You Are What You Eat

maggie

There is an old saying, “You are what you eat,” which means that if you eat good food, you’ll be healthy, and if you don’t, you won’t.
But do we really know what we’re eating?
In the past year or two, the news media has reported on foods that are purportedly one thing, but are instead something else, usually something cheaper, of poorer quality, or not meant for human consumption.
You buy beef, but it’s really horse meat. You buy salmon, but it’s really dyed white fish. You buy saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, but it’s been doctored with red dye, a substance known to cause cancer.
I recently read about a non-profit website called the USP Fraud Database intended to help regulators and large-scale purchasers spot food scams and substitutes. The database has over 2,000 foods that have been known to be a product of fraud based on food-related research studies. The database even lists those research studies in case you want to know the source and/or to read more about them.
If you type in “saffron,” that spice I mentioned before, you’ll find that there are over 100 “adulterants,” or substances put into it or in place of it that shouldn’t be there, including flowers, other spices, and even chalk! Yuck!
You can take a look at the USP Fraud Database yourself and search for foods you commonly eat. But, then again, sometimes ignorance is bliss.