Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Whose The Prettiest Of Them All? None of Y'all :)
A Better look at Natural & Artificial Flavourings used in Foods.
You would have most probably seen these on every and any kind of packaged foods or drinks that you buy or have ever bought, considering that you read the list of ingredients. They are actually not hard to miss since they are almost everywhere and in everything. At some point in time we all have wondered, what are they ? Well here are a few things about them.
What are they ?
Flavours are used as additives to enhance / modify the taste and aroma in food products so that even after months of lying in storage or on shelves the packaged foods still taste fresh and real when consumed.They are also engineered in a way to make you want to consume more of the same products.
Artificial Flavours - These are chemical mixtures made with synthetic ingredients in a lab. Usually produced by fractional distillation and chemical manipulation of various other chemicals and contain other additives as well.
Natural Flavours - Essentially the same thing as artificial flavours, with the only difference being that the base for these is extracted from a substance found in nature ( Animals, plants , etc )to which then various additives are added to.
The actual chemicals in these two kinds of flavours may be exactly the same.Shocking ?
How are they made & Whats inside them?
Flavours are made in the lab by scientists called "flavorists," who blend the required appropriate chemicals together to create the desired properties of these mixtures and formulas.
Each flavouring can contain upto or more than a 100 various kinds of chemicals.
Various Solvents, emulsifiers, anti-oxidants , stabilising agents, anti-caking agents and preservatives all adding up and these often make up to 80 to 90 percent of the mixture.
These Artificial and natural flavouring agents that are finally used and added to your packaged foods are all proprietary chemical formulas owned by the companies that make them and hence they are not required to list out or reveal whats exactly inside these flavouring agent.
These are top secret recipes and are shrouded in secrecy because these are what food companies use to compete with each other and revealing whats really inside would allow competition to copy the taste, flavour and odour that these companies spend a lot of time and money on achieving.
So Whats really inside will always remain a mystery.
Thats why you usually only ever see(contains Artificial flavouring) or (added nature and nature identical flavouring) at the end of ingredient list or after the list.
At the end of the day all we can do is to be more conscious of whats in our foods, what they mean and what effect they might have.Ultimately our bodies were never made to process a lot of the ingredients being used these days and thats why we have a really big list of things we said no thanks to because we truly believe in creating foods that are kept as close to nature as they were intended to be and that have a positive impact on you and our society.
