Chemistry and food message briefly. Introductory speech by the teacher. Food and nutritional supplements E

Our food. Flavorings, preservatives, sweeteners, carcinogens - these scary words we are regularly frightened by champions healthy eating. “Why are you eating this chemical?” Mom will ask, seeing a pack of chips in her hands. But in fact, everything we eat is chemistry, pure chemistry. Chemist-technologist, flavorist, author of a popular science blog, Sergei Belkov, in his lecture on the Theories and Practices portal, tells why you should not be afraid of chemistry in food.

Food makes you

Everyone wants to know the truth about food. They want to know which products contain more chemicals. In natural yogurt without flavors, preservatives and dyes with bifidobacteria, supposedly very healthy, as indicated on the packaging? Or maybe there is more chemicals in the orange, which was treated with pesticides while being transported from warm countries? Maybe there is more chemistry in the hamburger of a well-known chain, which is very disliked because they add chemistry to them? Or maybe there's more chemistry in copper sulfate, which is used as a fungicide in agriculture? Maybe there are more chemicals in a pack of salt, which has zero calories and cholesterol? So where is there more chemistry?

To answer this question, we look at the scientific journal Chemistry, which examined all the products and compiled a list of those that do not contain chemicals. Their list turned out to be empty, because there is only one answer to the question of how much chemicals are in food. There are exactly 100% chemicals in food. Everything in the world consists of chemistry. The table of our compatriot Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev tells us that even the cheese that the fox wants to eat consists of chemistry, because it contains specific chemicals, the fox may not know that they are there, but they are one way or another fall into the fox along with this cheese.

The DNA molecule is the main molecule of life on the planet. Even based on the name, it's chemical molecule, just like the ubiquitous bacterium, and everything that happens in it is the movement of flagella, the release of substances, etc. - this is the result of some specific chemical reactions. And even a person consists of chemistry, he has chemical formulas, chemical elements from the table, many chemical processes take place in his body every minute. Therefore, beware of horror stories about “ chemical food"It's not worth it. But this does not mean that you can eat any chemical, because it comes in different forms. And in order to understand what can be consumed and what cannot be consumed, you need to understand why chemicals are added to food.

History of preservatives

Another example is potato chips. Everyone knows that this product is very harmful due to the fact that it consists of glutamate, flavorings, etc. Also, any chips contain the toxic substance solanine. What is important is whether the substance is poisonous or non-toxic, but in what quantities it is contained in the product. And if we compare the toxicity of corned beef, glutamate and flavoring that are in chips, taking into account their real quantity, it turns out that the most poisonous thing about chips will be the potatoes themselves, the most natural part of which they are made of! And what is made artificially is much less harmful.

Cranberries have their own preservative, sodium benzoate, which protects and prevents mold and bacteria from eating the berries and seeds. In the process of evolution, cranberries have biologically developed the ability to create acid in their composition. And people later began to use this property of cranberries for their own purposes, realizing that if cranberries were able to protect their berries, then we can also protect soda. This does not mean that benzoic acid is beneficial or harmful. But the fact remains: the “harmful preservative” appeared in nature itself.

Food: Natural and poisonous

Mustard is a unique chemical weapon. Through millions of years of evolution, mustard developed allyl isothiocyanate, which gives it its pungency. This substance, which is formed only when plant tissue is damaged, is natural remedy from pests, why shouldn’t man take advantage of the achievements of natural evolution?

Since hydrocyanic acid is a fairly chemically active and toxic substance, the plant cannot retain it in the form of the hydrocyanic acid molecule itself; it converts it into a glycoside, which, when decomposed, can release hydrocyanic acid.

And if you ate a handful of almonds, you consumed the amount of glycoside contained in it, and inside you it broke down into aldehyde and hydrocyanic acid. The aldehyde smells like almonds, and the hydrocyanic acid serves to kill you. Therefore, if we are talking about flavorings, the smell and taste of natural almonds, then you always use a small amount of poison, and when using a flavor identical to natural, you absorb only the smell without hydrocyanic acid.

It would seem that vanilla aroma is a natural scent, but if you have seen green vanilla pods, you should know that they have no smell because there is no vanillin in green vanilla pods. Vanillin as a chemical is not meant to be added to buns, but to protect the seeds of the vanilla bean from pests. This substance is far from the most useful, and it was not intended by nature to be eaten.

The smell of coffee does not exist

Few would think that a product that is 100% insecticides and artificial flavors is coffee. The smell of coffee does not exist at all in living nature, since green coffee doesn't smell. The smell of coffee is formed during the process heat treatment in unnatural, unnatural conditions, while highlighting great amount substances that are in coffee - they char, heat up, interact with each other, there are much more of them than in cigarettes, somewhere around 2000. Thus, the so-called natural drink contains 100% insecticides and artificial flavors.

It is a little unreasonable to say that all plants in nature are beneficial. Almost all of them protect themselves using a variety of chemical substances.

We eat natural food not because it is tasty, but because the plants could not develop protection against us. the most delicious and useful plants, which appeared in the process of evolution, were eaten, only the most harmful and most poisonous remained, which they could not eat.

Food: What is good

The fact that everything natural is healthy is not entirely correct. About a hundred years ago, the famous English philosopher George Moore formulated the so-called “naturalistic fallacy.” Its essence lies in the fact that there is no basis for identifying the natural with “good” and the unnatural with “bad”. Natural and not natural, good and bad - these are two completely different categories that we cannot compare. There are many natural things that are considered bad. There are many artificial things that are healthy to eat. Therefore, when we talk about chemistry in food, we should evaluate it from the point of view of whether a particular molecule is good or bad, harmful or not harmful, but not from the point of view of whether it is natural or not natural.

What is natural anyway? Let's look at the composition natural lemon. Ascorbic acid, starch, lemon acid, essential oil, sucrose, water. What happens if we divide a lemon into lemon slices? We get an antioxidant, acidity regulator, flavoring, sweetener, stabilizer and water. But in fact, nothing changes - these are the same molecules, although perhaps in slightly different proportions.

Food and nutritional supplements E

Each of us has heard that nutritional supplements with index E are harmful. The permitted list E is not based on the principle that these are artificial substances that are added for unknown reasons. The list has a logical structure. If a substance has been studied, its safe dose, everything about the substance is known to science, then it is included in the list. E is the last thing that, from a logical point of view, should scare the consumer.

The story with glutamate is very simple. Let's imagine what will happen if there are separate shelves in supermarkets for products with glutamate. the remaining shelves will remain empty because glutamate-free products do not exist.

There is a simple explanation for this. Everyone knows what hemoglobin is; hemoglobin is a protein, it is in all of us. Just like growth hormone, it also contains protein. Protein is made up of amino acids. We have 20 of them in total. Amino acids are assembled into chains, and protein is obtained. One of these amino acids is glutamic acid.

There is not a single protein without glutamic acid. It is contained in different amounts in different proteins. In dairy products, for example, it is 20%, in some others it is 10%, in wheat protein it can be 40%. Glutamic acid is one of the most common acids in nature. When protein hydrolysis occurs in a product, it breaks down and amino acids appear, including glutamic acid, which gives the product its taste. It has a unique taste, the so-called “umami”, which has become the fifth in the flavor line after bitter and sweet, sour and salty. Glutamic acid indicates that the product contains protein.

Why is the red tomato the most delicious?

Because it contains the most glutamate. Or, consuming cottage cheese, which contains a lot milk protein, we somehow get glutamic acid. Its content in cottage cheese is approximately six times higher than in the strongest “over-glutamed” chips. Scientists like to conduct different experiments: for example, they injected newborn mice with glutamate, and after a while the mice became covered in fat. On this basis, they concluded that its consumption causes obesity. But the question arises, why was this done at all? After all, glutamate is usually consumed with food, and not intravenously. Of course, mice will become obese if they are injected with pure glutamate.

Now, regarding isomers. The properties of any molecule are determined not by where it came from, but by which atoms and in what sequence are included in this molecule. In nature, substances have optical isomerism. Some substances exist in two forms of optical isomers, which seem to consist of the same atoms and in the same sequence, but the substances are different. According to the classification, ordinary store-bought glutamate contains about 0.5% of the D-isomer; ordinary cheese, which also contains monosodium glutamate, contains from 10 to 45% of the D-isomer, depending on the degree of ripening. Any permitted food additives are substances that are known to be tested, safe, and do not harm your health.

Food and sweeteners

Aspartame is one of the most famous sweeteners, and the most unfairly maligned. The molecule, when interacting with water (including during digestion in your stomach or in a bottle of cola), decomposes into three substances: aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol, which is a poison. To talk about the dangers of methanol, you need to talk about quantity, and you need to understand why it is harmful. Methanol itself is harmless, but its breakdown products are harmful: formaldehyde, etc. The very fact that a substance is contained in a product does not mean at all that it is harmful in the quantities in which it is present in the product.

Food and carcinogens

Sausage, for example, does not contain the “dreaded creatine” and is therefore less harmful. Or acrylamide - a carcinogen that is formed in fried potatoes. The secret is that it also forms in our kitchen, although we think that this is not the case.

It is formed chemically, which is the same for all processing methods. We can choose natural way smoking, but in addition to the smell of smoke it contains a whole set of harmful substances. For hundreds of years, people ate natural food, which has a proportion. Let's imagine a nice Italian dinner consisting of wine, pizza with basil, tomatoes and cheese. This dinner contains the proportion of substances that people have been eating for hundreds of years. Let's look at this proportion in cheese. There are a million varieties of cheese, and what bacteria it was treated with, what milk it was made from, and under what conditions it was produced depends on what substances it contains. The milk that makes up cheese is also influenced by a huge number of factors, starting with what the cow ate, what kind of water she drank, etc.

The amount of substances from one sprig of basil depends on where the plant picked it, since in different areas Plants have different amounts of different fragrant substances. The proportions of substances will be different in each of the leaves of the plant. We take the cheese, mix it with tomatoes, flour, eggs and put it in the oven, where it all heats up. All the substances that are there interact with each other, and as a result, thousands of reactions are formed in which new substances arise. Chemical composition wine and the proportion of substances depends on what grapes were used, under what conditions they were made, what kind of utensils were used, and temperature.

Food and flavors

If we talk about aromatic substances that are contained in everyday food, about 8,000 of them have been found. Of these, Food Industry about 4000 are allowed.

They were tested and found to be harmless and can be used in flavoring. Any artificial flavor identical to natural one consists of these 4000, which have been studied. The remaining 4000, which were not included in this list, are present in natural products, and they contain not only studied safe ones, but also dangerous ones that were prohibited for use, but which we consume. So, our ideas about food are far from the real state of affairs, because even an ordinary apple contains a huge amount of e-additives.

"Morning of St. Petersburg"

September 27

“Chemical food” is the horror story of our time. People do not want to eat harmful chemicals, but want to eat healthy natural products. But what they mean by this is mostly myths, says chemist Sergei Belkov in his lecture to Gazeta.Ru.

When applied to food, chemistry is now used as a dirty word. But chemistry is a fundamental property of our world; everything in the world is made up of chemicals, including man himself. And food is no exception.

The first myth is that there can be food without chemicals. Can not. Chemicals in food - 100%.

Another question is whether these chemicals in food come from nature or are synthesized by humans.

The second myth is that everything natural is beneficial, and everything artificial is harmful. In fact, natural is different only in that it occurs in nature, and only that.

Natural is not healthy. Here's an example: forest fires are a natural phenomenon, just like death from smallpox, and steam heating- an artificial phenomenon. And which of this is useful and which is harmful?

The world's first artificial flavor was invented by a man who began to fry meat, because the smell of fried meat does not exist in nature.

The smell and taste of fried meat is the result of the interaction of substances that exist in raw meat when it is heated. Moreover, chemical interaction. The smell and taste of cheese is also artificial, since cheese does not exist in nature. But man learned to make this product quite a long time ago, and the purpose of creation was not at all to improve the taste, but the desire to preserve the chemicals of milk.

Many plant substances that we tend to think of as beneficial simply because they are natural are actually plant chemical weapons.

They are selected by evolution to cause maximum harm to anyone who wants to eat the plant. Many are poisons. For example, caffeine in a plant acts as an insecticide: it protects it from insects. In general, coffee can safely be considered a mixture of insecticides and flavorings, because the aroma of coffee is essentially artificial.

Green coffee has no odor, and the “natural” smell of coffee is the result of artificial chemical reactions that occur in the beans when heated.

What is, for example, vanillin, which we add to all kinds of confectionery products as a natural flavoring? From a chemical point of view, vanillin is an aromatic phenol and an aromatic aldehyde at the same time.

I wouldn't want to eat that.

The famous vanilla pods do not naturally contain vanillin; it appears in them only after ripening and falling. The plant does not need vanillin; its purpose is to protect the seeds from harmful molds and bacteria. This is a substance that protects plants from being eaten, and only by chance did a person like its taste, which does not indicate its usefulness.

The same goes for mustard. The main function of allyl isothiocyanate, to which mustard owes its pungency, is to repel larger insects and herbivores. As such, it does not exist in the plant: it begins to form only when the plant tissue is damaged. Its synthesis is triggered at the moment of damage to leaves or seeds in order to cause maximum damage to the pest.

And only man has learned to eat something that was invented as a toxin and call it healthy. At the same time, calling the same substance obtained by methods harmful chemical synthesis.

Toxic substances for protection against insects are also contained in cucumber pimples. But the man eats nothing. Almonds and apricots contain a very strong poison, cyanide, hydrocyanic acid. And this does not prevent a person from using them with pleasure.

The molecules that create the orange scent, located in the zest and whose formula is more similar to gasoline than food, serve to protect the juicy pulp and so attract us with their smell.

When talking about food additives, monosodium glutamate is most often mentioned: it is found in bouillon cubes, sausages, and frankfurters. But it is this substance that determines the taste of meat - the so-called umami taste, essentially the taste of protein. This was discovered by the Japanese professor Ikeda and back in 1909 he patented a method for producing it. But long before that, glutamate was the most common chemical molecule in our food. It is this substance that gives the taste to sausage, ham and any other meat products. Glutamate gives tomatoes their flavor, and its concentration increases as the fruit ripens. A red tomato tastes better than a green one partly because it contains more glutamate. Man has only learned to obtain monosodium glutamate by bacteriological synthesis. And this artificial glutamate, according to the atomic-molecular theory, is no different from natural glutamate.

Food additives on product packaging are designated by the letter E with various digital indices. And this letter often scares the consumer.

Although this only means that the product contains strictly defined and tested substances.

Often the same substances in large quantities are also present in natural products. For example, an apple has a much larger set of different E than any other finished product. Although, in essence, this is not important: the origin of a substance does not determine its properties.

Cranberries contain more sodium benzoate than is allowed for canning foods.

If cranberries are subject to tolerances for preservative content, they should be banned; they contain an overdose of preservatives.

What does she need them for? To protect yourself, prevent mold and bacteria from eating the berries and seeds. But no one on this planet would think to suspect cranberries of what they suspect preserves or drinks. On the contrary, many people consume cranberries for their beneficial antimicrobial properties, which, however, are exaggerated.

Parabens (esters of parahydroxybenzoic acid) are also natural substances; plants use them to protect themselves from pests. They are used mainly in cosmetics. And they are also afraid. You can often find advertisements for so-called paraben-free creams. But this is only possible in three cases: 1) if instead of safe and proven parabens, some less known and studied preservative is added to the cream; 2) the cream will dry out immediately after opening; 3) the manufacturer is not a fool and still added parabens, but, following fashion, he lied.

Sodium nitrite is another subject of horror stories.

It is very easy to find it in sausage: fashionable sausage gray does not contain sodium nitrite. But don't buy this kind of sausage.

Before sodium nitrite was added to sausage, the so-called sausage disease - botulism- was a fairly common occurrence. The word “botulism” itself originates from the ancient Roman “sausage”. Sodium nitrite reliably kills the bacteria that produces the deadly toxin. And if we talk about quantities, then 1 kg of spinach or broccoli will give you the same amount of nitrite as 50 kg of doctor's sausage.

Here's a story about caviar, a delicious product that, for a number of reasons, is very susceptible to spoilage. To preserve caviar, the substance urotropine (E 239) was recently used, which has been banned in our country since 2010.

But this is the only preservative that worked in caviar. And now the caviar either goes rotten, or it contains a lot of other preservatives, more than allowed.

Or it is still good and safe, but with prohibited methenamine. Hexamine was banned because it decomposes during storage to form formaldehyde, which is poison. But no one thought about the quantities. A minuscule amount of it is formed. And we don’t eat caviar with spoons. In addition, the same amount of formaldehyde that can be obtained from a jar of caviar with methenamine can be obtained by eating one banana.

Another myth is related to the harmfulness of sweeteners, which people who want to lose weight use instead of sugar.

For example, aspartame is a completely understood molecule, with an understandable effect, and there are hundreds of studies confirming its safety.

A very common myth is that “you know what a natural product is, but what you synthesized there is all impurities!” This is complete nonsense. For example, if you compare tarragon herb and flavored soda, then natural tarragon contains more impurities. Moreover, in soda they are all known, but in grass we do not know which ones could have formed. There are much more chemicals in natural coffee (almost a thousand), and their properties have been studied much less than in artificial coffee flavoring. In total, more than 8 thousand aromatic substances have been found in food products to date. Of these, about 4 thousand are approved for use as flavoring agents, their properties have been studied, and they are recognized as safe. About a hundred of these substances are prohibited: they turned out to be harmful. And about 4 thousand more never underwent any inspection. Thus, when consuming the flavoring, you are guaranteed to consume only substances from the tested 4 thousand.

By consuming natural foods, you eat everything: proven safe, untested, and definitely proven harmful.

Finally, lovers of everything natural in the store will choose naturally smoked sausage or ham rather than smoked with liquid smoke. And from a safety point of view, they will choose a much more dangerous product. There is neither one nor the other the best choice from a health point of view. But natural smoke contains many resins, carcinogens, which are released during the production of liquid smoke. In fact, artificial smoking is much safer than natural smoking. It may not be as tasty.

“We want to know the truth about food!” - under such slogans come defenders of natural food and opponents of chemical food. It's very cool when a person wants to know the truth. But it’s better to look for this truth not on TV or on women’s forums. And start at least with a textbook on food chemistry.

The truth about food is that all food is made of chemicals. The truth is that if a person makes his own food, then he knows what he makes it from and checks it for safety.

The truth is that food chemistry is also a science that makes our world a better place. And another truth is that by consuming only natural food, relying on nature, you are making a mistake. Nature is not at all obligated to take care of our safety.

Many centuries have passed since man learned to produce and use fire, prepare bread and wine, dye fabrics, smelt metals from ores... More than two hundred years ago, M.V. Lomonosov in his famous “Tale on the Benefits of Chemistry” specifically addressed attention to “how much chemistry helps us in preparing pleasant food and drinks.” According to a long-established tradition, food production technology is classified as chemical technology. In the 18th century, the molecules of substances obtained by chemists consisted of at most 10-15 atoms. These were fairly simple “constructions” of saltpeter, soda, and acids. IN early XIX century, the “construction” technology of chemists made it possible to make “multi-story” molecules - dyes, medicines, explosives. These were “buildings” of 100 atoms or more.

After A.M. Butlerov created the theory of the structure of matter, and D.I. Mendeleev gave a table of elements - these “building” materials of chemistry - chemists had unlimited possibilities for constructing “structures” of particular complexity.

All this brought the development paths of chemistry and food production even closer together. In this chapter we will not talk about the role of chemistry, in particular biological chemistry, in the processes of nutrition and metabolism. Let us leave aside the question of the role of chemistry in agriculture. We will just give a few examples of how chemistry and food technology, we’ll talk about some interesting chemical food additives, the wonders and secrets of chemical synthesis food products. Unlike other sections of chemical technology of organic substances, the peculiarity of food technology is that in all its branches biological catalysts - enzymes - are most widely used. Winemaking, alcohol smoking, brewing, production of vinegar, curdled milk, pickling, fermentation and, above all, bread baking are based on fermentation processes.

Academician A.I. Bakh said: “The production of baked bread is the greatest chemical production in the world...”. What, exactly, is the chemistry of baking? This is the conversion of starch into sugar by so-called enzymatic hydrolysis and then fermentation of the resulting sugar. In production rye bread Along with alcoholic fermentation, lactic acid fermentation also occurs, as a result of which the bread acquires a specific sour taste and aroma. The characteristic smell of rye bread crust is due to the presence of isovaleric aldehyde produced during fermentation rye dough. Pickling cucumbers and tomatoes, sauerkraut and peppers are also based on the processes of lactic acid fermentation. The production of molasses, a number of vitamins, food acids, and aromatic substances is based on complex chemical processes.

It should be said that in the processes mentioned, the addition of non-food products plays a seemingly transitory role. They contribute to the transformation of a substance, its isolation, crystallization or purification, but they themselves are almost never included in its composition. Perhaps many of you don’t even suspect that, for example, lime and carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide takes part in the production of juices and wine.

IN last years In capitalist countries, the inclusion of chemical (non-food) additives in food is increasingly practiced in the field of food production. From the point of view of our specialists, this is often abused abroad.

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Cucumber

Chips

Another example is potato chips. Everyone knows that this product is very harmful due to the fact that it consists of glutamate, flavorings, etc. Also, any chips contain the toxic substance solanine. What is important is whether the substance is poisonous or non-toxic, but in what quantities it is contained in the product. And if you compare the toxicity of the corned beef, glutamate and flavoring that are in the chips, taking into account their actual quantity, it turns out that the most poisonous thing in the chips will be the potatoes themselves from which they are made, the most natural part! And what is made artificially is much less harmful.

Cranberry

Mustard

Mustard is a unique chemical weapon. Through millions of years of evolution, mustard developed allyl isothiocyanate, which gives it its pungency. This substance, which is formed only when plant tissue is damaged, is a natural remedy for pests; why shouldn’t a person take advantage of the achievements of natural evolution?

Almond

Many people have heard that if you eat a handful of almonds, you can get poisoned. They also say that if you smell almonds, it means there is hydrocyanic acid nearby, and you should run away from this place. In fact, almonds, just like apples, cherries, peaches and some other plants, do produce hydrocyanic acid, which is a plant protection chemical. Since hydrocyanic acid is a fairly chemically active and toxic substance, the plant cannot retain it in the form of the hydrocyanic acid molecule itself; it converts it into a glycoside, which, when decomposed, can release hydrocyanic acid. And if you ate a handful of almonds, you consumed the amount of glycoside contained in it, and inside you it broke down into aldehyde and hydrocyanic acid. The aldehyde smells like almonds, and the hydrocyanic acid serves to kill you. Therefore, if we are talking about flavorings, the smell and taste of natural almonds, then you always consume a small amount of poison, and when using a flavoring identical to natural, you absorb only the smell without hydrocyanic acid.

Vanilla

Coffee

Few would think that a product that is 100% insecticides and artificial flavors is coffee. The smell of coffee does not exist at all in living nature, since green coffee has no smell. The smell of coffee is formed during heat treatment in unnatural, unnatural conditions, which releases a huge amount of substances that are in coffee - they char, heat up, interact with each other, there are much more of them than in cigarettes, somewhere around 2000. So Thus, the so-called natural drink consists of 100% insecticides and artificial flavors.

It is a little unreasonable to say that all plants in nature are beneficial. Almost all of them protect themselves with a variety of chemicals. We eat natural food not because it tastes good, but because plants have failed to develop a defense against us. The most delicious and useful plants that appeared in the process of evolution were eaten, leaving only the most harmful and most poisonous plants that could not be eaten.

What is natural anyway? Let's look at the composition of natural lemon. Ascorbic acid, starch, citric acid, essential oil, sucrose, water. What happens if we divide a lemon into lemon slices? We get an antioxidant, acidity regulator, flavoring, sweetener, stabilizer and water. But in fact, nothing changes - these are the same molecules, although perhaps in slightly different proportions.

Flavors

What can flavorings do? It is unknown whether all these substances lead to obesity and Alzheimer's disease, but the story with autism is interesting. And if we look at the graph, in which purple indicates the number of cases of autism in the world, and red the number of sales of organic food, we can draw two simple conclusions from the graph. First: if autism cases are on the rise, who said it was fragrances that caused them? Maybe the Internet is causing them? Secondly, autistic people, according to statistics, prefer organic food.

Index E

Each of us has heard that food additives with the E index are harmful. The permitted list E is not based on the principle that these are artificial substances that are added for unknown reasons. The list has a logical structure. If a substance has been studied, its safe dose is known, everything about the substance is known to science, then it is included in the list. E is the last thing that, from a logical point of view, should scare the consumer.

Glutamate

The story with glutamate is very simple. Let's imagine what will happen if there are separate shelves in supermarkets for products with glutamate. The remaining shelves will remain empty because glutamate-free products do not exist. There is a simple explanation for this. Everyone knows what hemoglobin is; hemoglobin is a protein, it is in all of us. Just like growth hormone, it also contains protein. Protein is made up of amino acids. We have 20 of them in total. Amino acids are assembled into chains, and protein is obtained. One of these amino acids is glutamic acid. There is not a single protein without glutamic acid. It is contained in different amounts in different proteins. In dairy products, for example, it is 20%, in some others it is 10%, in wheat protein it can be 40%. Glutamic acid is one of the most common acids in nature. When protein hydrolysis occurs in a product, it breaks down and amino acids appear, including glutamic acid, which gives the product its taste. It has a unique taste, the so-called “umami”, which has become the fifth in the flavor line after bitter and sweet, sour and salty. Glutamic acid indicates that the product contains protein.

Why is the red tomato the most delicious? Because it contains the most glutamate. Or, by consuming cottage cheese, which contains a lot of milk protein, we somehow get glutamic acid. Its content in cottage cheese is approximately six times higher than in the strongest “over-glutamed” chips. Scientists like to conduct different experiments: for example, they injected newborn mice with glutamate, and after a while the mice became covered in fat. On this basis, they concluded that its consumption causes obesity. But the question arises, why was this done at all? After all, glutamate is usually consumed with food, and not intravenously. Of course, mice will become obese if they are injected with pure glutamate.

Isomers

The properties of any molecule are determined not by where it came from, but by which atoms and in what sequence are included in this molecule. In nature, substances exhibit optical isomerism. Some substances exist in two forms of optical isomers, which seem to consist of the same atoms and in the same sequence, but the substances are different. According to the classification, ordinary store-bought glutamate contains about 0.5% of the D-isomer; ordinary cheese, which also contains monosodium glutamate, contains from 10 to 45% of the D-isomer, depending on the degree of ripening. Any permitted food additives are substances that are known to be tested, safe, and do not harm your health.

Sweeteners

Aspartame is one of the best known sweeteners, and the most unjustifiably maligned. The molecule, when interacting with water (including during digestion in your stomach or in a bottle of cola), decomposes into three substances: aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol, which is a poison. To talk about the dangers of methanol, you need to talk about quantity, and you need to understand why it is harmful. Methanol itself is harmless, but its breakdown products are harmful: formaldehyde, etc. The very fact that a substance is contained in a product does not mean at all that it is harmful in the quantities in which it is present in the product.

Carcinogens

The world's first flavor was roasted meat. Those substances that are formed during frying are not natural, they have been studied only recently, and when a person first learned to fry it, he did not know which of the components of fried meat were harmful. However, we believe that natural meat is somehow healthier than unnatural meat. This is wrong. Sausage, for example, does not contain the “dreaded creatine” and is therefore less harmful. Or acrylamide, a carcinogen that forms in fried potatoes. The secret is that it also forms in our kitchen, although we think that this is not the case. It is formed chemically, which is the same for all processing methods. We can choose the natural method of smoking, but in addition to the smell of smoke, it contains a whole range of harmful substances.

Proportion of substances

For hundreds of years, people have eaten natural foods that have proportions. Let's imagine a nice Italian dinner consisting of wine, pizza with basil, tomatoes and cheese. This dinner contains the proportion of substances that people have been eating for hundreds of years. Let's look at this proportion in cheese. There are a million varieties of cheese, and what bacteria it was treated with, what milk it was made from, and under what conditions it was produced depends on what substances it contains. The milk that makes up cheese is also influenced by a huge number of factors, starting with what the cow ate, what kind of water she drank, etc.

The amount of substances from one basil sprig depends on where in the plant it was picked, since in different parts of the plant the amount of different fragrant substances is different. The proportions of substances will be different in each of the leaves of the plant. We take the cheese, mix it with tomatoes, flour, eggs and put it in the oven, where it all heats up. All the substances that are there interact with each other, and as a result, thousands of reactions are formed in which new substances arise. The chemical composition of wine and the proportions of substances depend on what grapes were used, under what conditions it was made, what kind of dishes were used, and temperature.

If we talk about aromatic substances that are contained in everyday food, there are about 8000 of them. Of these, about 4000 are allowed in the food industry. They were tested, after which it turned out that they are not harmful and can be used in flavoring. Any artificial flavor identical to natural one consists of these 4000, which have been studied. The remaining 4000, which are not included in this list, are present in natural products, and they contain not only studied safe ones, but also dangerous ones that were prohibited for use, but which we consume. So, our ideas about food are far from the real state of affairs, because even an ordinary apple contains a huge amount of E-additives.