Alphabet Soup Additives

Today I almost ate a Reece's Peanut Butter cup. Then I read the ingredient label and decided instead to have a piece of organic dark chocolate I keep at my desk for just such moments as these.

In my former junk food days I used to devour these sweets mindlessly! But these days the first thing I do when I pick up a food item is to check out the ingredients. Have you noticed a new trend in labeling? Instead of distressing us needlessly with all those unpronounceable chemical names, they have resorted to short, non-intimidating pseudo-acronyms. Two ingredients jumped out at me-- PGPR and TBHQ. Seeing these innocuous abbreviations immediately triggered an alarm in me and I decided to do a little investigating.

PGPR - Polyglycerol polyricinoleate

• PGPR is a chemical fat replacement made from castor beans (think caster oil). It replaces cocoa butter in the mass production of cheap chocolate because...well, it's cheaper. More to the point, chocolate manufacturers can make more money pulling off the cocoa butter and selling it to the cosmetic industry for much more money than they could ever get leaving it in the chocolate candy. 
• Producers of PGPR extol the virtues of this product as a good solution to "control flow properties [of chocolate] and reduce fat content...allowing smooth, problem-free production for [their] customers." Wow! They're thinking of us. And we can all be relieved that the FDA has signed off on it as "generally regarded as safe" (GRAS), even though no long-term testing has ever been done on it. 
• But of course PGPR, however safe it might be, is not cocoa butter. PGPR is made up primarily (80%-90%) of ricinoleic acid. Ricinoleic acid is a man-made polyunsaturated Omega-9 fatty acid. Cocoa butter on the other hand, is a naturally occuring element of the cocoa bean, comprised of a unique blend of palmitic acid, stearic acid, and oleic acid. It is 59% saturated fat and 38% monounsaturated (from Know Your Fats, Mary G. Enig). Keep in mind that fatty acids are not interchangeable in the body. The body uses each type of fatty acid in different ways in our metabolism. Replacing one type with another will always have different results. The only redeeming factor of PGPR is that it is not hydrogenated, and therefore is free of transfat. If you're worried about saturated fat, you shouldn't be-- your body needs it, loves it, and makes it from scratch when it has the available materials to do so. On the other hand, you need very little polyunsaturates.

TBHQ - Tertiary Butylhydroquinone

• TBHQ is a chemical preservative used to keep fats from going rancid. It is an antioxidant derived from petroleum. While it takes a whole gram to be considered "toxic" by the FDA, it is in fact an unnatural chemical that the body has no use for and must figure out how to get rid of when we consume it. The FDA allows 0.2mg per gram of fat in the food. So in other words, you would have to eat 500 grams of TBHQ-preserved fat before a toxic effect would be felt. How much fatty processed food do you eat? Don't forget to count things like McDonald's (and every other brand) chicken nuggets. If you're wondering what products this chemical is in, there's a short list on the Healthy Tips website. If you start looking, you'll probably find it in many other products as well.
• The reason TBHQ is used in Hershey's candy in the first place is that the stable saturated fats naturally occuring in the cocoa beans are removed and replaced by unstable vegetable oils. It wouldn't be necessary if they left the cocoa butter where they found it. Other processed foods, like cookies and popcorn, are subject to oxidation (rancidity) when they are made with vegetable oils instead of more stable saturated fats like butter or coconut oil. Without an added stabilizer like TBHQ, they would go bad fast.
• If you're worried about the environment, oils treated with TBHQ, such as frying oils used by restaurants and then discarded afterward, have significantly reduced biodegradability. A .02% concentration results in a 25% loss in biodegradability; and a 2% concentration results in a 56% loss in biodegradability.
• Is this substance as safe as we're led to believe? There doesn't seem to be much in the way of documentation dealing with the cumulative effects of TBHQ in the body. I did find one Canadian study that found detrimental effects in some test animals at higher doses, but the results were not clearly stated in layman's terms. The conclusion was simply that .02% should be safe. As with every additive in our food, harmful effects are always dealt with as a fraction of a single food. Once the additive is declared safe, manufacturers put it in food after food after food. And before you know it, it's in everything and no longer a fraction of a single food. Cumulative effect is rarely addressed by the food industry. This is why it is so important to take control of what you eat by reading labels and being aware of all additives--even the supposedly "safe" ones.

Moral of the story? Neither one of these ingredients will kill you ... immediately. But a regular diet of unnatural foods will ultimately take its toll. I'm reminded of the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden. God told them they would die if they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent said, "You won't surely die." And so they ate the fruit. And they didn't die-- that day, anyway. It actually took over 900 years in their case. But the point is, they died, though they were meant to be immortal.

The wrong food will damage your health and kill you prematurely. Your body has wonderful healing powers, but a habit of eating all the wrong things will take its toll in illness and misery. We see this happening all around us. When we should be living well into our 80s and 90s, more people are dying of heart disease, cancer, and a host of other chronic illnesses before they ever reach the moderate age of 60.

We're all going to die, of course, but we don't have to be miserable on the way there. Chronic illness can be avoided by avoiding the foods that promote it.

We can all take back our health by choosing to eat foods that are as close to nature as we can get. If we don't buy it, they won't make it!