Do You Need A Chemistry Degree To Eat?

I read something disturbing recently. It was this: the average fast food strawberry milkshake has 59 ingredients. It contains 40 chemicals but no strawberries or milk. What?! Are you kidding me?

That got me thinking. We live in a society where our food is manufactured instead of cultivated. It's true. Take a look at bananas. They're picked while they're still green. Makes them more shippable. Before they hit the distribution center of your favorite store, they get stacked in a warehouse. Then that warehouse gets filled with Union Carbide's "banana gas". The gas makes them turn yellow. Now they're put in your store's produce department.

It's gotten to the point that we practically need a chemistry degree to read an ingredient list. Try this experiment: go to your pantry and pull out a package of something and look at the ingredient list. Do you know what all that is? Can you even pronounce some of those things? And the more processed the longer the names. I have no idea what methylphenylglycidate is. It's in strawberry flavoring. I'm not even sure how to say it. But I'm pretty certain it won't grow in my backyard.

Practically everything we eat is processed. And we have an obesity epidemic. Hum…could there be a connection? There are two very common ingredients in processed foods: high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil. Both of these are food products that have gone through a chemical processing. Not only do they have no nutritional value, they block metabolism and cause weight gain. What they do, and the main reason they are used, is they prolong shelf life. That's why a box of crackers can have an expiration date so far in the future.

If something can literally sit on the shelf for years, do we really want it on our bodies?