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Ingredients Of 'Nature's Perfect Foods' Will Terrify You

This article is more than 9 years old.

Reading the ingredients list on food packaging has always answered some questions, while raising several others.  Yes, it can be useful to know what exactly is or isn’t in that strawberry glazed Pop Tart you’re about to eat.  But for most of us without degrees in nutrition or chemistry many of the terms can make our eyes glaze over like, well, strawberry glazed Pop Tarts.  Many of these scary-sounding ingredients can actually be found in good, old-fashioned, ALL-NATURAL foods and are perfectly harmless.

James Kennedy, a high school chemistry teacher and blogger in Melbourne, Australia, has created a lot of buzz by presenting the ingredients of simple, natural foods in splashy graphics that highlight the comically complex terminology that would be required if you had to identify every substance in the all natural foods you eat everyday.

Consider the simple banana ...

Note the six (!) different kinds of sugar, including the yummy-sounding “Fibre E460.”  Which sounds more appetizing, the hydrophobic amino acid “phenylalanine” or the coagulation co-factor “phylloquinone”?  But what gives a banana that distinctly bananarific taste?  You probably figured it was either “3-methylbut-1-yl” or “2-hydroxy-3-methylethyl butanoate,” but it’s both!

Kennedy explained, “I made this graphic to demonstrate how ‘natural’ products (such as bananas) contain scary-looking ingredients as well.  All the ingredients on this list are 100% natural in a non-genetically modified banana.  None of them are pesticides, fertilizers, insecticides or other contaminants.”

Here’s what the label for a kiwi would look like:

That tryptophan may nix your plans for a kiwi glaze on this year’s Thanksgiving turkey.  And don’t get me started on octadecadienoic acid.  You get the picture.  As Kennedy puts it, “There’s a tendency for advertisers to use the words ‘pure’ and ‘simple’ to describe ‘natural’ products when they couldn’t be more wrong.  I want to demonstrate that ‘natural’ products are usually more complicated than anything we can create in the lab.”

The ingredients posters and the resulting discussion have become popular among the students at Kennedy’s school.  In a recent podcast, Kennedy explained, “I’m trying to engage students every day in chemistry and I’m trying to get them to see that chemistry is everywhere, trying to bring relevance into what we learn.”

In the U.S., the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 standardized the format and requirements for food labels, although a major update is currently under consideration at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Perhaps they should add color-coding, with red text meaning, “don’t eat this more than once a year” and green text meaning, “don’t freak out.”

In all seriousness, Kennedy’s take on food ingredients is insightful and instructive.  We’ve been trained as consumers to read nutrition labels in order to count calories, avoid allergens, and to identify the presence of a wide variety of substances that we wish to increase or decrease in our diet.  It’s good to be reminded that long, complicated names don’t, in and of themselves, mean that an ingredient is unnatural, unhealthy, or even unfamiliar.  Being a truly informed consumer means you may want to take the extra step of looking up ingredient names to find out if that multisyllabic mouthful is a safe and sensible one.

We leave you with an ingredients list for a common food item that sounds like it belongs on a box of Twinkies.  But it’s just a simple egg.  Enjoy your tyrosene!

(Image credit for banana, kiwi, & egg posters: James Kennedy)

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