There is no food without chemicals

"Cranberries should be banned, there is an overdose of preservatives in it"
Why Food Chemistry and Dietary Supplements Shouldn't Scare People,
says chemist-flavorist Sergey Belkov<url>

In relation to food, chemistry is used today as a swear word.

But chemistry is a fundamental property of our world, everything in the world consists of chemicals, including the person himself. And food is no exception.

The first myth is that there can be food without chemicals.

Can not. Chemistry in food – 100%. Another question is whether these chemicals in food are taken from nature or synthesized by humans. The second myth is that everything natural is useful, and artificial is harmful. In fact, natural differs only in that it occurs in nature, and only this. Natural is not useful. Here is an example: forest fires are a natural phenomenon, the same as death from smallpox, and steam heating is an artificial phenomenon. And which of these is useful and which is harmful?

Another myth is that all kinds of artificial food additives are a recent invention.

The world's first artificial flavor was invented by a man who began to fry meat, because the smell of fried meat does not exist in nature. The smell and taste of fried meat is the result of the interaction of substances that exist in raw meat when it is heated. Moreover, chemical interaction. The smell and taste of cheese is also artificial, since there is no cheese in nature. But a person learned how to make this product quite a long time ago, and the purpose of creation was not to improve the taste at all, but the desire to preserve the chemicals of milk.

Many plant substances, which we tend to consider useful only because they are natural, are actually chemical weapons of plants. They are selected by evolution in order to cause maximum harm to anyone who wants to eat the plant. Many are poisons. For example, caffeine in a plant acts as an insecticide: it protects it from insects. In general, coffee can be safely considered a mixture of insecticides and flavors, because the aroma of coffee is, in fact, artificial.

Green coffee does not smell, and the "natural" smell of coffee is the result of artificial chemical reactions occurring in the beans when heated.

And what is, for example, vanillin, which we add to all kinds of confectionery products as a natural flavor? From a chemical point of view, vanillin is an aromatic phenol and an aromatic aldehyde at the same time.

In the famous vanilla pods, there is no vanilla by nature, it appears in them only after ripening and falling off. Vanillin is not needed by the plant, its purpose is to protect seeds from harmful molds and bacteria. This is a substance that protects plants from being eaten, and only by chance did a person like its taste, which does not indicate its usefulness.

It's the same with mustard. The main function of allylisothiocyanate, to which mustard owes its stinginess, is to scare away insects and larger herbivores. As such, it is not present in the plant: it begins to form only when the plant tissues are damaged. Its synthesis is triggered at the moment of damage to leaves or seeds in order to cause maximum damage to the pest.

And only a person has learned to eat what was invented as a toxin, and call it useful. At the same time, the same substance obtained by chemical synthesis methods should be called harmful. Toxic substances for protection from insects are also contained in the pimples of cucumber. And the man, nothing, eats. Almonds and apricots contain a very strong poison cyanide, prussic acid. And this does not prevent a person from using them with pleasure.

The molecules that create the smell of orange, located in the zest and in their formula more like gasoline than food, serve to protect the juicy pulp and so attract us with their smell.

Speaking of dietary supplements, sodium glutamate is most often mentioned: it is in broth cubes, and in sausage, and in sausages. But it is this substance that determines the taste of meat – the so-called umami taste, in fact, the taste of protein. It was discovered by the Japanese professor Ikeda and in 1909 patented a method for obtaining it. But long before that, glutamate was the most common chemical molecule in our food. It is this substance that gives taste to sausage, ham and any other meat products. Glutamate gives flavor to tomatoes, and its concentration increases when the fruit ripens. Red tomatoes taste better than green tomatoes partly because they contain more glutamate. A person has only learned how to obtain monosodium glutamate by bacteriological synthesis. And this artificial glutamate, according to the atomic-molecular theory, is no different from natural.

Food additives on the product packaging are marked with the letter E with various numeric indexes. And this letter often scares the consumer. Although this only means that the product contains strictly defined and tested substances. Often the same substances are present in large quantities in natural products. For example, there is a much larger set of different E's in an apple than in any finished product. Although, in fact, it does not matter: the origin of a substance does not determine its properties.

Cranberries contain more sodium benzoate than is allowed to be used in canning products. If cranberries are driven according to the tolerances for the content of preservatives, it should be banned, there is an overdose of preservatives in it.

What does she need them for? To protect yourself, do not let mold and bacteria eat berries and seeds. But no one on this planet will suspect cranberries of what preserves or drinks are suspected of. On the contrary, many people use cranberries because of its beneficial antimicrobial properties, which, however, are exaggerated.

Parabens (esters of parahydroxybenzoic acid) are also natural substances, plants use them to protect themselves from pests. They are used mainly in cosmetics. And they are also afraid of them. You can often find ads for the so-called paraben-free cream. But this is possible only in three cases: 1) if, instead of safe and proven parabens, some less well-known and studied preservative is added to the cream; 2) the cream will fade immediately after opening; 3) the manufacturer is not a fool and still added parabens, but, following the fashion, lied.

Sodium nitrite is another subject of horror stories.

It is very easy to find it in sausage: fashionable gray sausage does not contain sodium nitrite. But don't buy such sausage. Before sodium nitrite was added to sausage, the so–called sausage disease – botulism - was quite an ordinary phenomenon. The very word "botulism" originates from the ancient Roman "sausage". Sodium nitrite reliably kills the bacterium that produces the deadly toxin. And if we talk about quantities, then 1 kg of spinach or broccoli will give you the same amount of nitrite as 50 kg of doctoral sausage.

And here is a story about caviar, a delicacy product that, for a number of reasons, is very susceptible to spoilage. For the preservation of caviar, the substance urotropin (E 239) was recently used, which has been banned in our country since 2010. But this is the only preservative that worked in caviar. And now the caviar is either going out, or there are a lot of other preservatives in it, more than allowed.

Or it is still good and safe, but with banned urotropin. Urotropin was banned because it decomposes during storage to form formaldehyde, and this is a poison. But no one thought about the quantities. Its minuscule is formed. And we don't eat caviar with spoons. In addition, the same amount of formaldehyde that can be obtained with a jar of caviar with urotropin can be obtained by eating one banana.

Another myth is associated with the harmfulness of sweeteners that people who want to lose weight use instead of sugar. For example, aspartame is an absolutely understandable molecule, with an understandable effect, and there are hundreds of studies confirming its safety.

A very common myth is that "it is known what kind of natural product, and what you have synthesized there are solid impurities!".

This is complete nonsense. For example, if we compare tarragon grass and soda with flavorings, then there are more impurities in natural tarragon. At the same time, they are all known in soda, and in the grass we do not know which ones could form. There are much more chemicals in natural coffee (almost a thousand), and their properties have been studied much less than in an artificial coffee flavor. In total, more than 8 thousand fragrant substances have been found in food products to date. Of these, about 4 thousand are allowed to be used as flavorings, their properties have been studied, they are recognized as safe. About a hundred of such substances are prohibited: they turned out to be harmful. And about 4 thousand more have never passed any inspection. Thus, by consuming the flavor, you are guaranteed to consume only substances from the tested 4 thousand. By consuming natural, you eat everything: both proven safe, and untested, and necessarily proven harmful.

Finally, lovers of everything natural in the store will choose a sausage or a natural smoked ham, and not smoked with liquid smoke. And from the point of view of safety, they will choose a much more dangerous product. Neither is the best choice in terms of health. But natural smoke contains a lot of resins, carcinogens, which are separated during the production of liquid smoke. In fact, artificial smoking is much safer than natural smoking. Even if it's not so delicious.

"We want to know the truth about food!" – advocates of natural food and opponents of chemical food act under such slogans. It's great when a person wants to know the truth. Only it's better to look for this truth not on TV and not on women's forums. And to start at least with a textbook on food chemistry.

The truth about food is that any food consists of chemistry. The truth is that if a person makes food himself, then he knows what he is making it from, and checks it for safety.

The truth is that food chemistry is also a science that makes our world a better place. And another truth is that by consuming only natural food, relying on nature, you are making a mistake. Nature has absolutely no obligation to take care of our safety.

About the author:
Sergey Belkov was born in 1978. In 2000 he graduated from the Chemical Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. He worked as a food production technologist at several enterprises, since 2004 – a flavorist (creator of food flavors). Currently, he heads the department for the development of food ingredients (flavors, sweeteners and dyes) of one of the largest Russian food industry enterprises. Master of Business Administration. Member of the British Flavor Community. He is a regular author of several Russian popular science publications.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru04.06.2014