Your Colorful Food…………
This week we learn that food additives are chemicals with little or no nutritive value that are added to commercially processed food. Food additives can be used to protect the food from being spoiled by oxidation, bacterial attack, or aging; others add and enhance flavor or color.
Artificial colorants are added to help identify foods, enhance their natural colors, mask undesirable colors, or for decoration. It is said that we “eat with our eyes as much as with our mouths”, and that’s certainly the case when we walk down the aisle of the supermarket. Fresh produce beckons us with its vivid colors and organic shapes, brightly colored packages and images seek to draw our eyes to those brands instead of competitors, and countless products—from Jell-O to Fruit Loops—are colored with bright synthetic dyes that turn unattractive mixtures of basic ingredients and food additives into alluring novelties.
Read the following article: Your Colorful Food
Conduct some research on food dyes and colorants using the website below to get you started:
Food and Drug Association (FDA). (2013, December 7). How safe are color additives? Retrieved from http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm048951.htm
After reading the article and conducting your research, address the following questions:
- What are the advantages of using synthetic food dyes rather than natural ones?
- What is the difference between a natural food coloring and natural-identical colors?
- What are the most common food additives?
- What are some of risks of synthetic and natural food dyes and what are some of the benefits?
- Locate a boxed, frozen, or canned food. What are the preservatives? What antioxidants are added? Are these substances from natural sources or synthesized? Simply take a container and list all the ingredients present. These substances can then be identified in terms of chemical composition and function. Use this website to get you started: http://sci-toys.com/ingredients/ingredients.html
75 -150 words only
