• You know that thing you’re about to put in your mouth?
Not that, the food thing.
Well, what is it?
Are you sure?
What’s the hidden truth behind our food.
It’s creepy food facts you'll wish you didn't know
15 – Very fishy seafood • Seafood labelling is about as trust worthy
as $5 all-you-can-eat sushi.
One investigation found that in L.A. a whopping 55% of seafood was not exactly what it was
supposed to be.
• A lot of the mislabelling is to do with weight but there are some very worrying possibilities.
The popular podcast This American Life, ran a story about how it’s possible squid rings
were actually being made out of pig’s anus.
To be fair, if it was an aquatic pig, then technically it would still be seafood.
14 – Carbon monoxide meat • Mankind eats a lot of meat and now that
most of us don’t hunt our own, we have to pick the best-looking hunks from the supermarket.
• And one of the ways that supermarket keep meat looking red and rosy is by filling the
packet with carbon monoxide?
Yeah, that deadly gas that you have an alarm in your house for… even though you took
the batteries out, didn’t you?
Don’t lie to us.
• This blast of CO keeps it looking red, even when it’s gone bad.
13 – Pink bug juice • We like our food and drink to look how
we expect it to, even if that doesn’t reflect its real ingredients.
For example, real mayonnaise is made with egg yolk, so it should be yellow.
Pink grapefruit juice is sometime given an added boost of pinkness with a colour additive
called carmine.
The thing is, carmine is made by grinding up a bug called a cochineal.
Not like… a few fall in the machine…
they are the main ingredient.
12 – Candy crust • Many types of candy, like the jelly bean,
have a lustrous shiny cover on the outside, like a varnish.
But this isn’t made form sugar, it’s a substance called shellac.
This also used to be used to make turntable records and as a coating on furniture.
• Shellac is actually a secretion from the female lac bug, which is where we get the
term lacquer from.
These Asian bugs eat tree bark and then spew out a resin.
11 –Pee-a-saurus • Almost all of the water that you drink
has been peed out by a dinosaur.
There is a lot of water on the planet and that water is constantly being recycled.
If you took all the water in the world, you could make a sphere about 860 miles across.
• But dinosaurs were around for almost 200 million years so that was enough time for
the water cycle to bring almost every water molecule round to the mouths, and then exits,
of our dino-friends.
Boil it, filter it, freeze it, it makes no difference, you can’t escape the golden
truth.
10 – Butt • One of the last things you want to be
thinking about when you tuck into a bowl of strawberry ice cream, is a beaver’s anus.
It’s not something you really want to be thinking about at other times either but strawberry
and raspberry flavouring can contain castoreum.
• This comes from beavers who use it to mark their territory and it smells a little
like vanilla.
• Its use is less common in foods now as it’s expensive but it’s still used occasionally,
and perfumeries love it.
• So, if you’re in the forest and you think you smell cake, you’re about to be
ambushed by a horny beaver. 9 – Vegetarian salmonella
• Hundreds of thousands of people area admitted to hospital every year with salmonella.
And we typically associate this kind of food poisoning with animal products.
• But even the most hyper level 10 vegan dieter is not safe.
• Watermelon, fruit juice, carrots, pecan nuts, nothing is safe.
The main reason is that animal droppings can get on to all of these.
• Worst of all are alfalfa sprouts since they harbour more warm moisture than a gym
bag 8 – A load of rot
• Many of you will be either lucky enough or smart enough to never have to eat Casu
marzu, or formaggio marcio.
It’s a traditional food from Sardinia.
• Someone decided that it wasn’t weird enough that we take animal milk and let it
go hard and sour, they had to make it worse.
This cheese adds fly larvae to really go up a few gears on the rotting process.
You are basically eating cheese that they have already eaten.
• You may want to go have a shower or seven now
7 – Extra Ingredients • Deep down, we all know that fast food
is pretty gross.
However, if we’re going to be gross and disgusting, we want it to be the gross and
disgusting we chose.
• Sadly though, you eat about 12 pubic hairs a year in your fast food.
• Although it could be worse.
A Nebraska family won $40,000 in 2008 when an employee’s spit and urine was found in
their KFC, which their son violently ill.
6 – Coked Up • A new Zealand woman suffered cardiac arrhythmia,
and the coroner put it down as an overdose...on Coca Cola.
• By 30 years old she was drinking over 8 litres of it a day.
Just your recommended fluid intake is 2 litres per day so obviously, she was going a little
overboard.
5 – Topping secret • In today’s world we like to know what’s
going in our mouths, even with something like pizza, that’s hardly a health food.
• Papa Johns pizza has the tagline “better ingredients, better pizza”.
But when people wanted to know exactly what was better, they basically gave everyone the
middle finger, and then refuse to say exactly what was in the finger or where it had been.
4 – Spice things up • Baking can be pretty boring.
You have to read a recipe, measure everything out, mix till your arm falls off and then
wait for the stupid thing to cook.
• However, if you want to spice things up a little then all you need is a hefty bag
of nutmeg.
• Nutmeg is hallucinogenic in large doses but, before you go sniffing the bottle, it’s
also horrifically bad for you; leading to vomiting, seizures and heart attacks.
• So, don’t shake and bake. 3 – Fruity Meat Eater
• Pineapple is the only food that tries to eat you back.
• The sweet tropical fruit is thought to be the only natural source of Bromelain, a
flesh-eating enzyme.
This is why it often hurts your mouth and lips when you eat it.
• So, be very suspicious of anyone carrying a large haul of pineapples.
Well, you’d probably be suspicious anyway, even without this information.
2 – Mouth on fire • Have you ever wondered why spicy things
are spicy?
What exactly are they doing to your face that gives you that mixture of pleasure and pain.
• The active ingredient of spicy heat is Capsaicin and it activates the pain receptors
in your mouth because you brain thinks you are actually burning yourself
• The reason some people get a euphoric rush from capsaicin is that you release endorphins
to deal with the pain.
Endorphins are basically chemical dolphins, that’s a science fact.
1 – Baby Bacon • If you are trying to conceive a child
then, well first, why are you watching this video?
Get back to work.
• But you also need think about your diet, especially if you’re a man.
• Bacon may go fabulously with eggs but it is terrible for your sperm, having been
proven to lower your count.
It’s probably not helping with the baby making part either thanks to all the sodium
and cholesterol too.