Did you know that if you eat out at fast food restaurants, you’re likely consuming up to 100 ingredients from each entrée? Many of those ingredients are not even food, but an impressive list of chemicals, food conditioners and preservatives. Recently, a food activist named Vani Hari from Foodbabe.com, exposed the ingredient list in Chick-A-Fila’s popular chicken sandwich. There were plenty of low quality, inflammatory food ingredients to be concerned about like GMO corn, soybean oil, sugar and refined grains. But the alarming part of the ingredient list was the multiple chemicals we were never meant to eat.
Among the ingredients listed was monosodium glutamate (MSG), a controversial seasoning often used in Chinese food. MSG has also been associated with causing headaches, nausea and rapid heart beat/ heart palpitations in some people.
At least MSG is somewhat familiar. What about that unpronounceable chemical that’s used as an anti-foaming agent for the refined peanut oil? Funny, peanut oil doesn’t seem to need a de-foaming agent when used at home.
If you think that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is watching out for our food safety, think again. There are many ways to circumvent the FDA rules. While there’s a capped limit of each preservative used, there’s no limit to how many preservatives are used in total. And Chick-A-Fila used about 18 in total in their sandwich.
One of those preservatives is Tertiary Butylhydroquinone or TBHQ. While it doesn’t sound very appetizing, it’s used as an ingredient in both the chicken and the bun.
TBHQ is a chemical made from butane and can only be used at a rate of 0.02 percent of the total oil in a product. It makes sense. Butane is the toxic and highly flammable oil used in lighters.
Eating only 1 gram of this toxic preservative has been shown to cause issues like ADHD in children. It has also been known to cause dermatitis and dizziness in humans, as well as stomach cancer in lab animals.
Shocked? Don’t be. This is the same FDA that allows a product to be labeled trans fat-free when it still contains 0.5 grams of trans fat. They figure a little bit won’t kill you. But what happens when these toxins build up in the body over time? Many health experts blame this toxic chemical build up for the rapid rise of auto-immune disease and cancer in the U.S.
There’s also the less serious health consequences that people may never associate with their fast food meals, like headaches, asthma, allergies, joint pain, depression, stubborn weight gain or uncontrollable cravings.
That’s why it’s so important to do regular cleanses to rid the body of the damaging effects of these chemicals.
The 21-Day Body Makeover allows you to cleanse those chemicals from your body and fat cells while still eating tasty food with far fewer ingredients. The homemade, real food versions of the Chick-A-Fila chicken sandwich can be made with high quality ingredients like organic, free range chicken, almond milk instead of dairy, almond flour instead of wheat flour, and anti-inflammatory oils like coconut oil. Use romaine lettuce to wrap it up and add extra vitamins.
The real food version of the Chick-A-Fila chicken sandwich may not taste exactly like the highly processed original, but it’s also not going to have the negative health effects. And when you make your own food from scratch, you can see exactly what goes into it.
You also won’t feel the same after eating the real food version of this sandwich. Instead of feeling sluggish, heavy and sleepy, you’ll feel light, energetic and virtuous. You’ll drop weight, shed toxins and learn to appreciate food that’s been made the traditional way.
