14 DAY TRIAL // Forget love, it's food we can't live without. It's kept us up and running for millennia now and not a day goes by that we don't think about it.
All the same, we don't really know what the food that we eat contains. We know what certain dishes are supposed to smell like, what our favorite flavors are and what's bound to make us sick. The chemistry behind food, however, is one big mystery.
The video below, put together by science enthusiasts over at SciShow, introduces us to 5 chemicals that are present in nearly everything we eat.
Now, we all know that processed foods come with a whole lot of additives. These compounds serve to preserve our favorite treats and keep them from going bad, enhance flavors or maybe add flavors that shouldn't be there, and make food colorful.
One of the most common food additives is red dye number 40, otherwise known as E 129 or allura red. As its name suggests, it makes our food, well, red.
Not to make you swear off candies and strawberry-flavored sodas for all eternity but, as it turns out, red dye number 40 is made from petroleum. Spooky, right?
Then there are additives that are added to food to control consistency, which are known as stabilizers, and all sorts of other compounds designed to make our favorite snacks irresistible.
Check out the video to learn more about the chemistry of food.
