8. Chewing gum
Chewing gum comes in a lot of delicious flavors but a lot of them have one thing in common: they’re made out of sheep. To be more specific, many chewing gums are made out of a secretion made from the skin glands of sheep. The substance, called lanolin, is the stuff that makes chewing gum chewy and is also found in many skin products. Chewing gums that don’t use lanolin are often made out of synthetic rubbers instead.
9. Bread
No one wants to find a hair in their food, but that just might be what you’re eating every time you have some toast. A lot of commercial bread has an additive called L-cysteine. This amino acid gives the bread a longer shelf life, but is often synthesized from human hair, which is just plain disgusting. To avoid getting hair in your mouth, opt for freshly made bread from the bakery instead of processed bread from the grocery store.
10. Canned mushrooms
Canned mushrooms? More like a can of worms…or maggots. FDA guidelines are meant to keep food safe, but they do allow traces of some pretty nasty stuff. Maggots and mites are particularly drawn to mushrooms, it seems, leading the FDA to rule on just how large a portion of these creepy creatures can be served up with canned or dried mushrooms.
The FDA is totally cool with maggots in your canned mushrooms, so long as they don’t exceed “an average of 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 g of drained mushrooms and the proportionate liquid…” To give you a sense of what that means, one cup of canned mushrooms is the equivalent 156 g, meaning that 30 or more maggots might be in every cup of canned mushrooms! Mites can be present in even larger numbers, not to exceed “an average of 75 or more mites per 100 g of drained mushrooms and the proportionate liquid…”
Believe it or not, it gets even nastier; up to 10 percent of those mushrooms can be decomposed. Yuck.
11. Coffee creamer
If you aren’t a fan of black coffee, you might be putting some pretty disgusting stuff into that morning cup of joe. Non-dairy coffee creamers have a concoction of oils that allow it to mimic the creaminess of milk. Most creamers use soybean or cottonseed oil to give it that smooth consistency. Each time you add liquid creamer to your coffee, you’re basically dousing it in oil.
If you think oil in your coffee is strange, you probably don’t want to know what powdered creamer is made out of. Powdered creamers contain an anti-caking agent called sodium aluminosilicates. This substance is highly flammable — not exactly the sort of thing you want to drink at breakfast.
12. Fat-free milk
If you think you can skip the horrible additives in non-dairy creamer by using fat-free milk in your coffee, think again. It turns out not even milk is safe from gross ingredients. When fat is removed from milk, the color turns blue. Since the Food and Drug Administration agrees that non-white milk would be too hard for consumers to drink, they allow it to be processed with titanium dioxide to keep its light color.
Somehow, the FDA thinks that it’s less off-putting for people to drink metal than to drink blue-tinted milk.
13. Cheese
If you have any cheese in your house, you might want to check the label on it right now and look for an ingredient called rennet. If you don’t see this ingredient listed, you can breathe easy. If you do see it, prepare to be horrified. While it’s common knowledge that cheese is a dairy product, most people think it’s safely vegetarian. Most rennet-containing cheeses, however, aren’t actually vegetarian-friendly as rennet (an enzyme found in the stomach of nursing cows, lambs, and goats) can only be extracted by killing the animal.
There are some cheeses, such as cottage cheese, that do not contain rennet. Other cheeses are made to be vegetarian-friendly using vegetarian rennet or microbial rennet. These cheeses are safe for vegetarians (and those with queasy stomachs) to consume.
14. Citrus-flavored sodas
Everyone knows that soda isn’t exactly the most healthy drink to consume, but citrus-flavored sodas are packed with more than just sugar. Many citrus-flavored drinks, like Mountain Dew, include a synthetic chemical that has been patented as a flame retardant. Brominated vegetable oil, commonly referred to as BVO, has been banned from foods in Europe and Japan but is still widespread in North America. Ten percent of sodas sold in the U.S. contain this ingredient, which helps to keep the citrus flavor mixed into the drink instead of floating to the surface of the can or bottle.
While there are limits that regulate how much BVO can be included in drinks, the studies on what makes it safe for consumption are decades old. It’s possible that BVO is more harmful than we suspect. Studies done on mice show that a buildup of BVO can cause behavioral and even reproductive issues.
Credits: mashed.com
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