We know very little about most of the foods we consume, unlike our grandparents or great grandparents, who grew and made their own foods. In an age of mass consumption and instant gratification, the want to satisfy our every gastric desire often leaves us all oblivious to the truth surrounding the foods we eat. You might, in reality, just find yourself chewing on a mouthful of lies.
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#1 Pumpkin Spice
Everything is flavored with pumpkin spice during the Fall and Winter, and we mean everything. But the stuff you are buying on that latte or topping that pie with are 85% not real spices at all. The spice is often artificially made from chemicals in a lab, used to replicate the key features of the spices made up to taste and smell like the popular Pumpkin Spice. That pumpkin spice latte is most likely a cup of very hot chemicals.
#2 American Cheese
The bright orange cheese slices made popular by Kraft Foods, usually found inside the Cinderella of American cooking: the cheeseburger, are a staple in the U.S culinary delight known as fast food. However, this cheese is not quite what it seems to be.
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#3 Fake Cheese
According to the USDA, American Cheese cannot be referred to as cheese or even a cheese food because it technically isn't. With less than 51% of cheese in each slice. the FDA has ruled that American cheese isn't really a cheese at all but is actually a "cheese product".
#4 Margarine
For decades, margarine was marketed as the healthy alternative to the seemingly life-destroying devil... butter. This, however, couldn't be further from the truth. Margarine can, in fact, be quite harmful to the health of its consumers. Trans-fatty chemicals used in the margarine used to enhance the shelf life can be very damaging to your health and are a common cause of cardiovascular complications. It's not better than butter, and experts say keeping away from either is your best bet.
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#5 Pringles
Potato chips stacked in a tube. Well, kind of. The former parent company of this popular brand claimed that the snack can't and shouldn't be considered as potato chips at all. They argued that the potato content of the chips in question reach only a meager 42%. Not only that, the potato content comes only in the form of dehydrated potato flakes which is used with a mix of 2% WOOD chips, to create the slices that eventually turned into the Pringles chips.
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#6 Naked Smoothies
PepsiCo advertise this brand of smoothie as containing no added sugar, helping the drink keep up its façade as a health product. The reality is, however, that these smoothies are no better for your body than the most sugary of drinks. PepsiCo claims that the sugar in these drinks occurs naturally from their ingredients, it has been found that even the smallest Naked Smoothie container contains the same amount of sugar as a 12-ounce can of Pepsi. That is your recommended daily intake of sugar in one drink.
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#7 Aquafina
Another PepsiCo drink, another PepsiCo fib. The label on this brand of bottled water reads across it: "pure water". But, according to PepsiCo, the water contained within the confines of the bottle actually comes from a Public water source. Aquafina comes from the same exact place that you and I receive our FREE water from. It is nothing more than filtrated tap water.
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#8 Crispy Seaweed
Certain types of seaweed are used as culinary ingredients in many coastal regions around the globe, but perhaps it's most commonly thought of in reference to forms of Asian cuisine. Crispy seaweed, in particular, is largely attributed to Chinese cooking. In the Western world, you'll most likely find cabbage disguised as seaweed. It is often missold and replaced by deep fried cabbage leaves seasoned in a similar way.
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#9 Red Snapper
An Oceana org investigation, conducted in 2013, discovered that there's a US nationwide problem with fraudulent seafood. The study shows that the popular Red Snapper fish is the most mislabelled and miss-sold fish food product throughout the united states. Oceana reported that Red Snapper are often substituted by 28 entirely different species of fish, and this happens in 93% of purchases. Meaning that there's a very high probability of the Red Snapper you're eating being a complete and utter fake!
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#10 Rocky Mountain Oysters
A dish unbeknownst to many who aren't accustomed to the moo-ey reaches of good ole ranch life; commonly found in regions of the U.S.A's Great Plains, in steak houses, and in delicatessen joints around the world. One may be coaxed by the name into thinking that this dish is made up entirely of oysters gathered from the Rocky Mountain territory. WRONG! Rocky Mountain Oysters are made exclusively from bull, pig, ox, and sheep testicles.
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#11 Nuts
Peanuts, walnuts, pecans, and almonds are referred to as nuts only in the culinary sense. In reality, they aren't nuts at all. Peanuts are in fact Legumes, they are dry edible seeds contained in multiplicity within pods that start to split when they're ripe, making them closer to peas and beans than to actual nuts. Walnuts, pecans, and almonds.
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#12 A True Nut
On the other hand, are more closely related to peaches than nuts and are classified as droops. A true nut is defined as a single hard fruit encased in a hard outer coating that never splits open. Some of these are chestnuts, hazelnuts, and acorns.
#13 Bananas
The bananas we find on the supermarket shelves and in our homes are the wonderfully edible results of thousands of years of genetic modification, meaning that they aren't exactly as natural as we believe them to be. Human cultivation and artificial selection and genetic modification have given us a soft and uniform banana over the years. The seeds in the banana are barely visible because of this, which means they can't be regrown by planting the seed. Production requires human cultivation where part of the stem is cloned are planted to grow a new tree. All bananas we eat today are genetic clones of mass produced bananas and a far cry from natural wild seed and tough bananas.
