Every food giant advertises its “delicious meals” and “high-quality food items” so that you, the consumer, will choose to buy its brand. And, true to their word, some of their food tastes pretty good.
But with the globalization and centralization of food, new problems arise. How do you keep food fresh long enough to:
- Be harvested
- Be transported to the factory
- Be processed
- Be packaged
- Be transported to the store,
- Be stocked
- Be sold
- Arrive in your kitchen
- Be placed in your cupboard or fridge
- And wait for you to cook and eat it
As you can see, this could take months, at times. But food in its natural state tends to go off within a few days. And when we spend our hard-earned money buying food, we complain bitterly if it has gone off or is spoiled. When we complain about a brand, its profits go down, and that is not a good place to be in, for a business.
The brilliant solution to food spoilage is of course the use of preservatives – but this is where you get a conflict of interest.
Nutrition, energy and health all center around an essential biological process called digestion.
To give you a really basic explanation of digestion, consider the following:
Digestion is the process of food being broken down and spoiled by bacteria inside your stomach.
Your digestive system isolates the nutrients for use, and once it has finished extracting those nutrients, it gets rid of the crap (literally).
Just think it through. Not trying to be crass here, but food gone off smells terrible. Well, there is a reason air fresheners in restrooms are popular. The same process is at work internally.
What is important to understand here is that the process of digesting is really the process of spoiling food: breaking it down, or making it “go off.” If this can not occur, then you can not extract the nutrients out of the food you eat.
But food manufacturers need to keep food fresh as long as possible. If they do not, we complain, and their profit goes down.
So they add preservatives that prevent or slow food from decaying or breaking down. Well, that is the exact opposite of what your digestive system is trying to achieve. Your digestive system wants to break the food down. If it receives foods that are difficult to break down, it can not extract the nutrients. If nutrients can not be extracted from foods, your health suffers.
This, of course, is a basic explanation. The subject of food preservation is a lot more involved. There are natural ways of preserving foods, which actually aid digestion. But these methods are not generally used by large-scale food industry. It is much easier and cheaper to use artificial preservatives – and that is where the conflict of interests lies, between the food industry, and you.
Artificial preservatives work entirely differently than natural methods of food preservation. They simply prevent food from being decayed – indefinitely. This is why we see so many cases of indigestion and stomach problems these days.
Did you know that some artificial preservatives use the same base material used to make lethal injections for executions in Nazi Germany?
Of course, many studies are used to proclaim that these preservatives are safe. After all, they wouldn’t be approved by the FDA for use otherwise, right?
The truth of the matter is that there are no studies proving they are safe. There are only studies saying they have “not noticed a detrimental effect.” Well just because you did not notice a detrimental effect is absolutely no proof there isn’t one.
But, purely from a logical or scientific viewpoint, one can ask this one question:
Is an ingredient, which counteracts or inhibits the natural digestive process of your body, beneficial, or detrimental?
Well we certainly know it is beneficial to the manufacturer and food stores. But it likely isn’t beneficial to you.
– This has been a guest post by William Tucker, Vice President of D&Y Laboratories. To be notified of future posts on this blog, please subscribe using the form below.