Wow, foods have chemicals in them. Who would have guessed?
A few weeks ago, the nation went ballistic after finding out that Subway was using the chemical azodicarbonamide in their bread, a chemical which is also found in yoga mats. Health critics barraged the company, which claimed it would remove the chemical from its bread in the future.
Yet according to NPR, that same compound is found in over 500 food products consumed by families every day, from Wonder Bread to Pillsbury Dinner Rolls. The compound is utilized to improve dough and textures in bread, and is apparently far more common than previously realized.
The attention began when the creator of the FoodBabe blog posted an online petition to remove the chemical from Subway's bread, and claimed it could cause cancer and asthma. Breathing in high doses of the chemical during manufacturing could possibly cause respiratory issues, but eating it in bread doesn't seem like a likely candidate to cause the same symptoms.
The petition is a symptom of a larger global movement toward fear of companies poisoning consumers with hard-to-pronounce chemicals. It is often assumed that a large chemical name means an unnatural product. Yet John Coupland, a professor from Penn State, has stated that the toxicity of a product within a food is harder to pinpoint.
"The real question is whether these tiny concentrations in bread are toxicologically significant," says Coupland in his blog.
Within the bread, the chemical is only used in a ratio set by the FDA of 45 parts per million, which is an incredibly small dose of the chemical.
In the same vein, the NPR article points out that sheet rock contains calcium sulfate, which is used as a food additive. This food additive is used to make a health food favorite: tofu. If publicized as "Tofu Contains Sheet Rock", people might start making a fuss in the vegetarian marketplace.
