thing, then maybe orange juice is. You may have been told many times
that most orange juices are artificial, but do you really know just how artificial? What
if I told you that the flavour of most major orange juice brands is 100% fake? To make
orange juice you squeeze oranges right? Maybe throw in some preservatives and added sugar.
No, that would just be too easy for big brand orange juices! They squeeze oranges then remove
all the oxygen from the extracted juice, this allows the juice to keep for a year without
spoiling, yes your morning juice is anywhere from a few months to a year old. But that’s
not all that removing oxygen does, it also removes all of the natural flavour and I mean
all of it. So you’re left with a very old, completely tasteless liquid that slightly
resembles something that came out of an orange once.
The orange flavour is then artificially re-added to the juice using a concoction of artificial
flavourings. But why purposely remove the flavour then put it in again, if it only makes
it worse? I mean that’s not easy or cheap to do. It’s all about consistency, each
big brand orange juice has their own unique flavour that customers are very familiar with.
Imagine if the taste of Tropicana changed slightly, millions of people would notice.
The natural flavour from oranges is just not consistent enough to stick a brand name on
it and have people associate that flavour with that particular brand, because the flavour
would constantly change, depending on the variety, location of the oranges and time
of year.
Orange juice manufacturers spend millions hiring flavour and fragrance experts. The
very same people that work for large perfume companies, to create a unique and recognisable
orange-juice-like flavour, just for their product. The worst part is that the flavourings
don’t even have to be listed under the ingredients, because they’re derived from orange oils.
Which is a dubious claim, but it technically means these artificially flavoured drinks
can be sold as 100% orange juice.
So I bet you’re wondering which of your favourite foods I’m going to ruin next.
What about a simple steak? “No! Not the steak!” A steak is just a single cut of
beef right? What could possibly be suspicious about that? Well if you opt for cheaper steaks,
whether it be from the supermarket or even your local butcher, you could be eating tens
of different cows in a single steak. You’re purchasing Frankenstein steaks that have actually
been glued together from a whole array of offcuts. And this doesn’t just happen with
beef, it could be lamb, pork, venison, or any meat really.
When many animals are being turned into various types of small food products, ready to throw
into a pan at home, a lot of waste is created and general chunks of meat that would most
likely get thrown away. Some unscrupulous companies and butchers use a meat glue called
“transglutaminase”, that’s well known within the food industry and completely untraceable
within the final product. They basically glue together the leftover pieces, which could
have come from many different cows, to create a Frankenstein steak, for your enjoyment.
Transglutaminase is so good at fusing meat together it would take an expert to examine
a steak closely to detect any wrong doing. The best part? It’s not a legal requirement
to list it as an ingredient. So to be safe, just stay away from cheap steaks, but what
if you already do? Maybe you are a cow connoisseur who opts to spend 40, 50 or even 100 dollars
or more on a single steak in a restaurant. And your favourite steak of all is the very
pricey Kobe beef. The Kobe beef craze has taken America in particular, by storm. Thousands
of restaurants all over the country and many large chains now offer highly-priced Kobe
beef burgers, Kobe steaks and other Kobe beef products on their menus.
Kobe beef comes from Kobe cows, a breed of Wagyu cattle that comes from Japan. The steaks
they produce are prized by chefs the world over for their impressive fat-marbling, flavour,
and melt-in-your-mouth texture. It is the ultimate steak. But it’s incredibly exclusive,
Kobe beef can only come from Japan and just 3,000 cattle are deemed worthy enough to be
slaughtered and turned into Kobe beef each year. They are all fathered by just 12 highly-prized
bulls, that are considered “genetically ideal”. Sounds to me like they’re trying
to create a cow master-race over there. Kobe cows are fed beer and sake to improve flavour.
Every cow is massaged daily to improve fat marbling. Hell, I want to be a Kobe cow.
That’s some serious dedication to creating a tasty steak and it doesn’t come cheap,
it varies but it will cost you on average about $350 to eat a real Kobe steak in a restaurant.
Because supplies are purposely kept small to focus on quality, the amount of real Kobe
beef that reaches the US each year would only feed 77 Americans. Yet millions of Americans
are going out and regularly eating Kobe beef in restaurants and buying it from the store
to cook at home, for far, far less than $350 per steak. So what’s going on here?
It’s one of the biggest food scams in America’s history. As you have probably guessed by now,
the vast, vast majority of so-called Kobe beef sold in America is just plain old regular
beef, that has never even been to Japan. It’s just outright lying and clever marketing,
if you can call it clever. Some farms in America are now creating fake Kobe beef for much cheaper,
often called “Faux-be beef” by those in the know. This fake Kobe is sold in thousands
of restaurants for upwards of $100 a steak. But in reality there are only 9 restaurants
in America that sell real Kobe beef, imported from Japan; yes, just 9 and they have a special
license, allowing them to cook and sell it.
The fake food you consume in the average day is sickening. Your olive oil is actually peanut
oil, soyabean oil and palm oil. Your cheese and even bread contains wood pulp, yes wood
pulp, which the FDA says is safe to eat. Thanks for the advice, but last time I checked I
wasn’t a beaver. Your dried spices contain a large amount of garden weeds. Your tea contains
sawdust and sand.
Blueberries are often faked, most products containing blueberries, such as muffins, cereals
and pancakes contain precisely zero blueberries. Real blueberries are expensive and so food
scientists have perfected a recipe of sugar, purple dye and other questionable ingredients
to craft imitation blueberries, with no health benefits whatsoever.
In America most of the Champagne sold is not actually Champagne, most people believe that
it’s illegal to sell sparkling wine as “Champagne” if it doesn’t originate from the Champagne
province in France and produced is using the “Méthode Champenoise”, a second fermentation
within the bottle. Well yes, this is true, in every country in the World, except America.
A 100-year-old legal loophole allows any American sparkling wine, a simple bottle of Californian
bubbly for example, to be sold as Champagne within America. Do this in any other country
and French lawsuits would take your fake Champers off the shelves faster than you can say “Is
this the bloody French inquisition or what…”
Of course all of this changes depending on where you live in the World. Every country
has its own unique food regulations and different levels of food quality. But which countries
have the most fake food and which have the least? British charity, Oxfam conducted a
study comparing the quality of food in every country in the World. The best countries in
the world overall for food quality, and lack of food-related health issues were found to
be The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. But shockingly, at the other end
of the spectrum was America, for quality and health issues the USA ranked 120th out of
125 countries, putting it in the same league as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Ethiopia and Chad.
It’s one of life’s great ironies that the world’s wealthiest superpower has some
of the lowest quality food in the world. But it’s not the fault of the American peoples,
large American food companies that have monopolised the market use every trick in the book and
some horrifying techniques and chemicals to make terribly poor quality food seem more
appealing to shoppers. And in America and some other countries, the regulations just
aren’t in place to properly regulate what goes into people’s food, at least they’re
nowhere near stringent enough. But just remember, every time you shop, you are voting. Avoiding
cheap, processed and general dodgy-looking produce will reduce the demand for it. Choosing
to instead shop at local stores with real, high quality food will make a difference,
and you’ll live a longer, happier life as well, for the sake of a bit less convenience.
You wouldn’t eat garbage out the bin so don’t settle for buying it off the shelves.
Thanks for watching.