Food Additives - User Manual For Humans S1 E12 - Dr Ekberg

welcome and thank you for coming I'm excited to see you here tonight and we

in this office we try to teach people as much as possible in in addition to just

adjusting delivering the chiropractic care we also try to bring it as much

knowledge as possible in all of the the aspects that support health so one of

the basic things we teach is that you have in order to get have health you

need to eat well you need to move well and you need to think well so today

we're we will talk about number 12 here in our series will be about food

additives so this is part of the eating well and what are food additives food

additives is basically anything that they add to food that if you were to

visit a farm a hundred years ago those things didn't exist it's it's a they do

it because they have either taken something away from food so they try to

replace flavor color or aroma or they try to improve if they think that nature

didn't do a good enough job they they try to add on some flavor to it that

maybe will make it sell better and the other reason would be to extend shelf

life will will cover all of these and give you a perspective on what all of

this is about what does what does it imply when they talk about shelf-life

what does safe when they talk about safe food additives what does that mean and

with all of the preservatives that they add to food what does that actually mean

so instead of just telling you eat this they'll meet this will try to give you

perspectives that you can make make some smart choices for yourself the first

thing is my favorite question is is it safe when you hear when you read

articles you hear on TV you hear that they have determined that

something was safe how did they do that I've always wondered so in in the slide

I found a few I went to WebMD and searched on food additives and so they

had I just clicked a few few sentences out and these are citations there's

quotes the truth about seven common food additives so they claimed to know the

truth first of all then they say if like many Americans you stock your pantry

with processed foods you may worry about how safe food additives really are and

then they go on to say a scare over a food additive may linger in our minds

long after researchers find that there's actually no cause for alarm so in other

words they've determined it to be safe and I think this is kind of humorous

because basically what they do is they take a poison and they feed it to a lab

rats and they determine how much they have to give the rat before it dies to

kill the rats then they back off and they see how much do they have to feed

the rats before it gets sick and anything below that level is safe

because it doesn't give you any symptoms and that is basically in in principle

I'm simplifying a little bit but that's basically how they come about with

things that are safe so I have at the bottom of slide two here is it safe to

skip exercise for a week yeah I mean you can skip exercise for a week and you're

not going to have a whole lot of symptoms so that would be safe the

question though is is that a good idea so it's not that the question is that

safe is not really a good start with we'd rather ask is it a good

idea so is it possible to prove that something is damaging to your health I'd

say so yeah you give somebody something and if they get sick it wasn't good for

you so it's very easy to prove that

something is bad but how do you prove that something's not damaging you give

it to a million people and nothing happens and you give it to a million and

one and they get sick then it wasn't good so what I'm trying to say is there

is no way for anybody to prove that something is safe it's not possible

because everyone is different and we just don't know the long-term effects of

anything so instead of using the those words we just want to try to start using

we want to think about we want to have a philosophy about it and we try to use

some common sense about what what to use and not to use so even if it doesn't

kill you immediately it may still not be a good idea to eat it and then on number

four here is one of my favorite cartoons the last organ there's the guy talking

to the doctor and he says everyone knows food is bad for you but I don't know

what else to eat and if that's kind of scary

but that's almost a point where we've come that everywhere you look there's

something wrong with the food what do you do so there's probably no food that

they haven't written something about it being bad for you so what what do you

eat well we've talked about these in previous previous lectures and basically

all you try to do is eat as natural as possible eat food the way

that nature made it for you so we're not going to stay on that topic today but

when we talk about food additives also we want to start asking some questions

like if they add something to a food doesn't that's the substance that they

add does it have any normal function in the human body so food has a purpose we

talked about that a few times ago who was supposed to nourish it does things

for the body movement does something for the body movement creates impulses and

signals that stimulate the brain so there's a purpose for movement a spine

has a purpose a spine protects certain sensitive areas and it creates a certain

mobility and stability and it sends impulses so all of these things were

created by nature because they have a purpose but when you look at artificial

color that is it has no purpose in the body it doesn't belong there is no

function there's no way that you can make a case for that molecule to be

entered into the body so it's it's a foreign entity and therefore it's a

stress to the boy same thing with artificial sweeteners and things like

mercury and heavy metals no one can make a case for that ever being a good idea

to be put into the body and one quote that I really like by Albert Einstein he

says God does not play dice with the universe

and what I take from that is that everything that nature has created and

we're part of nature has a has a purpose and all the food that nature created

belongs in the human body there's there's a relationship that makes sense

but when we start making things in the laboratory it doesn't make sense anymore

it just doesn't fit there's no molecular fit but the things

they make in a lab to to fit in the human body so there's a lot of text on

the next one we're not going to run through all of it we just want to cover

a few types of food additives then we'll talk about some of the main ones and and

we'll we'll make a few more points so types of food additives there are

anti-caking agents for example they keep powders from from sticking

there are anti-foaming agents so that the food won't fall I've never had an

issue with foaming food myself but it must be there antioxidants inhibit the

effects of oxygen on food that can be a good thing food coloring are added to

replace colors that are destroyed during processing

so again nature makes beautiful colored food it's it's very colorful yeah red

bell peppers and oranges and there's great color but when we process the food

and destroy the nutrients in the color then we have to add color back to make

it look appetizing emulsifiers allow water and oils to remain mixed flavor

additives give food a particular taste or smell and and so on and so on I'll

let you read the rest of it yourself here we don't need

go through the list I'll come back to most of these so just to make a few

points on each anti-caking agents again they keep powders from sticking so

things like salt for example they they frequently use use anti-caking so the

cheap salts they do something called sodium aluminosilicate or sodium

ferrocyanide okay they don't sound good to me I don't know

about you but those are those are synthetic they're chemicals and they

just don't belong so in more expensive salts like sea salt and high brand

things they use calcium carbonate which is a naturally occurring thing in the

body and if we add something that that has a place in nature normally then that

wouldn't necessarily be a bad food additive I mean we can make a case for

it but when they make it in a lab from from silicone and from toxic substances

there's just no case to be made anti-foaming agents again prevent

foaming so in chicken nuggets they put something called poly dimethyl siloxane

okay does it belong and did you know by the way chicken nuggets does not have

even half of its chicken there's like 37 ingredients most of

which are chemicals okay so just kind of start raising being

being aware of what they're doing to our food so that you can make some some

intelligent choices and silicone oil is very often added to cooking oil to

prevent foaming and deep-frying so even if they call it they say oh we use all

vegetable oil or old peanut oil chances are you're still getting some silicone

because they they don't want their their fries to fall the antioxidants that we

talked about a little bit last week oxidation is a natural process but when

it happens too much it creates free radicals and those can be destructive to

human tissue and they also make food deteriorate so what they often do is

they add antioxidants to food and some of those are actually not that bad

because they can add something like ascorbic acid which is vitamin C that's

a natural antioxidant so it's not really going to mess with you much in terms of

being a food additive something else that's very common is something called

tocopherols which is basically vitamin E both of

those are natural but then if you start reading the list of ingredients on any

processed food that you buy for the most part you will find one of the following

you'll find TBHQ which is tertiary butyl hydroquinone those are those are

basically toxic they're petroleum products

BHA BHT you'll find all of those in mayonnaise and dressings and so forth

when you have something with unsaturated we have fats that have unsaturated bonds

that means those those bonds those unsaturated places on the molecule

they're nutritious for us because they have the

ability to react so they perform a function in the body because they are

unsaturated but because they're unsaturated they also have a tendency to

react with oxygen so they're more sensitive so that's where they often

added vitamin E for example so when you have unsaturated fats with oxygen heat

and light that's where oils get rancid and create free radicals in the oils so

some of the exam what they do then is even though they start off with a

vegetable oil or something that's reasonably good they strip it of a lot

of those nutrients they sort of sterilize the oil from nutrients so that

it'll have a better shelf life so it won't go rancid that fast so what we'll

get back to this also to help you think a little bit more about that emulsifiers

these are some this is something else that's added to virtually every food

that you buy and it's not necessarily a bad thing the more natural emulsifiers

are egg yolk and lecithin and lecithin is something that your body makes so

when you eat a fatty meal your gall bladder is going to release bile which

essentially consists of less of them and the less of that helps the water and the

oil mix so that you can digest it easier so when they make a food where they want

the fats to be dispersed in in water in fluid then they use less of it so most

any product you see they're going to say something about less than that that's

probably not a terrible thing some other natural emulsifiers are honey and

mustard and some other stuff you want to stay

away from is another very popular one called sodium steroidal

to lack delay which is purely synthetic and this is one of those cases where

when I started off saying how do they and safe so this is one example where

they feed this to rats and there are no symptoms when they feed it less than

two-and-a-half percent of the diet so I mean that's that's a pretty substantial

amount to to not have any symptoms but there is a lethal dose that if you give

more than thirty grams of this per kilogram then you basically kill all the

rats and so they say okay well this much will kill the rat this much will not

give any symptoms so we'll reduce it a little bit more and we'll call that safe

and that's what they do with with a lot of the things that they add to food and

they call it they call it safe it's FDA approved as a food additive what they

figured out that is in the u.s. they're not allowed to use more than half a

percent in any food and in Canada they decided well you know we think half a

percent is not so good we think that's dangers we'll call it three point zero

point three seven percent but here's the question do you think it has no effect

or do you think it has a sound effect it's pretty obvious when you think about

it and then the next question is if you take a tiny little amount of something

that has a some effect and then you get it from a hundred different foods and

from multiple different sources and it's in virtually everything that you eat do

you see how that could be a significant factor in the decline

people so taking one thing in calling it safe and then allowing people

manufacturers to put it in everything so you get a hundred times that it's not a

great idea I know this is slightly depressing so the reason we do I don't

want to sound like doomsday but it's hard to avoid on this topic because

essentially there still is a solution and we'll get to that toward the end but

just just bear with me for a little bit here food coloring is used to replace

color that was destroyed in processing or to make food pretty or more

attractive when they think that well you know this food isn't colorful enough to

sell so we'll make it red or blue or green or they use it to mask

natural variations so sometimes in margarine or butter or something that

sometimes in the summertime is yellow sometimes in the winter is white well

let's make it all yellow so people can't tell the difference that happens quite a

bit also and there are some things called natural colors and I put that in

quotation marks because they're basically allowed that they are derived

from nature but they're basically allowed to do anything they want to it

in the process so it may not be very natural before it ends up in your food

so caramel coloring is brown that's based on sugar and natto is reddish

orange based on a seed chlorophyll is green from blue-green algae for example

there's something called cochineal which is red which comes from an insect I

don't know what you but I don't find bugs that that appetizing

so they go down the list and there's some things that they derive here but

even though they call it natural food color sometimes what they do is they

dissolve this natural food color in a solvent either hexane or acetone or some

of the color they know what they don't have to tell you that they used acetone

to give a better penetration of this color into food because the acetone is

defined as a carrier substance so they don't have to they don't have to label

that so even natural colors you don't really know what what they're doing with

it and even those so-called natural colors

even if they're properly derived some of them like Ananta which is a sieve

continuum which is an insect and carmine which is also insect they're very common

as severe allergies they've been known to give people anaphylactic shock

so even natural you got to be a little bit careful with and again if nature

puts some nice color to it in the first place why mess with it so if you eat the

whole unnatural food you're in pretty good shape

flavor additives and it's the same principle you want to add back or

exaggerate some kind of taste or flavor that was lost in processing and I won't

read all of this but I put it in there for you what a natural flavor and it's

like cut this straight off of the some regulation on that family

so natural flavor and is anything that comes from the essential oil all the

arrests in essence extract protein hydrolysate

distillate yada yada yada derived from a spiced fruit fruit juice vegetable laden

blah-dee-blah portion or fermentation products thereof

so they can do basically anything they want to it they start with something

natural and there is no limit to what they can do to it and if they add it to

a food is still called a natural flavor so you have to be a little cautious to

two things from it when they call them natural flavor additives same thing at

back or exaggerated taste and smell here are some of the artificial ones butter

is actually when you have a buttery flavor from something it's actually

dying diacetyl ester when something tastes or smells of banana it's actually

isoamyl acetate and there are some good books on this that if you read and look

into this there is an industry in this country that is so big that if you buy a

processed food there is probably nothing that you taste that comes from a natural

flavor that they take the food apart the private of all flavor and then they use

these artificial chemicals to put the flavor back in so most people especially

kids they hardly know most food tastes like anymore they're so custom so

habituated to these artificial flavors that you give them natural food and they

don't even like it so beware and then another one is flavor enhancers

and these the number one thing is called monosodium glutamate MSG and these what

they do is they they enhance the flavor that's already in the food so they

basically trick the brain into activating cells brain cells but when

you taste something you send a signal to the brain and if you add MSG to it you

strengthen that signal you amplify the signal so that the brain perceives that

this has more taste the problem with this is that MSG contains something

called glutamate or glutamic acid which is a neurological stimulant it's it's a

excitatory neurotransmitter that the body uses to send messages but if you

add it artificially it stimulates that brain cell to death and it's called an

excitotoxin so if you go to a Chinese restaurants and they put a ton of MSG in

the food and it tastes really really good but an hour later you feel like a

train wreck then those flavors were stimulated those

brain cells were excited until they fatigued and failed and you all but went

to sleep so you damaged some brain cells when you do this and people can be more

or less sensitive to it but it's a huge issue and it's very well worth paying

attention to so here's another little dilemma because people are getting more

aware of MSG and trying to avoid it they have invented 50 plus names for msg so

now if you look for msg they might even stay on the

on the product that contains no MSG but instead they call it hydraulic

hydrolyzed protein or authorized yeast extract or any of those totally generic

terms that basically means it has MSG in it and then even FDA when after if

Campbell and Heinz for a number of years but it was just too hard to to keep

track of it they try to find them for a while and then they said no it's too

messy we just won't deal with it so I put on on the slide there go go research

it on the internet find out there's you can easily print up a list of 50 things

that they call it and just do your best to to avoid those the first to watch out

for especially are salty snacks and soups and dressings because they

adversely it's almost impossible to find a ranch dressing for example without msg

it's so common that the flavor that we know as ranch dressing is basically msg

now we're getting to some of the fun stuff preservatives and why do they add

preservatives to food and the answer is really just one they want to improve

shelf-life and that makes sense from a money perspective because if food spoils

you have to throw it away but if it stays edible if it stays fresh

for a year then you can sell all of it before before it goes bad so it reduces

spoilage and makes food cheaper but what does it mean to improve shelf-life if

you put something to do it of food away and it doesn't spoil what does that mean

it basically means that they have made it so unattractive

that they have made it lethal to microorganisms because microorganisms

were the things that were and and oxygen and so forth are the things that make

the food deteriorate so if you preserve a food and nothing wants to eat it then

it has shelf-life right but what it also means is that if it has shelf-life it

cannot sustain life and the the preservatives that they add they're

basically a poison that is designed to kill off things that have a similar cell

membrane and and cell structure that you and I have so you think if it kills them

if the food gets so unattractive that they don't want to eat it it probably

doesn't have much value for you anymore okay so think about preservatives in in

that sense so preserve is basically to contaminate something and then

artificial sweeteners now we're getting to the stuff that if you have if you

didn't hear anything else I say just just listen to artificial sweeteners

there's three kinds that are the most common on the markets they are the pink

the blue and the yellow pack that you find everywhere and then the pink is the

sacrament sodium saccharin which is also called sweet and low the blue is

aspartame or NutraSweet and the yellow is the latest that's called Splenda or

the chemical name is Rollo's so what we have to understand

about these is that they were all developed by pesticide companies these

companies were in the process of developing poison to try to kill

something when they found that this powder that was floating around in the

air all of a sudden was very very sweet it was extremely sweet so now they say

okay we'll take it we'll modify it this way to kill bugs and we'll modify it

slightly this way and make commercial sweetener and the FDA turned down I mean

FDA is is they let a lot of stuff through but they turned down aspartame

eight times before it was finally approved and it was based on some study

that was funded by the manufacturer of aspartame since then aspartame is

responsible for more FDA complaints when people have something outrageous happen

to them they go blind or deaf or they something happens and FDA gets a formal

complaint that doesn't happen much but since aspartame was introduced aspartame

has accounted for more complaints than anything else than everything else

combined in more than 50% of the complaints in our asthma team

so these are very very potent neurotoxins and aspartame or NutraSweet

when it breaks down in the body it both it breaks into four different things it

makes asparagine which is a natural amino acid

and that further further fall down into or becomes aspartate aspartic acid and

like I said this is a natural thing it's a neurotransmitter but just like MSG if

you add it externally to the body then it becomes an excitotoxin it stimulates

the brain to death it also breaks down into phenylalanine which is important

for people with phenylketonuria but this is the also a precursor for

neurotransmitters so again if you add it externally you shift the normal balance

and you have a brain imbalance as a result the really good stuff it breaks

down to though is methanol wood alcohol that's the stuff that pretty much

guarantees to turn you blind if you get drunk on it and some desperate

alcoholics have been known to drink methanol and they don't see ever again

that's how how bad this stuff is EPA says that more than seven point eight

milligrams per day is unsafe and yet one died and soda contains 16 milligrams

more than twice the safe EP limit per can

and finally it it becomes formaldehyde you know what formaldehyde is it's what

they it's embalming fluid all right you want to drink that I don't think so it's

such a potent carcinogen that the World Health Organization says you can't have

any more than 0.5 parts per million I mean those are such infinitesimal

amounts and and yet they sell this on a regular basis and you have people

drinking a six-pack per day and it shows up they do have health problems

sucralose is the last one the Splenda and we were told cheerfully that this is

a natural product it's made from sugar oh yes we modify it a little bit but we

just use a natural compound we use chloride to to modify it well again if

it's made from sugar it's not sugar anymore who cares what it used to be

after they modified it but chlorine is not in sea salt chlorine is not salt

salt is in the form of chloride and chlorine is a poison and a carcinogen

that you make in a laboratory it's a poison gas it's an extremely potent

bleach and if you inhale a little bit of chlorine gas you'll pretty much won't

have any

any surface of the inside of your throat again I mean it pretty much has ripped

it out now when they start with sugar they start with a carbon molecule and

then they jam on a chlorine molecule onto it and this kind of bond does not

exist in nature it is very very unnatural and it is extremely toxic all

the other when they do this they it makes a compound called plural carbon

and all of the other plural carbons are poisons and insecticides there's some of

the most potent and you may have heard of another one another chloro carbon

called DDT okay that was banned in 1972 they replaced it with dye ldren that was

banned in 1974 and all these are chloro carbons just like Splenda old friend was

banned in 74 chlordane was banned in 88 flight trichloromethane was banned in

2002 and then they make Splenda in 2007 and they put it in all sorts of healthy

diet foods and they say oh well it's just made from sugar okay don't don't

buy into that it's just a matter of time before they start finding just as many

things as with any of the others so this was the depressing part I apologize

but it's even more depressing to think that you didn't know this stuff and you

went on to eat it and your life quality suffered for it so what do we what do we

do with all this well realize that you want to eat a minimum of processed

packaged food because it all contains all this stuff so the more that you can

eat Whole and natural food if you're out go to reputable salad bars when you eat

food at home try as much as possible to eat the whole food the way that nature

made it that's the simplest and the best advice that I can give real food is

perfect just the way it is there's no need to add color or flavor or aroma or

anything to food that nature may because it's already perfect and if something

spoils if you have lettuce if you have spinach if you have all these things in

your house that's oil it's because they have nutrition food is supposed to spoil

that's what happens if it has nutrients they will degrade because nutrients

interact with things so if things don't spoil they have no nutrients it's

basically as simple as that and the other thing that I would like to

say at the end is to encourage you that you have power because manufacturers

only made things that they can sell and if you don't buy them they'll stop

making them guaranteed so when you put your dollars when you vote with your

dollars and you start buying the healthy stuff when you start buying

the processed stuff I guarantee you nobody in this country what anything was

blend up for a month they wouldn't make it anymore

why would they so it all starts with with the individual and one person can

tell another person and we can become more aware and we can spread the message

and that's the only way anything has never changed really sorry for the for

the dismal tone of the message but again we're better off to be aware and be able

to make some intelligent choices then then to just be ignorant so at the end

here I have one cartoon it's this guy at the corner he says holding is sign up

since standing on the freeway says we'll work in low calorie all-natural locally

grown blue the free whole food with minimal packaging so the awareness has

to reach that guy too that's when we got it made thank you

very much and I'll see you next week