Food is a common necessity in our everyday lives. We constantly have to make decisions about food for both ourselves and our families. There are some little known facts about food.
All foods contain chemicals. They also can contain bugs, bug parts and toxins.
Let's start with bugs. We eat many bugs and bug parts without knowing it. Most foods have contaminants. Health inspectors know this and they even allow a set number of bugs, bug parts, and rodent contaminants in foods. These amounts are called DALs or Defect Food Action Levels.1
Experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decide on how much contamination is to be allowed in foods sold for human consumption. There is no question regarding how much since it would be impossible to produce food that had no contaminants whatsoever. The FDA's Food Defect Action handbook establishes the amounts of contaminants permitted in about one hundred plant-derived foods. 2
FDA sets these action levels because it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring unavoidable defects.
Some examples:
Every year the average person consumes twelve pubic hairs while eating fast food.
The FDA allows bugs and rodent hairs in peanut butter. The allowance is an average of 30 or more insect fragments and one or more rodent hairs per 100 grams of peanut butter.
The highest price coffee in the world comes from civet droppings. Kopi Luwak are coffee beans that come from civet poop. The animals indulge on only the most exquisitely ripe berries and excrete the partly eaten beans, which are then cultivated to be sold. Kopi Luwak sells anywhere from $120 to $600 per pound, primarily in the US and Japan. 3
Pink grapefruit juice drinks may contain bugs. Insects provide the ordinary food coloring named cochineal extract, carmine, or camines acid. The reddish color is derived form the insect know as Dactylopius Coccus Costa, whose diet is red cactus berries. The bugs are dried up and then ground into a find powder that is used in a lot of processed foods with a pink, red or purple tint. 3
Cocoa beans can contain 10 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound.
Sesame seeds can contain 5 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound.
With chemicals we talk about a few parts per million, parts per billion, or even parts per trillion. With animal excreta, note that 10 mg per pound is equivalent to 20 parts per million. These are serious parts per million!
However, not to worry, As Eric Berger notes, “It is incorrect to assume that because the FDA has an established defect action level of a food commodity, the food manufacturer need only stay just below that level. The defect levels do not represent an average of the defects that occur in any of the products—the averages are actually much lower.” 4
Chemicals in Foods
It's impossible to have food that is chemical-free. Further, there's a myth that synthetic chemicals are naturally more dangerous than natural ones but it simply isn't true. Every moment of our lives we are exposed to a vast array of chemicals, both natural and synthetic.
There are more than 1,000 chemicals in strawberries.5 Yet we happily eat strawberries even though one of these chemicals is acetone, a known neurotoxin.6
There are about 4,000 unique compounds in American whiskey. 7
Polypropylene glycerol used for antifreeze keeps your salad crispy. This chemical also comes with alerts like skin and eye irritation when exposed to the human body. It is generally used in products like Sierra Anti Freeze.8
Jelly beans keep their shine with shellac which is regularly associated as being a type of wood finishing material. Its common uses include furniture, guitars and even AK-47s for that special shine. Shellac is derived from the excretions of the Kerria lacca insect which is native to the Thailand forests. 3
Toxins
Foods contain natural chemicals that are essential for growth and health, including carbohydrates, sugars, proteins and vitamins. But some foods contain potentially harmful natural toxins.
The reason for the presence of natural toxins is not always known. In some foods, a toxin is present as a naturally occurring pesticide to ward off insect attack. Or a toxin may be formed to protect the plants from spoilage when damaged by weather, handling, UV light or microbes.
Here are some examples of toxins in foods:
Caffeine, weight by weight, is more toxic than most pesticides.
A cup of coffee is estimated to contain more than 2,000 natural chemical compounds and just one cup has fifty times the mutagenic activity of the smoke absorbed from smoking a single cigarette.9 There are more rodent carcinogens by weight in a single cup of coffee than potentially carcinogenic synthetic pesticide residues in the average US diet in a year, and this doesn't count the 1,000 or so chemicals yet to be tested. 10
Apple and pear seeds and the inner stony pit (kernel) of apricots and peaches contain a naturally occurring substance called amygdalin. This can turn into hydrogen cyanide in the stomach causing discomfort or illness and can sometimes be fatal. 11
Parsnips commonly contain a group of natural toxins known as furocoumarins. One of the furocoumarin toxins can cause stomach ache and may also cause a painful skin reaction when contact with the parsnip plant is combined with UV rays form sunlight.11
Many types of beans contain toxins called lectins. The highest concentrations are found in kidney beans, especially red kidney beans. As few as four or five can cause severe stomach ache, vomiting and diarrhea.
A naturally occurring toxin called glycosides in raw or unprocessed cassava and bamboo shoots can led to exposure to hydrogen cyanide and its related toxicity.
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Concluding Note
Note that the chemicals and toxins discussed above are all natural, not synthetic. Should you worry? Absolutely not. In these cases the levels that can cause damage are much higher than those typically found in foods. The risks of serious health problems in not consuming a wide variety of fresh fruit and vegetables in your diet are much greater than the risks of health problems associated with chemicals and natural plant toxins.
References
Defect Levels Handbook, US Food and Drug Administration, December 6, 2016
“30 scary food facts you need to know,” forensicsciencetechnician.org, March 23, 2016
Eric Berger, “Top 10 grossest food defects the FDA deems safe for humans,” blog.chron/sciguy, May 18, 2011
Sherman K. Stein, Strength in Numbers: Discovering the Joy and Power of Mathematics in Everyday Life, (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 21
Joe Schwarcz, Let Them Eat Cake, (Toronto, Canada, ECW Press, 2005), 159
Michaeleen Doucleff, “Rye bother? An inside the barrel look at American whiskeys,” npr.org/blog, September 9, 2013
Patricia Rain, Vanilla, (New York, Penguin Books, 2004), 9
Roger Coulombe, Does Nature Know Best? Natural Carcinogens and Anti-Carcinogens in America's Food, (New York, American Council on Science and Health, 1996)
L. S. Gold, Science, 258, 261, October 1992
“Natural toxins in foods,” New Zealand Food Safety Authority, nzfa.govt.nz, April 12, 2010
Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
