You know what always makes me mad?
How come banana candies never taste like actual bananas?
If not actual bananas, what the heck makes that flavor?
Hey guys, Julia here for DNews
So I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but there’s been a trend for big companies
to remove “unnatural” ingredients from their products.
General Mills is just the latest, joining others like Panera and Nestle.
General Mills says “90 percent of its cereals will have no artificial ingredients by the
end of 2016.”
and they want to move towards ingredients people will recognize.
They want to move towards products that people “see as natural”.
And that’s the rub though, do most people know what natural is?
When you look on the side of a box of cereal, you might see a few ingredients you can pronounce,
like wheat and sugar, and words like “natural flavor” and “artificial flavor”.
We use words like “artificial” and “natural” as a short hand, and just kind of assume every
knows what we mean.
We assume that natural is anything nature makes and artificial is man made or made from
chemicals.
The FDA sort of agrees.
Basically they say an artificial flavor means it’s not derived from plant material, meat,
or dairy products, or fermentation products thereof.
But the real difference between artificial and natural flavor is a little more complicated
and little bit fuzzier.
I mean processed food can be really tasteless, it’s been frozen, bleached, dried, whathaveyou
to smithereens.
but hey, at least it has a long shelf life.
To make up for that lack of taste, scientists have to add a little something extra.
Most of those flavors in your food, natural or not are made in a lab, by scientists called
flavorists, who are something like a mix of chemist and artist.
Their entire job is to mix minute amounts of chemicals to produce just the right flavor.
They can whip up a few chemicals and make you think it’s a turkey dinner.
And it’s big business.
One study from the Freedonia Group estimates the Flavor and Fragrance industry to be worth
over 5.7 billion dollars.
I know that word “chemical” might be scary to some of you.
but I mean everything is chemicals.
APPLES HAVE CHEMICALS IN THE THEM.
Like apples contain fructose, sucrose, pantotheic acid, ethyl hexanoate, 3-decanol, and a bunch
of others I can’t even pronounce.
So you could have chemicals derived from a pit of an apricot and heavily processed or
the same exact chemicals synthesized in a lab and one would be considered natural and
one not.
Eric Schlosser, gives the example of Amyl acetate, or banana flavor in his book Fast
Food Nation.
He says “When you distill it from bananas with a solvent, amyl acetate is a natural
flavor.
When you produce it by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol, adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst,
amyl acetate is an artificial flavor.
Either way it smells and tastes the same.”
So the same exact chemical can be considered natural or artificial.
And natural doesn’t always mean better.
Natural flavors goes through the same process in a lab with those flavorists, just like
an ‘artificial’ flavor would.
Some aren’t remotely related to the food they supposedly taste like.
Some “almond” flavors can come from apricot pits or in some rare cases that “natural”
vanilla flavoring has been known to come from the anal glands of beavers.
And even flavors made by fungal or tissue cultures are considered natural.
So these companies have a lot of lee-way with the word “natural” when it comes to processed
foods.
Just remember like arsenic and rattle snake venom are technically natural, doesn’t mean
they’re good for you.
So when you pick your favorite cereal off the shelf.
Just be smart, be skeptical.
And the next time you drink a vanilla latte, just think, you're probably taking a nice
sip of beaver butt juice.
Okay not really it’s very rarely used.
But hey, it’s natural.
speaking of another great debate in the food wars lately…
GMOS.
what’s the deal with those?
Laci really separates the wheat from the chaff in this great episode right here.
So, how do you feel about this “natural” vs “artificial debate”?
Health conscious or marketing baloney?