Mmmmm. Coal tar
Who here loves brightly colored food? Like oranges that are so orange they almost glow in the dark. Or what about all those wacky food colors out there. Like red velvet cake, green beer on St. Paddy’s day, yellow frosted cupcakes, cookies with blue icing, and on and on. We love to eat bright shiny stuff, all the colors of the rainbow, stuffed into our mouths. Probably because we associate bright and colorful with healthy and vibrant. And rightly so. Things that are alive and healthy tend to be bright and colorful. While things that are dead tend to be brown, gray, and, well, dead.
So we graviate towards all of those bright, shiny foods that are bursting with color. They make us feel like we’re taking a bite right out of the sun itself!
Too bad most of that stuff is chock full ‘o coal tar.
I’m talking about food coloring and dyes here, people. You know, those little plastic bottles of red, orange, yellow, blue, and green liquid that look they belong more in a child’s paint kit than they do in your spice cabinet.
Those dyes (and ones that are used commercially in prepackaged goods like snack cakes and whatnot) are made with petrochemicals and coal tar. Yes, those two things are as bad as they sound. Petrochemicals are made from petroleum/oil and coal tar is a delicious brown/black liquid that is a by-product of the process which turns coal into coke or coal gas. There are over 10,000 different chemicals in coal tar, and only about 50% of them have been identified. But I don’t think we need to wait around for the other half to be identified to know, without a doubt, that we shouldn’t be eating something with the words COAL and TAR in it!
At the 28 second mark, this cute Czechoslovakia mouse learns a lesson that we apparently haven’t.
The problem is that sometimes it’s hard to tell what has been dyed and what hasn’t. It’s easy with prepackaged foods that have ingredient lists, but what about the aforementioned day-glo oranges? Some Florida orange growers dip their oranges in dye to make them more appealing. The dye they use for this is a known carcinogen, but the FDA allows it since people don’t eat the peels.
This lil guy wants to give you two things: 1.) a big hug, 2.) cancer.
I mean, who the hell would eat an orange peel? No one, that’s who. OK maybe an old hobo (the kind who also eats apples cores) would eat the peel, but that’s about it.
Or not.
My advice? Learn to eat more white shit.
(via Science News and Natural News)
