The Common Ingredients in Your Snack Foods Could Kill You

By S. Randall Hood | December 20, 2016

The Common Ingredients in Your Snack Foods Could Kill YouEarlier this year, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos swept the nation. The cheesy dissolving snack food got a boost from the addition of a host of ingredients, almost none of which had anything to do with heat and everything to do with creating the chemical version of a laboratory approved flavor. Almost every one of the ingredients in this particular offering from Frito-Lay has been stripped of any nutritional value, boiled down, reduced and otherwise combined with synthetic compounds to deliver a bright red, fiery hot dose of carcinogenic chemicals into the waiting mouths of America’s snack enthusiasts.

It’s almost amazing that Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration instead of the Drug Enforcement Agency. A breakdown of the ingredients by WIRED magazine shows just how little actual food the snack contains. The full article is worth a read, but we’ve summed it up here:

  • Enriched cornmeal. Corn is milled to break and remove hard kernels, along with most of the nutritional value. Artificial chemical versions of natural nutrients are added back in to “enrich” the meal.
  • Maltodextrin. This flavorless white powdered chemical is used to evenly distribute other chemicals. The FDA considers it safe, but the powder has a high glycemic index that can cause big blood sugar spikes; diabetics, be warned.
  • “Cheddar cheese.” When cheeses age, milk fat and protein break down into small fatty- and amino-acid fragments. Fatty acids taste cheesy, and amino acids taste savory; combining them into a slurry with milk solids and salt and drying it to a powder is not the same thing as using cheese.
  • Monosodium glutamate. The dreaded MSG is great for flavor, but bad for almost everything else; the compound has been linked to headaches, fatigue, and cancer.
  • “Natural” flavor. These are protected trade secrets; they’re required to be a concentrate of an edible, naturally occurring substance. Unfortunately, natural flavors can constitute as little as 0.1% of the product by volume. With ultra-light Cheetos, that’s an ultra-small amount of natural flavor.
  • Red 40 Lake and Yellow 6 Lake. Last but definitely not least, the dyes that make this product look improbably, unnaturally “fiery” are water-soluble dyes that don’t play well with food until you make them act like oils. In order to do this, they are chemically altered into substances know as “lakes” through the addition of aluminum hydroxide. The next time your fingers turn orange or red from a helping of snack food, you can rest assured knowing that the sticky colors are the direct result of the aluminum compounds binding to your skin.

At McGowan, Hood, Felder & Phillips, LLC, we fight for people who have sustained an injury or illness because of a defective product. When that product is your food, there are many more options to consider. Please call us at 803-327-7800 or fill out our contact form today to schedule your free consultation.

 

Posted in Defective Products