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How food companies fool consumers with food coloring ingredients made from 
petrochemicals
by Mike Adams
http://www.NaturalNews.com/z022870.html
Originally published March 21 2008

Have you ever wondered why companies use artificial colors? You might
think it's because they want to make their food look good, but
there's another reason -- a far deeper reason -- why companies use
artificial colors to make their foods more appealing to consumers.
Keep reading to learn what that is.

Why do foods with more vibrant, saturated colors look more appealing
to consumers? Why does a bright-red apple look more appealing than a
dull-red apple or a green apple? Why are foods sold to us in neon
green, yellow and orange packages? The reason is that of the color of
food speaks to humans' innate perceptions about the value of food items.

Humans are born with brains that are preprogrammed with the ability
to learn language; or to recognize certain inherent dangers such as
falling off a ledge. We also have all kinds of behaviors built in for
survival. One of the survival strategies our ancestors developed was
the ability to recognize foods containing usable energy or nutrition.
They could walk through a field and instantly spot foods that
contained potent, healing phytonutrients and calories that would give
them usable energy, healthy brain function, boost immune function and
boost overall survivability. The natural medicines found in food
often appear in bright colors, and calorie-rich foods designed to
appeal to primates (such as apples or berries) are also brightly
colored. It is these colors that appeal to our built-in perceptions
about the value of food. (Birds have a similar system and also tend
to judge food by its color.)

Color is a reliable indicator of the healthful quality of foods. An
apple that has red in its peel, for example, actually sends a
message: "Hey, I'm here. I have some healing medicine in my skin."
That's why humans are naturally attracted to more vibrant-looking
apples. Berries, fruits, root vegetables and other foods broadcast
similar messages through their own coloring.

Eating the rainbow diet
You may have heard of the rainbow diet, in which you eat foods of
different colors. It is based on the idea that different foods carry
different energies and provide different types of nutritional
medicine. There is a real science to that, and an art as well. You
can examine phytochemicals and their healing effects, and categorize
them by color. There are foods that are purple, blue, green, yellow,
red, orange, brown -- all the colors of the spectrum -- and each food
has a different medicine. Our ancestors learned to recognize foods by
their color, and they also learned that foods with more vibrant
colors in their natural environment contain a lot more medicine.

For example, a red cabbage that is actually a dull grey doesn't look
very appealing, but a purple cabbage with a saturated, bright-purple
color looks fantastic. That's because we have an innate perception
gauge telling us we should be attracted to these foods -- they are
healthier for us, and the health quality is indicated by the
saturation of the color.

This is what food-manufacturing companies are exploiting when they
enhance colors artificially.

Food makers use harmful dyes to get you to buy
When you shop for oranges, you're looking for a bright, deeply
colored orange. You don't want a yellowish orange, because that tells
you it's not ripe; if it's not ripe, it hasn't developed all its
medicine. (That's one reason why so much of the produce available in
grocery stores lacks real nutrition these days -- it's all picked
before it has a chance to ripen on the plant.)

Growers know about this color preference, so some of them -- in
Florida for example -- hijack that instinctual process by dipping
some of their oranges in a cancer-causing red dye that makes the peel
look more orange. The FDA has banned that dye from use in foods,
because it is a carcinogen, but they say it's okay to dip an orange
in it, because people don't eat the peel. If a consumer is comparing
two oranges -- one of them is yellow, and one of them is deep, rich
orange -- most consumers are going to pick up the deeper, richer
looking orange.

Food manufacturers use artificial colors because, when they make
their foods more colorful, it turns on the light switch in our brains
that says, "This is good stuff." We've been fooled; we've been drawn
like a moth to a flame. If you took one nacho chip with flavors but
no color and put it beside another nacho chip with the exact same
flavors but lots of artificial colors to make it look more orange,
and you asked people to pick which chip they think would taste
better, almost everyone will choose the chip with the color. The
color can actually fool your mind into thinking that these foods
taste better.

Food colors are made from petroleum
Coal tar and petrochemicals are the sources of the artificial colors
that go into our foods, and these artificial coloring ingredients are
dangerous to our health. The human body was not designed to eat
petrochemicals. You don't see people digging up petroleum and
drinking it with a straw. That's not the kind of energy we're
designed to run on. So why are we putting petrochemicals in our foods?

The food companies are doing it to sell a product and generate a
profit, regardless of the health effects on consumers -- and the
health effects have been worrisome. In fact, more than one artificial
color has been banned and pulled off the market over the last several
decades because it was ultimately found to cause cancer. The safety
of those still allowed on the market is highly questionable.

Eventually, artificial colors used in the food supply will likely be
outlawed because they contribute to all sorts of health problems, the
most notable of which are the symptoms diagnosed as attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a behavioral pattern often brought on
by Yellow #2 food dye. Children are being fed these chemicals in such
large quantities that they begin to have nervous system malfunctions
that ultimately are misdiagnosed as ADHD, learning disabilities, or
violent behavior.

If you want to reverse these so-called diseases in your children, one
of the best things you can do is stop feeding them petrochemicals.
That means you, as the parent, have to understand that your very
instincts are being hijacked by food companies' use of artificial
colors to sell their garbage products. It's automatic, it's innate
and it's unconscious. You look at foods and you instantly evaluate
them by their color. It's something that you can't stop doing because
it's part of your perception hardware. Food companies know this and
they exploit it to sell you unhealthy foods artificially colored to
look nutritious.

How to defend yourself against dishonest food companies
So what's your defense against this? How can you take control over
your own mind and make better decisions at the grocery store? You're
taking the first step right now by reading this: you're educating
yourself. All you have to do is take this information and apply it by
reading ingredient labels. Look for artificial food coloring
ingredients like Yellow #2, Red #5 or Blue Lake #40, and then avoid
them. Don't buy those products. It's as simple as that. Instead, you
look for natural food coloring ingredients. There are products
colored with beet juice, a much healthier way to color food; annatto,
a very healthy plant source; or turmeric, a fantastic herb with
anticancer, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

With a little checking around, you will discover that all the cheap,
low-grade, disease-promoting products in the grocery store tend to
use these artificial colors. You will also find that the same snack
chips, processed foods, boxed dinner meals, and junk food made by the
biggest food companies also contain refined white flour, MSG and
hydrogenated oils. It's really no surprise they mostly all contain an
artificial color of one kind or another.

Also, you should watch out for artificial colors in fruit drinks and
candy. There are loads of artificial colors in candy, which makes for
a very bad combination -- especially for children. If you give kids a
load of sugar and petrochemicals together in the same meal, their
nervous systems go crazy. That's why you have kids climbing the walls
after feeding them candy and sugary drinks with artificial colors.

Another repeat offender in this category is "sport drinks," which are
loaded with petrochemical artificial colors that have no purpose
other than to make the beverage visually appealing to consumers.
There's no nutritional value whatsoever to using artificial colors,
which means most sports drinks are a complete waste of money: they're
just salt water with sugar and artificial colors added. If you want a
real sports drink, you should juice some celery and cucumber, or just
drink coconut water. That's real replenishment.

The confectionery industry relies heavily on artificial colors to
make its foods -- like cake and icing -- look appealing as well.
Icing is usually made of hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a nerve
toxin, combined with refined sugars, which are dietary poisons that
cause diabetes. The petrochemical-based artificial colors are used to
top it off. If you really want to commit nutritional suicide, eat a
lot of icing. Get yourself some iced doughnuts, cakes and pastries,
and load up.

You'll notice artificial colors in foods like blueberry muffins or
blueberry bagels, too. Read the ingredients on blueberry bagels at
your local grocery store next time, and you'll find that there are
really no blueberries but plenty of artificial blue and green colors
to create the impression of little blueberry bits. They can't even
put blueberries in their bagels. They have to trick you with
artificial colors.

Do you know what liquid they're using to hold the color? Propylene
glycol -- the same chemical you put into your RV when you want to
winterize it. It is antifreeze. You're eating antifreeze and
petrochemicals -- and that's just the blueberry part. We haven't even
gotten to everything else, like refined sugars, chemical
preservatives and refined bleached white flour, which has diabetes-
causing contaminants. A blueberry bagel is no longer a blueberry
bagel. When you really understand what's in the foods, it's mind
blowing.

Artificial colors sometimes find their way into salmon before it even
becomes food
Artificial colors turn up in a lot of interesting places. Many salmon
farms are adding artificial color to their food to make the salmon
flesh appear more red because that's what consumers will buy. They'll
buy red or pink salmon over grey salmon any day of the week because
their instincts tell them deeper, richer colors are healthier.
Imitation crab meat has artificial colors added to make part of the
meat look red -- but at least the label includes the word
"artificial," so you can avoid it if you read labels.

The biggest form of dishonesty across the entire food industry is the
use of artificial colors that influence you to buy and consume foods
that actually harm your health (such as snack chips made with MSG).
The food companies have figured out how to hack into your perception
hardware. They send one message to your eyes, but they manufacture
foods out of something entirely different. The bottom line is that
foods, through the use of artificial colors, are sending an
incongruent message: "I'm a healthy food." But the reality is, "I'm
harmful junk food."

These companies employ tens of thousands of food scientists in the
United States alone. They figure out how to make foods more palatable
and less expensive by using the cheapest ingredients possible while
prettying them up with artificial food colors made from petrochemicals.

Food coloring from insects
I have one more interesting tidbit I'd like to share with you. You
may be familiar with a red color ingredient called carmine; it can be
found in strawberry yogurt and a variety of other products. Carmine
is sourced from a mash made by grinding up beetles grown in Peru and
the Canary Islands. The mash is strained out to obtain a red liquid.
That liquid, made from insects, is then shipped to the United States
to food companies, where it is dumped into the yogurt to make it look
like there are strawberries in there. Folks, it's not strawberry.
It's insect juice. That's what's in your yogurt (and a lot of candy
and children's foods as well).

Some people have a dangerous allergic reaction to this ingredient.
They can go into anaphylactic shock, which puts them in a coma (or
worse!). As this demonstrates, some of these color additives can be
extremely dangerous, but you'll notice companies don't put this
information on their labels. "Insect juice" is never listed on your
yogurt. They merely list "carmine," and they leave it up to you to
figure out what that means. Ninety-nine percent of people in this
world have no idea what carmine really is, but now you do.