Usefully Useless

So I’m eating a bag of “Kettle Chips”, with “sea salt and crushed black pepper”. Proudly on the front of the bag is “absolutely nothing artificial”.

Now I wonder, did these crisps come from a salt and pepper crisp tree? Let’s check those ingredients.

Select potatoes, sunflower oil, potato maltodextrin, potato starch, sea salt, black pepper, yeast extract, citric acid from sugar beet molasses, black pepper extract

How many of those are natural? Answer is not too many.

Potatoes are an artificially engineered version of a nightshade family plant once native to South America. They bear little resemblance to their natural ancestor and do not exist in nature.

Sunflower oil? You need to specially and artificially process sunflower seeds to get it.

Potato maltodextrin is made in large steel reaction vessels by the partial hydrolysis of potato starch. It is entirely artificial.

Potato starch is extracted from mashed up potatoes using solvents.

Sea salt is specially treated to remove all the things in seawater which will, given a chance, make you very ill. So again, it’s artifically refined.

Black pepper, for a change, is actually natural. Well, after we artificially process it. The berries of the pepper plant piper nigrum are dried in large factories which use giant fans to blow hot air over them. Once dried, they’re peppercorns ready for use.

Yeast extract is used because it contains massive amounts of monosodium glutamate and glutamic acid, two nutrients essential for life and good tasting. Flavourings, basically. It’s made by either hydrolysis or autolysis: Kill the yeast, filter off the cell walls and the contents of the yeast cells are the “yeast extract”.

Citric acid from sugar beet again requires extensive refinement to filter off the vegetable matter and the sugar. Artificial citric acid is much purer, as is citric acid from citrus sources – Sugar beet is just far cheaper.

Finally, black pepper extract. This is probably some piperine or some concentrate of it. Piperine is the slightly toxic chemical in black pepper that gives them their characteristic heat. This is used because it’s dirt cheap and means that less actual black pepper is needed to give it the same hot taste. It’s a cost-cutting measure, that’s all.

On the back of the pack are even more bold statements:

We don’t add MSG

Yes you do. What on earth do you think’s in that yeast extract? Yep, the exact reason you’re even using yeast extract – Because it contains huge amounts of MSG and that’s a flavour you just can’t get any other way.

We never use artificial flavours or colours

Calling cultured, processed and refined yeast “natural” is rather like calling a steel bar natural just because the iron ore was. Yep, that’s a flavouring.

We don’t use hydrogenated fat

I’m sure you don’t use diamonds either. Why are you telling us this? Hydrogenated fats would be unsuitable anyway!

We know the origin of all our ingredients

So what? As long as they meet quality standards, does it matter if they come from Surrey or Scotland? Better yet, why aren’t you telling us the origins?

We only use sunflower oil

Because it’s cheaper than the other suitable oil, olive oil.

The colour of our chips is determined by natural sugars in the potatoes we use

Same with everyone else’s.

Exactly how abstracted from nature do we need to get before something becomes artificial? Kettle Foods seems to think that drying, washing with solvent, filtering off the solvent and all different kinds of refinement means the resulting chemicals are still “natural”? Indeed, processing potato feedstock until it no longer contains any naturally occuring components means the end product is still natural?

By that logic, a car is perfectly natural. The aluminium came from natural bauxite, the steel from natural iron ores, the plastics from natural oil.

Go here to read about the story if you like. I’m not about to go into the event, but instead why it’s happened.

Why would anyone want to contaminate milk with melamine? What’s there to gain?

Usually milk is tested for concentration, to ensure it isn’t watered down or adulterated, and this is done by testing its protein content. Watered down milk, or milk powder cut with flour, will contain less protein as it contains less milk.

The standard test done is simply measuring nitrogen content, since in milk most of the nitrogen is in protein. Protein in milk is usually around 15% nitrogen by mass. However, melamine is 66% nitrogen by mass and so can be added in to watered down milk to make it appear to be undiluted.

Normally this would be almost undetectable, without specific reason to test for melamine. Melamine is about as toxic as normal table salt, you could drink melamine contaminated milk every day for your whole adult life and merely have a heightened risk of kidney stones, nobody would notice without specifically testing for it

It’s fraud, plainly and simply. By passing off the milk as undiluted and passing off animal feed as higher in protein than it is, the companies who buy the stuff to use it are being ripped off.

Melamine itself is harmless, but mix it with cyanuric acid (again totally harmless) and the two form melamine cyanurate, which is insoluble and forms crystals in the kidneys, kidney stones. An adult’s kidney is large enough to simply expel the crystals before they grow any larger, but a baby (or small animal) cannot.

If melamine contaminated milk finds its way into infant formula, then the problems start. A baby’s kidney will form melamine cyanurate itself, infants do not have the same kidney function or renal chemistry that adults (and older children) do, meaning melamine is much more harmful, rapidly forming kidney stones which can prove fatal in babies.

It’s not just milk formula, however. Other products tested and sold by protein content are also known to have been contaminated in the 2006-2008 timeframe, such as animal feed. This is harmless to humans, but did kill 1,500 raccoon dogs being bred for fur and can find its way into eggs produced from chickens fed with contaminated feed.

China already sentenced two people to death for their part in the 2008 scandal (which affected 300,000 children, hospitalised 50,000 of them and killed six) , it’s likely more will follow. China is very protective of its booming export trade and will deal very harshly with people or companies which threaten confidence in its exports.

Many food manufacturers are now prominently displaying “low”, “medium” or “high” glycemic index on their labelling and saying that low “GI”, “Gi” (g-ee) is better and makes you feel fuller for longer. For example, the text that Tesco uses is:

Low to medium GI foods help you feel fuller for longer.

Is there some truth to the marketing or is it yet another passing craze?

Glycemic index is a measure of the insulin response to a food and was originally important to diabetics and those treating diabetes. It’s all about carbohydrates, the body’s primary energy supply (unless you’re on a suicide-diet, such as Atkins), which are long chains of various sugars, usually glucose, fructose and lactose. A food with a high GI releases sugars into the blood faster and so provokes a greater insulin response. Part of appetite is blood sugar level, so a steady and slow release of carbohydrate is better, right?

Now it’s very important to note that foods high in carbohydrates (even simple sugars such as fruit) may well have quite a low GI because they tend to be acidic, the presence of acid in the food will lower the GI by making the sugars more difficult to absorb. Also foods very low in carbohydrates (meats, etc.) will have a low GI, but will not make one feel fuller for longer, as they have little effect on blood sugar chemistry.

Complicating things further, GI is a calibrated scale, so needs a fixed point of reference. Manufacturers disagree on what to use as a reference, some using white bread, some using glucose. If using glucose, then a GI of 100 is the highest possible, because 100 is glucose and nothing has a higher GI than the simplest of sugars. If using white bread as the 100 point, then glucose is about 145, which complicates things. This means that labels are usually relative as “high”, “medium” or “low”.

Diabetics should avoid high GI foods, but what about everyone else? What harm could a bit of sugar have? Well, it turns out quite a lot. The blood sugar spikes after a meal cause some stress to the body, both by oxidative and insulinic means, so a smaller spike with a longer release lowers the stress. This is associated in many studies with a considerably lower risk of coronary heart disease and type-2 diabetes.

So have we finally found a food-fad with a bit of truth? Not so fast. All food-fads start off with a little truth taken either out of context or out of proportion and this one is no different.

The GI’s effect on blood sugar is modulated from one person to the next by insulin and how well the person responds with insulin. Diabetics respond very poorly (this is why they’re diabetic!) and is only one extreme of an entire spectrum. GI added to insulin response gives the glycemic response (GR), which has the real benefits…

…But with many caveats. Your GR varies wildly over the course of a day and from one day to the next. It depends on your level of activity, your weight (overweight people have extremely poor GR, overweight diabetics have almost no GR worth mentioning) and foods with a low GI may actually contain huge amounts of carbohydrates, such as fruit, which has a terrible effect on blood sugar for much longer. For example, a fillet of fish has a low GI because it has very little carbohydrate. An orange has a low GI because it digests slowly. These two foods have extremely different effects on blood sugar levels, the fish will raise blood sugar very little, but the orange will raise it and keep it high for hours.

There’s demonstrably much more benefit from consuming carbohydrates in a controlled manner rather than using a poorly dimensioned measure which gives only a quarter of the story. It’s better to go low calorie than low GI. Rather than work around a poor glycemic response, it’s better to improve the response to begin with. Well exercised people of a healthy weight have the best glycemic responses and will benefit the least from lower GI food. Poorly exercised people of unheathy weights will benefit best from getting off their backsides and eating less burgers, not from eating low GI food.

The end result is that unless you’re diabetic then GI numbers or ratings are misleading at worst and meaningless at best.

With all the media frenzy over the Mexican swine flu virus, I thought it might be nice if someone actually explained what’s going on and why. So I did.

The first thing many people ask is “What the hell does H1N1 mean?”. It’s the first thing I asked anyway. These are subtypes of the influenza A virus, we know about sixteen of each H and N. The H is a type of protein known as haemaggluttinin, the N is a protein called neuraminidase, both are the external face of the virus, what the immune system (and cells under attack) see.

All our modern flu is descended, at least in part, from what was quite literally the mother of all flu – The H1N1, so numbered because that was the first one we studied. This was the Spanish flu of 1918 where two in five were infected, globally, and 50 million people died. This H1N1 never went away, it’s the seasonal flu that seems to go around every winter, not quite as deadly as it was back then.

Due to every fundamentalist’s worst enemy, evolution, flu changes rapidly but even for a virus, which evolve at lightning pace anyway, influenza A is something special. It has numerous subtypes which stick to certain species. The main three we’re concerned with are human flu, avian flu and porcine (swine) flu.

The virus’ structure is very simple, it consists of a genome of 4,400 amino acids made into RNA, consisting of just under 14,000 bases. It has just eight genes, and each gene is modular, the virus can be assembled by just tossing the genes together, they’ll arrange themselves, this is how genes are so mobile between species in influenza A.

We initially thought the devastating pandemic of 1918 was caused by intermediate shuffling. As pigs can get BOTH avian and human viruses (humans don’t get avian viruses and birds don’t get human viruses) it’s common for the two viruses to share the same host. Due to how a virus replicates, when both viruses are in the same cell, the results will be a random shuffling of their genomes. We believe this to be how flu gains new genetics, it shares between the avian and human lines (and the pig lines!) while in pigs, the pig being an intermediary.

In 2002, it was revealed that of the 4,400 amino acids in H1N1 (which before 1918 was a bird strain) less than 30 of them changed to make it transmissible in and deadly to humans. Normal bird flus, which are usually strains of H5N1 and H5N2 these days, cannot transmit from human to human (they cannot cross the lining of the lungs) so the bird flu scare of a few years back ONLY infected humans who had direct contact with the birds, it was not contagious from human to human. The scare was that it would encounter a H1N1 variant and so gain the ability to transmit in humans, this appears not to have happened.

This means that the H1N1 Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not use a porcine intermediary, it gained its ability to kill and travel with humans while still in birds. We’re worried that H5N1 will do that.

We need to be on alert because, even if this variant of H1N1 from Mexico does turn out to be fairly benign (we believe it will), it’s spreading so rapidly that it will inevitably encounter the H5N1 “bird flu” in pigs, pigs in China already carry H5N1. Once this happens, it’d be like adding the right two chemicals together to make a bomb.

Flu is constantly evolving at a phenomenal rate, even by virus standards (only HIV evolves faster, but that’s because HIV is an extremely unstable virus), we added the antigen H16 in 2005 and N9 was discovered in the 1980s. Drugs which worked very well against it in 1994 (95% effective) are now (2008 research) less than 1% effective. Each strain constantly shuffles its genes around and obtains new versions of them (or reobtains older ones) and so changes ever so slightly.

In all, don’t worry too much H1N1 is a common variant of flu and most of us have partial immunity to it.

So, for various types of the flu virus:
H1N1 is everywhere and usually appears each winter, it was the Spanish flu of 1918, a variety of it is also the Mexican swine flu everyone’s so fussed about.
H1N2 is also endemic to humans (and pigs), like most H1N1s, it is not usually fatal.
H2N2 was the Asian flu of 1957 and is thought to have died out (though a virus with the same H and Ns could reappear)
H3N2 was the Hong Kong flu of 1969 and is still sometimes seen in pigs.
H5N1 was a threat in 2006 but did not gain the ability to transfer from human to human.
H7N7 can infect species of animal most varieties of flu cannot, but does not infect humans.

With all that out of the way, why is this particular flu so worrying? Part of it is in the body’s response to it. Most of the time, we just feel lousy and sneeze a lot, then get better a week or two later. H1N1 and H5N1 can, however, become “cascade reaction” forms where the body sends FAR too many lymphocytes to the lungs to combat the virus, these form mucous which coats the inside of the lungs and makes it hard, if not impossible to breathe. The victim then asphyxiates. So far it’s unclear (and unlikely – Spanish flu H1N1 lost this ability to become the common H1N1 of today) whether this strain does that, but all flus can be deadly due to opportunistic effects, where an unrelated infection (such as pneumonia) takes advantage of the body’s defences being busy with the flu.

To kill some myths that have been travelling around Twitter and Facebook:
- You cannot catch the flu from eating pork, bacon or another porcine product, even if you eat it raw like the bloody Germans do. Not only is the virus not present in muscle tissue, but it cannot survive our digestive tract, is destroyed by freezing and cooking and is generally extremely fragile outside a living host.
- You’re very unlikely to catch it from a live or dead pig, the risk is in human to human transfer.
- No, it won’t kill half of everyone. It caused most trouble in Mexico where it interacted with another local form of flu. Cases in the United States have so far been no more pathogenic than normal flu.
- No, it is not a strain of H1N1 escaped from a lab, it’s a purely wild-derived strain.

Following right on from the post below, this one visits hydrogenated vegetable oil. I’ll be touching on the chemistry of it too, but nothing too scary.

The basic chemical structure of organic chemistry is the carbon chain, which is a line of carbon atoms all bonded to each other. Each carbon can be involved in four bonds, so it usually goes CH3, CH2, CH2 … CH2, CH3. This’d be a long chain alkane, quite similar to what fuels your car.

The longer the chain gets, the stronger it can interact with other molecules near it, which is an attractive force. This makes them boil at a higher temperature and melt at a higher temperature. Diesel is thicker than petrol for this reason.

In the chain, carbon can be double-bonded to another carbon (this is what makes an alkene) and this is quite special, because double bonds do not rotate. Normal single bonds are freely rotatable which means the molecules can pack more tightly. If we have a double bond, the molecule can’t rotate around it, so can’t pack as tightly. It’ll have a lower melting point so be more likely to exist as liquid at room temperature.

Vegetable oils have quite a few double bonds in their carbon chain, such as maleic acid. (For chemistry students, this is a but-2-ene chain with two carboxylic acid groups on either end) We consider it to be unsaturated, a chemical term meaning how well hydrogenated it is. Since a double bond can be broken to a single bond by adding two hydrogen atoms to one of the bonds (one either end), it is not saturated. A saturated fat has few to no double bonds and has a much higher melting point – This is desirable, as we’ll see below.

We hydrogenate the fatty acids, then, (maleic acid will become succinic acid, a butane chain with carboxylics on either end) to adjust their physical properties. Margarine goes well on bread, but sunflower oil likely will not. By hydrogenating the sunflower oil, we make it more solid and more appetising. Few would pour sunflower oil on their morning toast, but many spread margarine on it.

This brings us now to the tricky bit: trans-fats. In nature, biology favours cis-fats and trans-fats are very rare. This is all about the conformation around the double bond, it looks like either a bowl or a Z. The bowl shape, where the molecule continues off on the same side it entered the double bond is known as “cis” and the other, where the molecule continues on the opposite side is “trans”. Cis is less stable than trans, which is important for hydrogenation.

When we hydrogenate, we break the double bond and form a reaction intermediate. This intermediate can re-form the double bond, but it may form either cis or trans, which trans being favoured. We wanted to add hydrogen across it, but this doesn’t always happen.

The worry is because trans-fats are very rare in nature and don’t metabolise well. Most of them pass straight through the bowel. The usual scaremongers are out in force about it. Trans-fats are linked to heart disease and various obesity statistics, but let’s come back into perspective. People who’s diets are already high in fat are the ones most likely to be high in trans-fats! We already know a high fat diet causes heart disease and obesity so really, the scaremongers are pretty much stating the obvious.

We’ve been doing hydrogenation on a grand scale for almost two hundred years, the current scare is way out of proportion to the actual risks: Someone with a high fat diet who’s already a good bet for heart disease may have a 5% higher chance of it.

My advice here? Sit back, relax and don’t worry about it. It’s just another “fat craze” to add on to the “monounsaturated fat” panic of the 1980s and the “polyunsaturated fat” panic of the 1990s. Both of which were pretty much the same deal, “Fat’s bad for you but THIS ONE is worse!”

A “fat” is a carboxylic acid with none (saturated), one (monounsaturated) or more (polyunsaturated) carbon-carbon double bonds in its chain. The smallest fatty acid is butyric acid (four carbons long) while the smallest common in nature is octyric acid (eight carbons long) and go up to 28. Most of them are unbranched chains and we traditionally exclude methanoic acid, ethanoic acid (acetic acid) and propanoic acid but many chemists use “fatty acid” to mean any acyclic (no benzene rings), aliphatic (no substituents other than the carboxylic) caboxylic acids.

No added sugar! No MSG! GM free! No artificial colours!

Why’s it all there? To increase consumer distrust in food, which then helps these “No added…” brands sell. Is the distrust warranted?

No.

Products with “no added sugar” are usually fruit juices which are incredibly rich in sugar. A glass of fresh orange juice contains about half its own size in sugar – Half a glass filled with sugar. Usually sweeteners are added, such as aspartame or saccharin, to offset the bitter, acidic taste of the citric acid.

The biggest lie, in my opinion, is “MSG-free” or “No MSG!” which is utterly hilarious. Monosodium glutamate is a form of glutamic acid, an essential amino acid (a group of chemicals known as the ‘building blocks of life’) used by almost all life to produce proteins. It’s found at high levels in most vegetables (especially protein sources), all meats, fish, eggs and dairy products. It’s essential for cellular metabolism and tissue growth. So essential, in fact, that we have a pleasant taste receptor specifically for it, known as umami. This is responsible for the unique spice taste of Chinese and Japanese cuisine, where it’s often sourced from seaweed and kelp in traditional dishes.

“MSG-free” is rather like saying “Vitamin-free” or “No added minerals”.

Artificial additives are the next point to make. People have this strange preference for natural chemicals, which are impure and often tainted with the numerous poisons that plants use for defence. Our artificial production is pure, we know exactly what we put in to make the final chemical and in exactly the right amounts. I’d sooner drink water made artificially by burning hydrogen than water from a lake, which has who knows what in it. If we isolate natural vitamin C from, say, fruit juice and then make some via amino acid synthesis, there is no test we could do to tell them apart – They are the same chemical, the same substance and are identical in every way.

GM is a whole other subject, one I covered earlier in this blog.

So next time you’re wondering what to eat, wonder how much your food’s packaging is trying to scare you with baseless nonsense. Go for the brands which don’t spout deception and we’ll all be better off. After all, if they’re deceiving you in the packaging, would you trust them to make what they say they’ve made?

You’ve got to hand it to the Germans. They’re as obsessed with amorphous shaped meat as we are with pies. Hamburgers, bratwurst, brockwurst, frankfurter and virtually all sausages ultimately derive from Germany (and before that from mutton patties that the Mongols made). Eating a few hotdogs, I started to wonder what meat it actually was (rather like how a vegan wonders which chemical in soy will give them cancer out of the 100+ recognised carcinogens in it) and imagine my surprise when I found it was 55% chicken!

From the label on the tin: Chicken (Mechanically recovered) (55%), Water, Pork Fat, Pork Collagen, Salt, Wheat Flour, Chicken Fat, Thickeners (E412, E451), Beef Collagen, Herbs and Spices (Contains celery), Flavouring (contains Milk Lactose, Soya, Egg), Natural Smoke Flavour, Preservative (E250)

The use of mechanically recovered meat in sausages is widespread – It’s what’s scraped off bones when they’re fed through a wire mesh after proper cuts of meat have been taken and quite suited for making sausages and burgers. I was just surprised as to how little pork it had in it, indeed the only pork is fat and gristle (collagen). There’s a little chicken fat and beef collagen in there too.

Of the “E-numbers” (which, I will add, are a wonderful way to standardise nomenclature), we start with E412 and E451, which are guaran and triphosphate. Guaran is an extract of the guar bean and around eight times better at thickening than cornstarch. Triphosphate is actually an emulsifier. Essentially this keeps the water content of the hotdog at the proper texture, thickness and stops it from leaking out. The preservative is E250, sodium nitrite. It inhibits fungal and bacterial growth and means the hotdogs do not have to be refrigerated and do not spoil in transit. It is very difficult to find any meat, especially pre-cooked, which doesn’t contain sodium or potassium nitrite. Why’s that then?

Poultry products, especially in mixed-meat servings, are vectors of three very nasty pathogens – listeria, botulism and salmonella. Salmonella especially is widespread, it’s as harmless to chickens as E. coli is to mammals (there are more E. coli cells in your body than human cells) but can cause deadly infections in mammals, especially humans. All three can grow under refrigeration (listeria can even grow when the meat is frozen!) but none of them grow well at all if nitrite is present. Indeed some countries do not permit the selling of prepackaged precooked meat which has not been nitrite treated. In the UK the pressure is more litigous – Wash the meat with sodium nitrite solution or risk extremely expensive legal action when people contract listeria? Here’s an interestingly amusing activist website which is about as grounded in reality as most vegan militants are.

Hotdogs, of course, are precooked and are quite defined by it. This means that the fat content of them is melted and spread out, the nitrites largely oxidised to nitrates and nitrosamines (the latter is carcinogenic, but only in very large quantities and you still shouldn’t include it in products for babies) and the colour which is added by the flavouring and pork collagen is leeched into the chicken.

Interesting facts about hotdogs (the sausage, also known as the frankfurter)

• In the US, they can contain no more than 20% mechanically recovered beef or pork, so everyone uses chicken.
• Sometimes known as “wieners”, this comes from the German name for Vienna, Wien which has its own variety of sausage mostly made of pork
• They contain high amounts of calcium as a result of being mechanically recovered
• As a sausage, the frankfurter has been around since the fifteenth century
• The name comes from “dachshund” (little dog), the first commercial sausage-sandwich of success were sold as “dachshund sausages” after their shape
• In the early 20th century they were called just “dogs” until they became associated with baseball in the US where, on cold days, vendors would advertise “hot dogs”
• Hot dog purists (yes, they exist) consider adding ketchup to be blasphemy since the strongly spiced and flavoured ketchup completely overpowers the subtly smoked sausage
• Adding English mustard to hot dogs sold in London was a common offering in the 1970s with more than a little humour. American tourists had no idea of the strength of English mustard as opposed to the more bland taste of their French mustard.
• There’s no standard recipe for hot dogs in terms of chicken, turkey, pork or beef content

There’s more nitty-gritty about how these kinds of meats are prepared in this post.

Colloquially it’s a saying about sausages and law: Those who like it shouldn’t know how it’s made. It applies to a lot more foods too. This post is going to talk about mechanically recovered meat and meat reforming.

Nutritionally it’s near identical to any standard cut of meat, so there’s no health issue to worry about over what would be normal. What’s more fun is how it’s made and what it is.

We all have exposure to MRM and reformed meat, it’s what makes up those pre-sliced ham packets you can get anywhere. Mechanical recovery and reformation are two different processes and need not occur together (but MRM is almost always reformed, while reformed meat is not always MRM).

The particular example I’m using is a pack of ham slices I have here – “Thinly Sliced Ham”:
Pork (78%), Water, Salt, Dextrose, Stabilisers (E451, E450), Antioxidant (E301), Preservatives (E252, E250).

To the untrained eye, it looked as though it was just a slice through a block of ham. It’s not. It’s never been. After butchering and carving, a carcass typically has quite a bit of red meat (by ‘meat’ I’m refering to muscle, not offal or other forms of meat, but actual red meat which would otherwise be called ‘pork’) left on it. Some clings to the bones, other chunks are unattractive due to size or position. This is removed by forcing the bones through a mesh of fine metal wires. The result is cartilage, some meat and a few chips of bone. That’s mechanical recovery.

These slivers of meat are partly digested by the addition of enzymes to make them sticky, then forced into a block, which is reforming. The origin is usually quite a few animals from multiple sources. The block is forced together in a compression chamber where square blocks of sticky meat come out one side and a vaguely pink/white slurry sloshes in the other side. Tasty.

They then cure it and steam it before slicing and packaging.

78% pork, though? Most of the other 22% is water. A very light brine is added for three reasons. Firstly because reformed meat is very dry and would stick together in the pack and secondly because people consider meat that’s cold and wet to be fresher than meat that’s cold and dry. Finally and greatest of all is that it bulks out the meat. Sold by weight and 22% of the weight is water.

The salt added is part of the water and usually quite light as far as brine goes. The salt is added for very simple reasons: The reforming process removes salt from the pork which is naturally quite salty and salt is a preservative.

Dextrose is very simply, sugar. Or, rather, glucose, the most basic sugar. “Glucose” itself refers to D-glucose, it is a chiral compound with four chiral centers (centers with reflective symmetry but no superimposition symmetry or rotational symmetry – they make differently structured molecules) in the molecule, giving 16 enantiomers. Eight of them are biologically inactive in that they don’t taste sweet, they provide no energy to the body but are otherwise chemically identical, these are L-glucose and very hard to come by since no biological processes make them. Dextrose always refers to D-glucose. It’s added for taste.

E451 is sodium tripolyphosphate and potassium tripolyphosphate (Na₅P₃O₁₀ and K₅P₃O₁₀) which are used as emulsifiers, preservatives, acidity regulators but overwhelmingly (and especially here) as hydrolysers or emulsifiers – They make food retain water. It adds a rather soapy taste so is used sparingly. Used here it is an emulsifier, but it’s also used in detergents (it softens hard water), toothpaste and industry. While not toxic or harmful in any testing, most juristictions limit how much tripolyphosphate can be added because of its bulking properties, it makes protein-based food (meat, seafood, etc.) take on water so make them heavier. When buying by weight, this adds to the sale price but not to the production cost. In our 22% water ham, it’s there to keep the water in the ham.

E450 is similar to E451, but is E450(i) Disodium diphosphate, E450 (ii) Trisodium diphosphate, E450 (iii) Tetrasodium pyrophosphate, E450 (v) Tetrapotassium pyrophosphate, E450 (vi) Calcium dihydrogen diphosphate. These are a group of diphosphates. For some of them the older “pyrophosphate” name is more common, but they are all actually diphosphate. Diphosphate is extremely important in biology as it is part of the respiration process whereby sugars and fats are metabolised to energy. As a pure chemical, it is slightly toxic and mildly irritant and can cause an allergic reaction to sensitive people when used in food. In food it is used as a buffering agent (resists changes in acidity), an emulsifier as E451 is and as a thickening agent. Here it is an emulsifier…why two? E451 can be quite unpleasantly tasting but E450 is tasteless. It’s added in much larger quantities to soy-based meat ‘alternatives’ which aren’t terribly healthy to begin with.

E301 is the sodium salt of ascorbic acid, vitamin C. It’s used here as an antioxidant, specifically to prevent the formation of nitrosamines from nitrites via contact with oxygen.

E252 is potassium nitrate or saltpetre/saltpeter. It is used as an explosive, a fertiliser and a food additive and has been used for curing meat for hundreds of years. Traditional foods have used potassium nitrate to preserve meat long before the chemical was even known about, usually as ashes from burnt wood.

E250 is why E301 is present, sodium or potassium nitrite. They are antibacterial and antifungal compounds used largely to prevent the occurence of clostridium botulinum (botulism). Nitrites oxidise to nitrosamines which are listed as being potentially carcinogenic, but unproven. Nitrosamines are formed from nitrites and some amino acids (e.g. vitamins, proteins) under high temperatures (frying), acidic environments (e.g. your stomach) and in the presence of oxygen (e.g. in air). Since we can’t get amino acids, the “building blocks” of life, any way other than by eating them then nitrosamines are produced by the body during digestion, mostly from meat. Some studies have linked them to cancers of the gastric tract and oesophagus but at a very low risk. The conversion rate from nitrites isn’t great in the stomach (not hot enough) so risk is very low if anything.

I was wondering two things at half past two (about twenty minutes ago as I write this, about one hour and ten minutes ago as I post it) this morning. What to eat and what to post. So I decided to combine the two.

My victim was a packet of Batchelors Beef flavour Savoury Rice. As I was making it, I was wondering about all the so-called “food scares” we have every so often when the media gets bored. My idea was to list out every ingredient listed on the packet and see what, exactly, they are.

As printed:
Rice, Dried Peas (4%), Flavourings (contain Celery, Milk, Soya), Dried Carrot (2.5%), Dried Onion, Salt, Sugar, Dried Red Pepper (1%), Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Flavour Enhancers (E621, E635, E627), Onion Powder, Colour (Ammonia Caramel (contains Wheat)), Garlic Powder, Black Pepper Extract and Herb Extract.

Rice, dried peas, celery and milk are obvious. The first one worth mentioning is soya. This is a derivative of soy which is a veritable cocktail of poison! Our Western obsession with soy is obvious: It’s cheap, available in huge quantities and very easy to produce. Soy and its products contain enzyme inhibitors which block protein digestion by blocking the enzymes responsible for breaking down proteins into amino acids (the ‘building material’ of most body tissue). We have haemagluttin which causes blood clots, hinders oxygen transport in the blood and stunts growth. Soy contains numerous phytates which make minerals unavailable to the body during digestion, remarkably insidious since the best way to avoid severe mineral deficiency with phytates and phytic acid around is to eat lots of meat. Last, but by far not least, phytoestrogens, chemicals which mimic the female sex hormone. Soy, in any of its forms, is bad news. It has been linked to Asians (especially Chinese) having far higher rates of cancer along the digestive tract than anyone else in the world and with the relatively recent rise in the same cancers among Westerners. Soy-based infant formula is banned in many countries and linked to numerous growth defects, especially in girls (probably due to the phytoestrogens). Dr. Fitzpatrick’s ‘Truth About Soy’ website has more information.

Next up we have dried carrot and dried onion. Carrot, when dried, is virtually tasteless and is used for colour and texture. Onion when dried becomes quite a potent spice, so is used for flavouring.

Salt needs no introduction, it’s an essential mineral with a distinctive taste. It also helps food cook better. Sugar is just for taste and is a dimer of fructose and glucose in its most common form, sucrose. Note that “salts” in a chemical context is not what we usually think of as salt. A salt is the product made when an acid is neutralised. Sodium salts are common in food because sodium is only harmful in huge excess (and is actually necessary for life) and the alternative is using the acid directly (e.g. monosodium glutamate instead of glutamic acid) which is typically not possible since the acid would be in liquid form, the salt in solid.

Dried red peppers are common in this sort of thing, being largely for colour, but also quite a potent spice in their own right.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil is the next big one. Oils are long chain carbon molecules (long chain organics) with various chemical groups. The ones we’re interested in are double bonds (the alkene group) between two carbon atoms. As the molecule cannot rotate around that bond, it’s fixed into shape. This prevents it from getting up close with other molecules, so lowers the melting point. What we do is then react them in a huge reaction vessel with hydrogen and a catalyst, typically nickel, to crack open the double bond into a single bond by adding hydrogen across it. This means the molecule is more free to rotate and can stack well with its fellow molecules, if it can get closer to another molecule, it can solidify more easily (London dispersion forces are stronger) and so the melting point rises: Perfect when you want something closer to the consistency of butter and less like, well, vegetable oil. Now, the big problem there is that we get an amount of some quite nasty stuff in there: Trans-fats. Trans-fats aren’t found in nature and the body’s digestive system doesn’t recognise them as something it can use to make your belly bigger. They’re being more and more linked to all kinds of chronic illnesses and some places have already banned their use while others are considering it.

The flavourings are next, E621, E635 and E627. If anything, european standards mean that manufacturers have to be consistent in their labelling. Starting with E621, we have monosodium glutamate, the sodium salt of glutamic acid, a natural amino acid. The sodium is, of course, removed and the amino acid restored. It has a distinctive taste but was with a health scare some years ago. Even now, some manufacturers advertise “MSG-Free!” as though it were a good thing. MSG is found in nature and quite plentiful (especially in Asian foodstuffs), it is present in high quantities in yeast, soy and many spices. The health scare? Investigation after investigation found utterly no evidence to support any harmful activity by glutamate or glutamic acid, noted its high natural presence and that the human body produces it itself and that amounts which could cause harm in laboratory tests (on rats) were massively high doses involving chemically pure MSG. The verdict? Enjoy the stuff, it tastes nice and indeed the taste itself, umami, is very difficult to obtain any other way because our tongues contain specific receptors for glutamate – It’s something that we’ve evolved to be able to detect and almost everyone finds the taste to be pleasant. Nature wants us to eat this stuff.

E635 refer to guanylic and inosinic acid or their sodium salts in mixed proportions. They’re used as flavour enhancers. They don’t have a flavour themselves but enhance many others, meaning less salt (salt being common salt, sodium chloride) and flavourings are needed. Finally, E627 is guanylic acid alone and used exactly as E635 is (it’s partly the same chemical!) as a flavour enhancer.

That brings us to onion powder, made by pulverising dried onions. It is a very potent flavour but otherwise unremarkable.

Under that is our colour, ammonia caramel, also known as E150c, baker’s caramel or beer caramel. Caramel has no known toxicity and, as an extensively used ingredient, has undergone exhaustive trials and study. It is used as a colour in this case, to stain the rice slightly brown (this is a “beef-flavour” after all).

Finally, we have garlic powder (another very powerful flavouring), black pepper extract (usually simply crushed in water, the dissolvable stuff dissolved, then dried out of the water and added to the food) and herb extract which isn’t specified; This means it legally doesn’t have to be so no known studies have found any cause for concern.

And there we have it. The extensive list of ingredients which make a common modern convenience food everything it is. Flavourings to emulate beef (which typically fail), flavour enhancers to make the taste stronger, vegetables and spices to add texture and colour, a colouring, a bunch of cheap soy and the ever-present hydrogenated vegetable oil, possibly to prevent the rice from clumping.