What Is Actually In It

NUTRITION AND ANTI-INFLAMMATORY LIVING · 11 MIN READ

I was standing in my kitchen with a package in my hand, googling a word I could not pronounce.

It was a colouring. And what came back was that it is made from insects. Female scale insects, farmed, dried and crushed, and the result is the pink or red in many things people eat every day.

I read it twice. Then I put the package down on the counter and stood there.

Not because an insect will hurt me. It will not. That is not the part that got me.

It was that I had been eating it for years and nobody had thought I needed to know.

If you have ever turned something over, read one word on the back, and felt the floor tilt slightly, this post is for you. And if you have never done it, I would gently suggest you pick up whatever is nearest to you in your kitchen and turn it around while you read this.

What I used to look at, and what I missed

For most of my life I read labels. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to tell you I never looked, and it is not true.

I looked at calories. Sugar. Trans fats. Protein.

I could tell you the macros of almost anything in my cupboard, but I could not have told you many of the ingredients in those items.

That changed the first time when I went plant based, because suddenly I had to read the ingredient list properly. But I was reading it for one thing only. I was scanning for animal products. Everything else went past me.

It changed the second time, and permanently, after the mould poisoning.

What I was told then was that my body was overrun and was not clearing things the way it should. Which meant that everything going in mattered, in a way it had not before. Not only what I ate. What I put on my skin, what I cleaned with, what I breathed.

That is when I started reading every word. And that is when I found the insect.

What my body does now

I want to say this part plainly, because it is my experience and not a diagnosis of yours.

I can tell within hours.

It arrives as a reaction in my gut first. Then brain fog, the kind where I am reading the same sentence repeatedly. A stuffiness in my head that feels like the beginning of a cold and is not one. Puffiness. And soreness in my joints that has no other explanation, because I have not done anything to earn it.

When I eat something with a long list of additives in it, that is the sequence, and it is reliable enough that I no longer wonder about it.

I am not going to tell you your body will do the same thing, or that this is a test you can run on yourself and trust. Bodies are different, and I am one woman. What I will say is that I spent years feeling those things and having no idea they were connected to anything, and once I knew, I could not unknow it.

Nobody has to tell you it came from an insect

Here is what I found when I went looking properly, and it is worse than the insect.

The colourings are called cochineal extract and carmine. You will also see them written as Natural Red 4, or as E120 on anything labelled for Europe. Worth knowing all four, because they are the same thing.

Until fairly recently, in the United States they could be declared on an ingredient list as nothing more specific than colour added. The FDA changed that and now requires them to be named, which came into effect in 2011.

But read why the change happened. It was not about transparency. It was in response to reports of severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, and a citizen petition asking for protection.

And here is the part that made me put my laptop down.

People asked the FDA to also require labels to disclose that these colourings come from insects. The FDA declined. Its position was that the insect origin is not material information, meaning not relevant to what might happen to you from using the product as intended.

Which is technically correct. It will not harm you.

But I would have liked to decide that for myself. And if you keep kosher or halal, or you are vegetarian or vegan, or you simply have a view about what you put in your mouth, so would you.

Natural flavours, and what that phrase legally means

This is the one. If you take a single thing from this post, take this one.

The regulatory definition of a natural flavour is broad. It covers essential oils, oleoresins, essences, extractives, protein hydrolysates, distillates, and products of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, so long as the flavouring constituents originate from a natural source and the significant function in the food is flavouring rather than nutrition.

Read that list again. It is describing processes, not ingredients.

What it means in practice is that natural flavour is a category, not a substance. It can be a mixture of many things. It has to have started from something in nature, and after that a great deal is permitted.

It also does not have to be named. A company does not have to tell you which flavour compounds are in there, or how many, or from what. It is two words on a label standing in for something you are not entitled to see.

There is an additional twist worth knowing. Regulations can require a company to write natural flavours rather than the actual thing. If a cereal is called something with blueberry in the name, but it is flavoured with a trace of extract and contains no actual blueberries, the company is required to write natural flavour. So the words on the ingredient list can be there precisely because the real thing is absent.

And in Canada, on the front of the box, the guidance around natural claims is looser than most people assume. Claims like made with natural flavour can appear on foods that also contain synthetic or artificial ingredients, or that have gone through heavy processing, provided the specific ingredient being described meets the criteria.

So this is my line, and you can take it or leave it. If a package says naturally flavoured, I put it down. Not because I know it will hurt me. Because I have decided I am no longer interested in eating things that are not willing to tell me what they are.

Safe on its own is not the same as safe

The response you will get, if you ask about any single additive, is that it has been assessed and is permitted at the levels used.

That is usually true, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But notice what that sentence is actually measuring. It is measuring one additive. It is assessed on its own, in isolation, against a limit set for that substance.

It is not measuring the forty other things you ate that day. It is not measuring what happens when the same handful of compounds appear in your breakfast, your lunch, your snack, your drink and your dinner, every day, for twenty years, alongside everything else you are absorbing through your skin and your lungs.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a genuine and acknowledged limitation of how food safety assessment works. Substances get evaluated one at a time, because that is what is practical, and the cumulative real-world picture is far harder to study.

I am not asking you to be frightened of a single ingredient. I am asking you to notice that nobody is adding it up, which means the only person in a position to add it up is you.

The things I bought because I thought they were the good choice

This is the part that still gets me, because I was trying so hard.

Plant-based milks. I bought them for years thinking I had made a healthier choice, because there was no dairy in them. When I finally read the lists properly, the fillers and gums and additives in some of them were remarkable.

Plant-based yogurts, the same. Worse in some cases.

Protein powder, plant-based and otherwise, which I was drinking specifically to look after myself. I read the label one day and had to sit with the fact that I had been doing that daily.

And this is the trap. We have been taught to read one word on the front of a package and let it stand in for the whole product.
Plant based. Vegan. Gluten free. Dairy free. Keto friendly. Sugar free. No added sugar. High protein. No trans fats. Allergen free. No artificial colours, dyes, or flavours. No preservatives. Non-GMO. All natural. Made with real fruit. Made with whole grains. Naturally sweetened.
 
And some of these are completely true while telling you nothing. No artificial colours means no synthetic dyes. It does not mean no colours. Carmine is a natural colour, so a product containing it can carry that claim, and carmine is the one the FDA changed the labelling rules for because of severe allergic reactions.

The natural one was the one with the documented risk.

They describe one narrow thing, and we read them as a verdict on the whole.

I have picked up items that were vegan and gluten-free and marketed as a healthy treat, turned them over, and found a list I would not put in my body.

That sounds cynical. I would call it neutral. The front of the box is marketing, and it is doing its job. The back of the box is closer to the truth, and it is the only part I read.

What I actually do, standing in the shop

Here is the real sequence, shortcuts included.

I flip it over before I look at anything else. I do not read the front at all now, and that alone has changed what ends up in my cart.

First I look at the allergen statement, because it is fast and it is at the bottom, and it tells me quickly whether this is even a candidate.

Then I read the whole ingredient list, in order.

If the list is long, that is frequently enough. I put it back. A long list on a processed food is telling you something before you have read a single word of it.

And then the rule that does most of the work.

I do not stand there researching anymore. I did that for a long time and it was exhausting and it made me a bit obsessive, and I want to be honest about that phase because I do not think it was good for me. Now the unknown word is the answer. I do not need to know what it does. I need to not be eating it.

There is also an app I use called Yuka. I am not affiliated with it in any way and nobody is paying me to say this. You scan the barcode and it tells you what the additives are and what is known about them. It is not perfect and I do not treat it as gospel, but on a tired evening in a supermarket it does the looking-up that I no longer have the energy for.

One more thing. This post is about food, and food is only part of it. What you wash with, clean with, and put on your skin is its own subject and its own list of words nobody explains. That is a whole other conversation.

What actually makes me angry

It is not any single ingredient. It is the arrangement.

These companies have built an entire industry on the fact that we are busy. We work too much, we are tired, we have families and appointments and second jobs, and food that is fast and cheap and requires no thought is exactly what an exhausted person reaches for. That is not a moral failing on our part. It is a business model, and it works.

And it is sold to us as a gift. Convenience. Time back in your day.

I do not think that is what is happening.

If what you eat is contributing to how unwell you are, then it is not giving you time. It is borrowing time from the end and charging you interest, and you will pay it back in years you do not get to spend in a body that works.

Yes, cooking from scratch takes longer. I am not going to lie to you about that. It takes planning and it takes learning and some weeks it is genuinely a lot.

And that is the thing being quietly taken.

What I wish somebody had told me before I started

When I began reading labels properly I went through a stretch where I was frightened of everything in my own kitchen. Everything looked contaminated. I got obsessive and I googled constantly and I made myself miserable, and I do not think any of that was necessary.

So let me tell you what I wish I had known.

Processed food contains preservatives and stabilisers for a reason. They keep it shelf stable. That is not a scandal, it is chemistry, and knowing that takes some of the horror out of the list.

You are not going to fix this in a weekend. It is a learning curve, and it is meant to be.

You can build the convenience back. Batch cooking. Freezing. Dehydrating. Having things ready so that the tired version of you has something to reach for. That is the actual work, and it is completely doable.

And you are not alone in it. There are a great many people living well this way, and they all started exactly where you are, holding a package and feeling slightly ill about it.

You do not have to do all of it. Start with one category. Start with whatever you eat most days, because that is where the arithmetic lives.

Turn it over

I am not asking you to be afraid of your food. I spent a while there and it was not a healthier place to live.

I am asking you to look.

You have been making decisions about your body based on the front of a box that was designed by people whose job is to sell you the box. That is all. The information you actually need is on the other side, in small print, and it is there because somebody was legally required to put it there.

Turn it over. Read the whole thing. Put back the ones that will not tell you what they are.

You are allowed to start now.

You do not have to work this out alone

 If you read all that and felt slightly overwhelmed, that is a normal response, and it passes.

Take one thing from this list. Not the whole list.

Come sit with us. The TRAC community is full of women swapping what they actually buy, which is worth more than any article. The membership is free. → Join us

Or work with me one-on-one. If you want somebody alongside you while you work out what your own body is reacting to, we can do that together. → Book a call

If you are at the start of this and mostly wondering what is left to eat, I wrote about that in What Can You Even Eat?.

And if the exhaustion behind all of this is the part that landed, that is in What Your Body Has Been Carrying.

You are allowed to want to know what is in your food.

That is not being difficult, and it is not being obsessive. It is reading the label of something you are about to put inside your body.

And you are allowed to be partway through this and still learning. I am.

With you,

Jennifer