Living A Full Life

Common Food Additives Are Silently Harming Your Health

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 20

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Ever wondered what's really lurking in your packaged foods? The truth about common food additives might shock you.

Food additives occupy a controversial space between scientific evidence and real-world health impacts. While traditional toxicology focuses on immediate, lethal effects, the emerging research reveals something more insidious—these substances accumulate in our bodies over decades, potentially triggering serious health problems from metabolic disorders to cancer.

I walk you through the ten most concerning additives hiding in your pantry right now. Artificial sweeteners disrupt gut health and metabolism despite being marketed as "diet-friendly." MSG acts as an excitotoxin with documented neurological effects. Red Dye 40 and other artificial colorings can transform a child's behavior within minutes—something parents can observe firsthand by comparing reactions to home-baked treats versus commercially-colored candies. Even seemingly innocent ingredients like carrageenan (in dairy alternatives) and potassium bromate (in bread products) carry significant long-term health risks.

The regulatory landscape explains why these substances remain approved despite growing evidence of harm. Food manufacturers prioritize shelf stability and palatability, while FDA guidelines focus on immediate toxicity rather than cumulative effects. The result? Americans consuming ingredients that European countries banned years ago. Fortunately, you can protect yourself and your family through simple strategies: reading labels carefully, choosing whole unprocessed foods, buying organic when possible, and preparing more meals at home with natural ingredients.

Take control of your health today by becoming an informed consumer. What additives have you discovered hiding in your favorite foods? Share your experiences and join our community dedicated to healthier eating without the chemical complexity.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr Enrico Del Ciccori and this week we'll be talking about food additives and how they can become toxic and what they do to our overall health. On one of our last episodes we got into toxicity and dyes came up, and that's been a hot topic recently with RFK and the whole revamping of oils used in fried foods and in processed foods. And then the dyes came up as well, and Red Dye 40 has now been pulled off of the FDA approval list for the United States, which is great. It's huge and that created a lot of spur One of the most frantic episodes I've had, with the most emails that came in about that like, oh, I didn't even know dye could do that to behavior. So go back to that episode and learn more about dyes. But let's talk about food additives in general, the hidden dangers of food additives, and really this episode is what you need to know about them and which ones are the most common ones that are out there that you should probably avoid that the FDA still allows.

Speaker 1:

Now, on social media, when you scroll in the doom scrolling of TikTok, facebook, instagram, whatever it is that you're using, you'll see both sides of every story. When we talk about health and wellness, you'll see the crunchy side talking about how everything's bad and then you'll see the medical side saying how it's all phony baloney, that really nothing's that toxic. Because from a scientific method, when we talk about toxicity, toxicity means toxic dose that leads to an adverse effect or even death. That's what toxic means. So let's say you get into some arsenic or rat poison, you better run to the hospital pretty quick. That can be toxic. Or if you get bit by a rattlesnake or a cottonmouth or a black widow spider, these things can be venomous and poisonous and it can create a lethal dosage inside the body. So when we think of toxicity from a medical and scientific perspective, it means pathology and adverse reaction in the moment.

Speaker 1:

A cumulative effect of toxicity over time is not considered scientific principle. So that's why you get this middle ground of the debate session on both sides saying well, come on, msg is not that bad for you. If you go out and get some extra monosodium glutamate, what's the big deal? It's just a salt used in most barbecue rubs, flavoring seasonings, it's all in there. What's a matter with that? And how much are you going to consume to really cause an effect, an adverse reaction, where you fall down on the floor and have a convulsion or possibly die. I mean, I understand both sides of the story. So when we talk about scientific method, it's the toxic dose. What's the amount that we have to give to kill someone? And then the the scientific dose is the toxic effect.

Speaker 1:

Then the healthy version of this or the vitalistic version of this is like what happens over time, in the slow accumulation of this stuff over time, and that is becoming more and more scientifically relevant because we're actually monitoring what's happening all around the world. Europe got rid of most dyes a long time ago. They didn't even introduce some of the dyes that we have here, like the yellows ever. They never, ever passed Euro clearance into their food system and then they had to pull blue and red 40 out of there very quickly because they were finding it linked to behavioral issues and lighting up the brain in negative ways. So here we are now in 2025 and relooking at this stuff, as we always should, and seeing what is healthy and what is not. So when we talk about the worst food additives out there, I'm going to list these in no particular order, but we're going to go through them. I got about 10 that we really need to consider for yourself and your family when you're looking at additives and to avoid on all causes, because these are ones that accumulate over time to cause pathological change in the body which may not lead to imminent death, but it will lead to disease, inflammation, obesity, diabetes, cancer. It can lead to all of these things, so let's talk about them.

Speaker 1:

Artificial sweeteners has got to be on the top of the list. We got to talk about this. We try to avoid sugar because we know sugar makes us fat and we can see fat when we look in the mirror. I find american culture is very vanity, very mirror-esque, where, when we look in the mirror and it starts to change our skin or if we start losing hair or if our teeth become yellow, well, holy smokes, are we going to jump to to change our skin? Or if we start losing hair or if our teeth become yellow, well, holy smokes, are we going to jump to changing our lives very quickly? Or if we start gaining weight but we don't see the inside? So we smoke cigarettes and cigars and vape and do marijuana and do all this stuff because we can't see our lungs right. We can't see what's happening on the inside. But if God designed us with a window on our chest, trust me people would not be. They'd be wondering. Sexy lungs would be, you know, nice and pink and healthy, and black lungs would not be. You wouldn't marry somebody with black lungs. So that's, that's unfortunate truth of our society.

Speaker 1:

So when it comes to artificial sweeters, we've replaced sugar, fructose, glucose and high fructose corn syrup with artificial aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, all these other ones that are directly linked to metabolic issues. So they also can cause metabolic issues. It may not be weight gain, but it can really skew the metabolic system in how they efficiently break down amino acids, build up fatty chains and break down carbohydrates. So this can cause havoc on our metabolism. And another thing it does is it wrecks havoc on the microbiome, the gut health, because the bacteria and viruses in your gut don't even know what these artificial things are. They don't know how to break them down, they don't know how to utilize them and they really cause dysbiosis in the gut and some of them even have a potential carcinogenic effect. Aspartame in the 90s was shown and proven to be linked to not calcification but mildewing of the brain where a film and a layer was building up on people's brains, linked to type 3 diabetes or dementia and Alzheimer's. So these studies are out there so that what they did is renamed aspartame, but they still continue to use derivatives of it. Danger, danger.

Speaker 1:

So artificial sweeteners in. You know, every now and then, if you're grabbing a diet soda, that's okay. Having two diet sodas every day because you're replacing the two sugary sodas you used to do 10 years ago, not a good idea. The accumulative effect has an effect. That's it. So I would say artificial sweeteners number one. Number two MSG. I brought it up earlier. It's an excitotoxin that can cause headaches, fatigue and neurological issues. Now you're going to say how come? Why would salt cause this and does eating it once at a buffet really going to affect me? No, you may have some cravings, you may have some lucid dreams that night. Those are common side effects and then they go away.

Speaker 1:

But I had the opportunity of working in a bio and an animal tech facility at the University of Calgary, in the medical lab where we worked with mice, rats and small animals for diabetes research, parkinson's research, and each each doctor managed different labs and different things, and I was more of a tech, and there was one with the monosodium glutamate and what ended up happening is you can cause instant seizures in infant mice immediately, depending on the dose that you give them. So you give them, you know, 0.01 gram didn't really know much. They become hungrier, they ate more and they were fatter long-term. But the short-term one is what happened? If you give them 0.02 or 0.03, they would go into convulsions, 0.04, they would die. So if you can do that toxic effect in a small 16 gram mouse tiny little gram mouse, compared to 160 pound adult human, 0.04 will do nothing for you, but the cumulative effect of having this all the time. Imagine if you use seasoning salt with celery or celery salt with MSG in it and it was your main seasoning that you used every day, two, three times a day for cooking. Well, what happens after 20 years? What's the effect there? Are we going to have chronic headaches? Are we going to have neurological issues long-term? That's where research is going right now and the answer is yes.

Speaker 1:

High fructose corn syrup this one's being pulled off the shelf as well, which is great. We're going to lose the high fructose corn syrup in America. Finally, that makes sense. Increased risks of obesity, insulin resistance and fatty liver disease We've known this. It's high concentrated sugar. Of course it's never good. I don't think we have to preach to the choir. You all agree with me on this one. Eating high fructose corn syrup probably not a great idea of concentrating sugar compounded on itself as a good thing. Might as well just use some cane sugar or some natural sugar to sweeten whatever you're baking naturally there. Cane, whatever it is, coconut sugar, whatever you're going to use.

Speaker 1:

Trans fats and hydrogenated oils. We have to be careful in our processed foods and how we cook them. These contribute directly to heart disease, inflammation and weight gain, and using good fats is always a better decision than using bad fats. We won't dive into that. We have other episodes about fats. You can go back and search it and watch those videos those are great. Or listen to those podcasts. We dive right into those. Those are great.

Speaker 1:

Sodium nitrates and nitrites these ones are used usually to cure processed meats that's the most common utilization in them used in deli meats and they're directly linked to cancer. This hits home for me immigrant parents. My dad from Italy, big fan of salami, mortadella, capicolo, all the good stuff, and it was a staple almost daily in his diet by the time he was 67, he did get colon cancer. Now, now you're going to say, well, it could have been for many different reasons and it absolutely is. Stress, everything but the nitrate concentration and being linked directly to colon cancer. I was like dad, you know, you know, maybe do you think that may have done it. He's like, yeah, maybe he, you know, and so that hits home for me it doesn't mean that's, that's a correlative thing. It's not a direct scientific thing that if you eat nitrates you're going to get colon cancer. But for me it hit home and it was very close to home. So these things can add up. So be mindful about nitrates and processed meats. Eat them temporarily or intermittently, but don't make them part of your diet daily. That's, I think, a good advice for that.

Speaker 1:

Potassium bromate and brominated vegetable oils or BVOs they're used in bread and sodas mainly. Potential carcinogens and endocrine disruptors in the body is the side effect. So be careful with that. Flip those bread packages over and make sure you don't see that potassium bromate in there. You may want to switch breads just to minimize this specific toxin. Over time. Hopefully that gets off of the FDA list as well.

Speaker 1:

Carrageenan you may have seen this. It's found in dairy alternatives and you'll see this on social media too. Carrageenan it's used in this, in this healthy thing, and you eat this all the time and it's in gum and it's all this fine stuff and it's fine. But cumulative effects of this can cause digestive distress and inflammation. So, even though it's safe to eat and it doesn't have a toxic effect or a deadly effect, the long-term usage of carrageenan is that it can distress the digestive system. This can lead to IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, gut issues, dysbiosis, floral issues in the gut as well.

Speaker 1:

So, carrageenan, add that to your list and just keeping an eye out of it. And when we say add it to your list, it's not to go to the grocery store and do this every time you go shopping. It's to go through your fridge and your pantry at home right now and say, hey, what are the common things we buy week in and week out? The same eggs, the same almond milk, the same bread, the same deli turkey, the same chicken. And then looking at those packages right there in your fridge and just quickly going over them and saying is there any MSG in here, is there any carrageenan in here, is there any nitrates in here? And just reading it and then, if there are maybe being like man, we buy this every single week. Maybe we should change the brand of chicken that we're buying or the brand of deli turkey that we're buying, whatever it is, or bacon, or whatever it is that you're eating. That's logistic ways of making permanent changes for you and your family.

Speaker 1:

Artificial food dyes. We talked about it Red 40, yellow 5 and 6, blue 1 and 2, linked to hyperactivity, behavioral issues and potential carcinogens. Activity, behavioral issues and potential carcinogens. The United Kingdom has been a leader on the dye studies with behavioral issues in children and you can do this study from the comfort of your own home.

Speaker 1:

Give your kids Skittles, choose just red, give them all the red ones. Actually, don't do this. If we know this information, why would we do this to our kids? But don't bounce off the walls. You're going to have immediate behavioral disruptor issues.

Speaker 1:

It's not just the sugar, because if you bake something at home, you make homemade cupcakes and you give them a small portion of a cupcake, they may get a little active, a little bit hyper. But if you give them Skittles or you give them something with high absorbent amounts of dye in it, where their mouths are turning colors, watch the difference between having a handful of Skittles and having a homemade cupcake, the difference in behavior that happens with your children. Immediately Under the age of five, you will see this within 30 minutes. Five to 10 years old, you'll get it within the hour. Over 10 years old, it may take an hour or two to notice the mood swings that they go through, and that's directly linked with most children. So what does that do to you and I as adults? Being heavier, taller and bigger allows us to consume some of this. But even you will get irritable if you pay attention to how you feel after eating these things. Oh, that's a big one.

Speaker 1:

So dyes. If it's too bright and it looks too good, don't eat it. There's the natural colors that come from the world. When you dye things I don't know if you've ever done Easter egg dyeing with white eggs it never ends up looking like the commercial right? That bright orange and the bright blue. I'm sitting there dyeing these eggs the whole time. I'm like how do I get this vibrant blue color? And I just can't get it. It's like this dull pastel blue. That like this dull pastel blue. That's normal. That's how things work in the real world. You won't get that huge color right. You can get red red beets. And if you ever use them by hand, what happens to your hands? They turn red right and you could use that to dye things like beet juice to get a nice red. And even that won't get to a bright skittle red, make sense. To get that vibrant color you need these chemical dyes to go in there to do this. There you go. Artificial dyes.

Speaker 1:

Go back to that last episode on toxins, which was two episodes ago, and we dived right into toxins and dyes came up quite a bit. Propylparaben is a preservative in baking goods and it disrupts hormones and fertility. This one, luckily, I don't see anymore on packaging that much, but it doesn't mean it's not out there. It's still FDA approved. But it disrupts hormones and fertility and we can have a whole episode about fertility and why around the world fertility is going down. We've ultra-processed our food around the world. Fertility rates are not going down in Africa like they are in North America and there's a reason for that and it's definitely the processing of food and how we're consuming it.

Speaker 1:

And then butylated hydroxyanisole or BHA and BHT these ones are preservatives that are used in chips, cereals and their potential endocrine disruptors and carcinogens in themselves B-H-A-B-H-T. You'll see these on the side as butylated hydroxyl anisole and hydroxytulene. These are the two that are on there. Again, when I'm keeping an eye out on ingredients, I don't see it that much. But me I'm going to the healthy sections anyways, I'm not going down the Wonder Bread aisle, right. So for those of you that may purchase those things, check those things out, see if they're in there.

Speaker 1:

They're endocrine disruptors which cause metabolic disorder, hormone issues and are directly linked to cancers. They're found in teratomas from human tissue, that where they're built up, like the days of the parabens, the polyphenols, the estradiols, ddt you know all these pesticides and herbicides that are actually found in teratomas in the body and breast cancer, prostate cancer, liver cancer they're all linked with potential effects there. So again, toxicity, medical right Versus vitalistic viewership of toxic buildup over time. There are two different microscopic lenses that we're looking at this from, and these things are not venomous bites from a rattlesnake right. They're not going to immediately have an effect where you have to rush to the hospital, but the cumulative effect is being shown in the research and the literature to have a cumulative pathological change in the bodies, and we need to be on top of this, especially as parents, we've got to protect our kids and what goes in their bodies. Now you may ask things like why are these additives allowed? Well, hopefully there's a change, starting with the whole change in government and their stance on making America healthy Again. I guess that was their whole thing. I'm not going to hold my breath. They're still government, they're still politicians. I don't trust a single one of them. But if change happens, that's absolutely wonderful.

Speaker 1:

The FDA creates guidelines, but there's just too many loopholes for the food manufacturers to jump through. Super easy for them to get it in there. If it is on the FDA not approved list, they can say, well, what's the amount that's not allowed? And they'll say, well, 0.02 grams. And then they're like, okay, great, we use 0.01. They're still adding it in there to make sure that the food stays addictive and palatable.

Speaker 1:

Processed food's not good. I don't know if you've ever been in factories where they've done this. They're all made the same way. They're all dried out, so they all taste pretty much bland and what you have to add to them is lots of salt and lots of sugar to make them taste good. Then, to hold them on the shelf and hold the ingredients together. You have to have binders and preservatives so that they don't spoil on the shelf, so they can last there for a few weeks four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks so they can sell the product. Make sense? That's the loophole.

Speaker 1:

So these manufacturers are going to the FDA saying, listen, it's not logistically possible for us to create this Twinkie or this Oreo or this cookie and put it on the shelf by your guidelines, because if we do, it's going to be bad in eight days. It won't last. We need to use hydrogenated oils, we need to use so what's the allowable dose? Then they go to medicine and research and they're like listen, this is the toxic dose, don't ever cross this point, we'll allow this much. And then it passes.

Speaker 1:

That's in a nutshell how this goes. It's not evil corporations trying to kill people. It's literally them saying listen, we found out a way through chemistry on how to make these foods last on the shelf so the consumers can buy them in a reputable time, in an allowable time. And then the FDA is like that makes sense. Then the food companies give the FDA and the politicians lots of money called lobbying, and they're convinced. They're like oh yeah, this is good and follow these guidelines and we won't change them for the next four years, and that's how it really works. I'm not being a conspiracy theorist here. That's how government works. So big food companies prioritize shelf life over health. That's just the bottom line.

Speaker 1:

And the countries that have banned certain additives have put people really first on top of that, saying listen, there's other ways to do this. We don't need our Froot Loops to be that bright. You can still sell Froot Loops, but we're not going to allow you to use Red 40. Use a different one, and what do they do? They use a different one and it's more of an orangey red one. And whether they do, they use a different one and it's more of an orangey red. Fine, and it's more pale and pastel. It's not as bright as it is in America, and that's great. And they can still sell Froot Loops in Ireland. Make sense? That's how that all works.

Speaker 1:

How to avoid food additives Read ingredient labels. What to look for. You have to read the labels. If you can't pronounce it, look it up. Shop for whole, unprocessed foods. This will keep you out of trouble all the time. You can pretty much buy organic cucumbers and organic lettuce and organic grapes and not even have to read the label because it's pretty simple. That's one ingredient on the label grapes. Pretty simple to buy those keeps you out of trouble. But once you get into packaged and boxed stuff, read the label, flip it over. Read the label. Choose organic when possible. Organic just automatically minimizes the amount of pesticides and herbicides that can possibly be in the food. It's wonderful. It's a wonderful way to shop and then use natural alternatives for flavor and preservation. So salt at home, himalayan salt, Celtic salt, sea salt, and using these things to season your own meats at home helps you preserve them and keep them in the fridge longer, so that you can cook them three days down the road on the grill or whatever it is that you want to do. So there's ways to do this in the house.

Speaker 1:

My dad used to cure his own meats and used to call it a cool room up in Canada in the basement. He had a corner there in the laundry room. It was in the corner of the house and no drywall on it, it was just concrete and he closed the door and because it's Canada, this thing would get down to like 32 degrees, 36 degrees at night in the winter and then in the summer it'd be like 40, 36, 40 degrees during the summer days, and so you could leave meats in there and leave preservatives and pickled olives or pickled vegetables, jarred stuff, jams. He'd keep everything in there because it was nice and cool. It was almost like a refrigerator. It doing Italian things all the way up in the Northern parts of North America, which is pretty cool. So he did at home. He had a little bit of a green thumb and that spilled on over to me.

Speaker 1:

So I just encourage you guys from this episode to read the labels, you know, use cleaner food brands and prep your own meals. It's it's how you're going to get away from these things. And then, if you have any ideas for the next episode, just keep sending those emails. I love them. It keeps us on top of content for you and we know what you're into and what you want to listen to, what you want to learn more of. But yeah, there you go the top additives to avoid. Go out there, read them, empower yourself and protect your family. Have a great and healthy week.

People on this episode

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
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Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host