Why Is This In My Food: Calcium Propionate

Calcium Propionate lurks mostly in breads. In fact, mostly in most breads. Try and find a cheap grocery store bread without it. I dare you. Also try finding tortillas without it. I couldn’t, that’s why I made my own.

What exactly is it though, and why is it in our food?

Calcium Propionate is used to prevent mold in foods, such as breads. It can also be used as a fungicide, and even as a feed supplement in cattle rearing.

But mold prevention is good right? Well, maybe if people were buying fresh baked bread instead of the generic stuff that keeps for three weeks, or eating meat that had been fed fresh grass instead of grain that had been sitting around for months or even years it wouldn’t be needed at all.

The wiki article that I got most of this from contains one paragraph that, to be honest, freaks me out a little:

“When propanoic acid is infused directly into rodents’ brains, it produces reversible behavior (e.g. hyperactivity, dystonia, social impairment, perseveration) and brain (e.g. innate neuroinflammation, glutathione depletion) changes that may be used as a model of human autism in rats.^“

Human autism eh? Hrmmmm….

Could stuff like this in our foods have a link to the current number of people with ADHD, autism and the like? I have no idea. I’m not a scientist. If it could mess with rats though, what’s to say even the little trace amounts we get in our food aren’t messing with us?

The Great Purge

I am currently in the process of purging out all of the foods in which I cannot name all of the ingredients in from my food supply.

I was (and still kind of am) excited about this, but it’s not the easy 20 minute sweep that I thought it was going to be.

First off, I am getting rid of more food than I thought I would be. Luckily, most of this is unopened and can be donated to the food bank. I will keep opened items until my roomie comes home to see if she will use them, and if not, bye bye honey garlic sauce.

Items being disposed of (and their unwanted ingredients) include and are definitely not limited to:

Beans: dextrose, modified corn starch, artificial flavour, caramel

Vegetable Thins: vegetable oil shortening, dextrose, monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed soya and/or wheat protein, natural flavour, more vegetable oil shortening, disodium guanylate, ammonium bicarbonate, glucose-fructose, monocalcium phosphate, sodium bicarbonate, more hydrolyzed soya and/or wheat protein,  soybean oil with TBHQ, amylase, protease)

Kraft Peanut Butter: corn dextrose, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil

Golden Dragon Sweet and Sour Sauce: hydrolyzed (corn soy and wheat) protein, modified corn starch, maltodextrin, sodium benzoate, colouring, partially hydrogenated soybean and cotton seed oil

Vegetable Thins Ingredients (interesting: there is a "Sensible Solution" claim, a "Baked with Real Vegetables" claim and a "44% less Fat" claim on the box too..)

The Veggie Thins are by far the worst of it, and a lot of what I am getting rid of isn’t too bad except one or two things. Most of the beans have EDTA and Calcium Chloride (which is basically to help them keep their shape from what I could gather on wiki, but it sounds too sciency for me). Even Kraft Dinner doesn’t beat the crackers, but with sodium phosphates, natural flavours and colour is has to go.

I wavered back and forth on a few cans of fruit, because I love canned peaches and pineapple, and because the ingredients really aren’t that bad. Peaches have: peaches, water, concentrated fruit juice (apple and/or pear and/or grape) and citric acid. Citric acid was originally on my “no” list, but it’s really just lemon juice. The reason I’m not keeping the peaches (single tear) is because they can’t tell me which fruit juice is in the peaches, and because I don’t understand why they need fruit juices at all.. peaches are yummy as peaches. I am however keeping the pineapple, because it is pineapple, pineapple juice and citric acid.

Another surprising keep is ketchup (though, without frozen fries and KD for a year I’m not entirely sure what I will put it on). Heinz Ketchup (at least the one I have) has tomato paste, sugar, white vinegar, salt, onion powder and spices.

I am also needing to dispose of some alcohol. This is tricky, because it is opened, and I’m pretty sure you can’t give it to the food bank even if it is sealed, and I don’t want to chuck it and let some under ager or recovering homeless man find it.  This too can wait until the room mate gets home I guess (unless anyone out there over the age of 19 is in want of tequila, white rum and half a mickey of Sailor Jerry’s). Pending that, I may be celebrating New Years by pouring it all down the drain.

Other item’s that I am keeping though won’t be buying again in 2012 include my probably not so happy frozen meat, baking supplies (meringue powder, cream of tarter, baking soda and baking powder as well as white sugar and flour).

This has also made me think a little on what is or isn’t acceptable. For example, I am shunning canned tomatoes for a year, because the acidity in tomatoes is proven to chance the chemicals in the linings of the cans and well, it’s all bad (though tomatoes packaged in glass jars are all good). Also, EDTA is scary. Pretty much anything that is described by only letters is a definite no. I also want to stop eating hidden corn product such as dextrose, and maltodextrin, and the less hidden corn product high fructose corn syrup. Natural Flavours is a scam (if something was naturally strawberry flavoured, you would get strawberries or strawberry juice in it), and though I am keeping my own supply of (cough cough expensive high end) food colourings, I would rather not have them in my food. Though I have come to terms with citric acid, I am weary of anything else that sounds chemically (calcium chloride, disodium guanylate etc.).

While I am a little sad to see how many items I had stocked that I have to get rid of, I am also inspired by my simply stocked new fridge and cupboards. It’s kind of refreshing to see (almost) nothing but simple meats, fruit, veg, dairy and eggs.

So Long Unidentifiable Food!

 

 

Why Is This In My Food?: Vitamin A Palmitate and Vitamin D3 in Milk

I am in serious ramp up mode for the new year and on a recent grocery shop tried to buy 2% milk with no additives. Good luck if you try!

Even the organic milks (yes, I’ve started to make the switch, at least with milk, bananas and apples) had Vitamin A Palmitate and Vitamin D3 in them. I bought the milk, and sent myself a text reminding myself to investigate.

I Wikipediad Vitamin A Palmitate, and after clicking on three or four more links to try to decipher all of the science talk, this is what I came up with: Vitamin A palmitate (also known as Retinyl palmitate) is added to low-fat milk products to make up for the vitamin A lost in fat reduction, and also acts as an antioxidant. Palmitate is attached to retinol (part of Vitamin A) to make the vitamin stable in milk. Palmitate is a major part of palm oil, and you get it by treating palm oil/ fats with really, really hot water (more than 200 degrees celsius) and distilling the whole thing. The World Health Organization puts palmitate in the same grouping as trans fatty acids, and say there is “convincing” evidence that consuming palmitic acids increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (although there were no direct links in the study between the intake of palmitate and patient outcome). Hmmmm… interesting, and kind of confusing.

If I boil that all down into words that even I can understand (and I may have this wrong) they take the natural fat out of milk, and the vitamin A goes with it, so they take new vitamin A, mash it together with an acid from palm oil to make it bind better and put it back in the milk.

Then I Wikipediad Vitamin D3: This was even more confusing than the vitamin A thing.. As milk doesn’t naturally have any vitamin D* it’s not like they add it to make up for something they lost. Vitamin D3 helps with calcium absorption. Your body can produce it’s own vitamin D3 from the sun, but the stuff in milk is ” produced industrially by the irradiation of 7-dehydrocholesterol extracted from lanolin found in sheep’s wool.” I am wearing my giant wool sweater while looking and typing all of this up, and that somehow strikes me as funny. I read somewhere else (but didn’t book mark the page and have lost it), that it can also be somehow extracted from fish.

I also found out on the Wikipedia page that “Vitamin D might support the emergence of allergies and adulterate already existing allergies and autoimmune diseases”. You can read for yourself by clicking the link at the beginning of the previous paragraph. This makes me wonder if the fact that so many people are now allergic to something (peanuts, dairy, wheat, etc) has something to do with the fact that we are messing with our food. I’m sure it does, but I also think there’s more to it than just the vitamin D3 in milk.

 

I am really starting to realize that I have opened Pandora’s grocery bag.  My options as far as milk goes are these:

1) I can completely strop drinking milk. I really don’t drink a lot of it anyway, but really enjoy milk with my hot chocolate and some baking just plain needs it (oatmeal cookies are very hard to make chewy unless you add about a tablespoon of the stuff).

2) I can accept that there is milk, palm oil derivatives, and things sucked out of sheep’s wool in my milk and live with it.

3) I can compromise. I looked at the Dairyland website, and their homogenized milk has no added vitamin A palmitate as enough of the natural fat and vitamin A are still in there. It still contains the vitamin D3 though (by law Canadian milk has to be fortified with vitamin D).

I’m thinking option #3

All is not depressing and über scientific though! I thought that I was doing a great thing for myself by switching to the expensive organic stuff to try to avoid hormones and antibiotics. As it turns out, Canada has strict regulations as far as this is concerned. Even normal (cheaper) milk is not allowed to contain growth hormones or antibiotics. If a cow is sick and is given antibiotics it must have a “withdrawal” period in which it’s milk is not used for human consumption. In the case of organic milk, that cow is never allowed to produce milk for human consumption again. This means that I can look up which milk producers treat their animals the nicest and go from there, organic or not.

 

*Many sites that I visited say that milk does not naturally contain Vitamin D, although the Dairyland website says that it does,and, like the vitamin A, it is reduced during processing. Because I am not a scientist, I am trusting the nutritionists websites over the one that sells the milk.. again I could be wrong.