Minus The Additives, Please!

In the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, I have been pointing out the perils of the additives, and I keep finding articles like this one which find more and more things wrong with the "E" vitamins.

It's not surprising to see the modern childhood epidemic of such symptoms. We're allowing food manufacturers to conduct experiments in chemical tolerance on us and our children. The sad thing is that we will all pay for that, one way or another.

As I found out, our metabolisms have evolved over the millenia (five to ten thousand years, certainly) to make peak use of natural whole foods. Nowhere in our history until the last few hundred years have chemical preservatives additives colourings and flavourings entered our food chain, and it will take another five to ten thousand years before the first humans adapted to such chemicals will appear.

For us, right here and right now, these things are poisons. Nothing more and nothing less. You buy something that has preservatives to prevent natural spoilage, irritants to bring out natural colour, artificial colouring to augment the natural colour, and six different "agents" to prevent sticking caking clotting setting and slumping- and you have a cocktail that is almost guaranteed to throw your body into disarray.

Now look at everything you eat in a week. Take a note of only the additive chemicals, and add the amounts of each up. I almost guarantee that if you have an aveage suburbanite diet you will find that you are having more than the recommended amount of over half of those chemicals.

The scary thing is that each manufacturer makes the decision on how much of each additive to use, based on their product alone. After all, if you buy the competition's foodstuffs as well, then what have they to lose? If you come down with a case of poisoning, they can blame the opposition...

But if you read the ingredients on the label, remember that manufacturers aren't required to list all of them. It's a bit of a voluntary / legal / notsolegal grey area, and of many additives, manufacturers aren't required to inform you if the quantity is below a certain percentage. That means that while one manufacturer might tell you about the E614 they use, while three others won't.

Individually, those amounts may not be worth worrying about - but add upthe E614 in everything you eat during the week - admitted in the label or not - and you may come to a worrying result...