Your body as part of the biggest science experiment of all time

We’ve got to be living in an era of the biggest scientific experiment in the history of the world.  The average food consumer = lab rat.  The average food producer = mad scientist.  Some (read: most) food producers are putting all sorts of dangerous chemicals into processed foods, to improve shelf-life, change texture, or alter the colour of foods to make it more appealing for the consumer who’s brain has been washed out and painted with images of picture perfect 1 trillion DPI and pi-relation foods in television and print adverts.

Take bacon, as an example.

Bacon producers add, as some of the curing agents or chemicals to improve and maintain the colour of the meat, and to extend shelf-life, sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.  See below.

What are these you might be asking? Wiki tells us:

Sodium nitrate is used as an ingredient; in fertilizers, pyrotechnics, as an ingredient in smoke bombs, as a food preservative, and as a solid rocket propellant, as well as in glass and pottery enamels. The compound has been mined extensively for those purposes.

And….

Sodium nitrite is also used in the manufacture of diazo dyes, nitroso compounds, and other organic compounds; in dyeing and printing textile fabrics and bleaching fibers; in photography; as a laboratory reagent and a corrosion inhibitor; in metal coatings for phosphatizing and detinning; and in the manufacture of rubber chemicals. It may also be used as an electrolyte in electrochemical grinding manufacturing processes, typically diluted to about 10% concentration in water.

Chemicals that are used to make bombs, fertilisers, antirust, pottery enamels, rubber chemicals are going into our foods to make them look prettier and last longer on the shelves??  That is the most ludicrous, dangerous and outright evil thing I’ve learnt about food, ever!!

But there’s no need to worry, apart from the above mentioned poisons, the bacon contains no allergens!

No wonder cancer and heart disease have become so common place these days.  Now I am not here writing to make a subjective value assessment of these practices, but I can point this out to you, so you may take some responsibility for what you put into your body.

Use it, don’t use it…

Related reading: Book Review: Eat Fat, Lose Fat

PS. If anyone knows where I can find some nitrate/nitrite free bacon, please let me know, I haven’t found anywhere.  And I’m really not in the mood to do a Gordon Ramsay, and keep a pig in the back yard to slaughter every time I’d like to eat some bacon…