Interesting piece in the NY Times about the use of artificial food coloring. Groups have tried unsuccessfully to get the FDA to place warnings on products that contain artificial coloring siting hyper-activity among the many possible outcomes for labeling.
What is really scary to me about artificial coloring is that a generation of Americans have grown up eating processed food with these outrageous colors. The times article speaks of side by side taste tests where the only difference in the test products is the coloring. Most choose the product with the artificial food coloring.
Without the artificial coloring FD&C Yellow No. 6, Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks would look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect. Not surprisingly, in taste tests, people derived little pleasure from eating them.
Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring.
“People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren’t much fun to eat,” said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university’s Food and Brand Lab
It is no mystery that we live in a visual society but has it come to the point that our sense of taste is overridden by our sense of sight? Will this lack of instinctively knowing what food is suppose to look like make it even harder to eat healthy and avoid the temptations of the Food Processing Giants and their marketeers? My own daughter won't eat Chicken off the bone but will eat Nuggets. Could texture be another issue? Every nugget looks eerily the same unlike the reality of nature.
In an effort to be unbiased I have linked to Frito-lay so you can read about their natural products and healthier choices.
Dr David Marcon
Work Smarter Not Harder!
Cincinnati, Ohio
wwwdrdavidmarcon.com
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