Some of the products in your home are full of terrifying and potentially dangerous ingredients. So today, we’re going to expose lead-filled lipstick, plastic pasta and wrinkle cream that’s made from babies, as we explore some products that you’ll never want to buy again!
Leaded Lipstick
If you wear make-up, you should know that it might be made up of seriously toxic ingredients. Lead is a toxic metal that can poison you if it gets into your bloodstream, and it turns out there are traces of it in your favorite lipstick, eyeshadow, and mascara.
In 2016 the FDA found that 400 of the most-popular lipsticks in the USA contained traces of lead, including shades from L'Oréal, Maybelline and Cover Girl. All of these samples included less than 10 parts per million, or PPM, which is a very small amount.
But scientists say that no amount of lead exposure is safe, and even teensy doses can cause high blood pressure, brain damage, and many other physical ailments. Furthermore, the
FDA sets limits of just 0.1 ppm of lead in food, because ingesting it directly could cause major harm. Your cosmetics might contain 100 times this amount, but how did it get there?Well, while cosmetic companies aren’t purposely filling their products with toxic lead, lots of them use color additives that are made from natural ores and minerals that are contaminated with lead when they come out the ground. These rocks are tainted with tiny amounts of lead, so it’s practically impossible to remove the toxic metal entirely and still get that particular shade of Sunset Red or Blushing Pink you’re so fond of.
The FDA haven’t strictly regulated this, because you only absorb a very small amount of lead when it’s applied to your skin. However, they’ve noted that more lead is absorbed if you wear contaminated lipstick and lick your lips, and remember, scientists say no amount of lead is safe to ingest. So maybe you should opt for a more natural look from now on!
Ambergris (Whale Vomit)
If use perfume, you might want to consider saving your money and switching to cheaper bottles in the future, because some of the fancier products contain a pretty disgusting animal-ingredient.
When sperm whales eat their diet of squid, they vomit out the parts of the creature that can’t be digested, like their beaks. However, sometimes these parts can sneak through into their digestive system, which causes the whale’s gut to secrete a waxy substance that protects its intestines from being punctured.
Over the course of several years, the beaks and the waxy substance bind together to form a solid mass called ambergris, that is later ejected into the ocean. For years scientists didn’t know how the whales got rid of the ambergris, and for a long time they thought they probably vomited it up. Although it’s now believed that the substance eventually leaves the whale safely with its poop, or grows so large that it fatally ruptures through its intestines!
This sounds pretty disgusting, but believe it or not ambergris is crucial to the perfume industry, and just 2lbs of the stuff can be sold for as much as $40,000. While Ambergris stinks like poop when it’s first ejected, it contains an odorless alcohol called ambrein which has fixative qualities. This means that when it’s added to a scent it makes it last much longer, so luxury perfumers extract it from Ambergris and add it to their products to make them longer lasting than cheaper offerings. Furthermore, when ambergris dries out it develops a more pleasant, earthy smell and some of the world’s most expensive perfumes directly use it as an ingredient for its scent!
Of course, finding ambergris in the ocean to harvest is difficult and costly, and trading it is actually illegal in Australia, the US and India to discourage whalers from killing sperm whales to obtain it. This means the substance is incredibly expensive to get your hands on and only a few of the world’s most luxurious perfumes use it. So, the world’s elite might look glamorous, but they’re really dousing their bodies with a scent that comes from whale poop!
Isinglass: Fish Bladders In Your Beer
For some people giving up alcohol can be incredibly difficult, but here's something that might just motivate you to go sober. While beer is famously made with barley, water, hops and yeast, some brands that you might’ve drunk also contain a nasty ingredient that’s derived from a fish’s innards! The swim bladder is a unique organ that fills up with gas to let certain fish float up and down in the ocean. But when it’s dried out, you can use it to extract a form of collagen called Isinglass.
This gelatin-like substance has been used by brewers since the 19th century as a fining agent, which is added in the later stages of the brewing process to remove unwanted contaminants from the beer. The
fining agent sticks to the contaminating particles and makes them clump together so they can be easily filtered out, which makes the finished beer look clear and bright.These fishy finings have been used for this purpose for hundreds of years, but brewing has come a long way. Today, most brewers use vegan alternatives like gelatin, silica gel and a red algae called Irish Moss as a fining agent to filter out contaminants and give their products that same glossy finish. But it turns out the Brits love tradition, because Isinglass is still used by popular beers brewed in the UK like Foster’s and Carling. Furthermore, over in Ireland, Guinness only stopped using Isinglass in 2015! Even if you’re not from the British Isles, you’re not totally safe, because some local breweries all over the world continue to use Isinglass in their products to honor traditional beer-making.
So the next time you crack open a cold one, you should check out the ingredients label to make sure you aren’t accidentally drinking fish innards!
Dead Wasps In Your Figs
We all know that the chicken nuggets and spray-cheese in our kitchens is unhealthy. But if you’re trying to avoid nasty ingredients, you can’t go wrong with a nice piece of fruit right? Not necessarily. You should see how figs are made!
Most fruits that grow on trees need to be pollinated with flying insects like bees, and figs are no exception. However unlike most fruits, their flowers and pollen are stored inside the fruit’s skin, so they’re pollinated in a rather unusual and unappetizing way. The process involves a specially evolved bug called a fig wasp, that will find an unpollinated fig and crawl through a tiny hole in its skin to get inside. In a male fig, the female wasp will lay her eggs, cover herself in the fig’s pollen, then fly off to find another unpollinated fruit, and when her babies hatch they’ll do the same thing.
Fortunately male figs are inedible and we don’t eat them, but we do eat female figs, and somehow the pollination process is even grosser. In a female fig the entrance that the wasp crawls through is so small that the creature actually loses its wings as it enters, which traps them with no escape. Then, once they’ve pollinated the fruit with pollen they gathered from a male fig, they slowly die inside the female, meaning that technically, every fig you eat will have contained a dead wasp.
This is pretty disgusting, but thankfully, the fig produces an enzyme called ficin, which breaks the wasp down, digests it and absorbs its nutrients for ripening before you eat it. So, there’s no trace of a physical dead bug present in your Fig Newton’s. But still, each fig you eat is technically the delicious grave of a very unfortunate wasp, which is kind of off-putting.
Chemical Crops
Usually it’s pretty obvious when food is unsafe to eat, and everybody knows to avoid consuming moldy bread and discolored meat. But it turns out, some of the scariest things that we regularly eat are completely invisible. When farmers grow crops, weeds often grow around them and reduce the crop yield by stealing sunlight, nutrients, water and space. Weeds can be killed with herbicides like Glyphosate, but in the past that would destroy the crops too.
So today, lots of modern crops are genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides, so they can be covered in the toxic chemicals without dying. This lets farmers indiscriminately spray their fields with herbicides to keep them weed-free. But terrifyingly, it has also allowed Glyphosate to sneak its way into our food products, as the coated crops are harvested.
Today, traces of glyphosate can be found in around 95% of oat-based food products and our drinking water, and it’s become such a common part of our diet that it’s now being found in people’s urine and breastmilk! So far, we don’t know how harmful the chemical is to our health, but in 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer stated it’s likely carcinogenic. Furthermore, studies suggest that glyphosate can accumulate in our cells and build up over time, leading to infertility, birth defects and respiratory diseases as we absorb more and more into our bodies. This is scary when you consider that an estimated 81% of Americans are regularly
exposed to glyphosate, and scientists still don’t know how dangerous it is. But it isn’t the only chemical that can be found in crops. In China, watermelons are treated with a plant growth regulator called Forchlorfenuron, which makes the fruit grow very quickly. Occasionally, these melons have been given too much of this regulator and have grown so fast they’ve exploded. Seriously. Farmers in Danyang lost up to 115 acres of melons back in 2011, after they overloaded them with Forchlorfenuron and turned them into delicious, explosive land-mines!
This story went viral, and it led to a rumor in the USA that Forchlorfenuron is a dangerous chemical that causes cancer. So, American consumers started avoiding fruit from China and melons that contained lumps and cracks, as people started claiming it was evidence that the fruit had been grown with the growth regulator.
However, not only is Forchlorfenuron perfectly fine to eat and causes no health issues at all, it doesn’t even cause cracks like this. Watermelons actually get these lumps and hollow interiors when they’re grown during exceptionally hot or cold conditions, and in this case the concerns about eating Forchlorfenuron were just conspiracy theories. Ironically, the growth-regulator is already used in the US to increase the size of grapes, and the only risks that the chemical poses is to farmers picking up a fruit and having it explode in their face. So keep eating your five-a-day!
Culling
For centuries, humankind has been forced to wonder why the chicken crossed the road. But it was probably to get away from all the culling farms. In the food-industry, culling is when animals that aren’t of use to the manufacturers are deliberately destroyed.
One of the most notable examples comes from the egg industry, where newly hatched chicks are immediately separated into males and females. Then, the females are taken away and raised to lay eggs, whilst the males are taken off in bags and terminated. They’re either suffocated with gas, or macerated, which is when they're placed on conveyer belts that push them into grinders.
Baby Chicks Ground Alive by SpirituallyVegan An astonishing
6.5 billion male chicks are exterminated every year worldwide, although in some countries like France and Germany the practice is completely banned for being too cruel. In those countries, egg producers either have to keep the male chickens and raise them for meat, import all their hens from other countries, or shut down operations entirely!
In 2018, emerging technology was introduced to stop culling in the rest of the world, that lets factories
test the sex of a chick before it hatches. This would allow for the destruction of eggs containing a male chick before it’s actually born. However, this process is expensive and time-consuming, so it isn’t widely used on a global scale. Today, only 10-20% of European eggs come from cull-free hatcheries and 300-million chicks are killed in the US alone every year. So those sunny-side ups that we treat ourselves to every morning are only possible due to a process that involves the destruction of millions of chicks in horrifying ways.
Foreskin Injections
From disgusting smoothies to questionable medical procedures, celebrities have come up with some deeply strange health fads as they strive to achieve eternal youth and beauty. But one increasingly popular celebrity trend is especially bizarre, because it contains, well, foreskin. It sounds crazy, but A-List actresses like Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock have tried and sworn by foreskin facial injections, and Oprah endorsed a brand called SkinMedica that uses it in their wrinkle creams.
This sounds insane, but there is some method to the madness. Foreskin cells from newborn babies possess a protein receptor known as epidermal growth factor, or EGF. This stimulates the growth of proteins called collagen and elastin that are responsible for tightening and repairing the skin.
So, when the cells are injected into your face or rubbed onto your skin with a cream, the extra collagen and elastin they produce encourages your skin to regenerate, giving you smoother cheeks and less wrinkles. Furthermore, just one piece of already discarded foreskin has enough cells to generate over a million treatments, giving lots of A-Listers their highly-prized foreskin facials.
The epidermal growth factor used by SkinMedica is cloned from cells taken from a single baby over 20-years ago. But other treatments genuinely involve using new EGF from newborn babies in South Korea, and as you can imagine, there’s some controversy over this practice. Supporters note that the foreskin is being discarded anyway, as it’s taken from babies that have already been circumcised.
But others believe it immorally promotes circumcision in infants as it allows companies to profit from the practice, and the profit margins are huge. The EGF injections used by celebrities like Cate Blanchett cost around $650 per session, so the gross, and arguably immoral practice really is only for the rich and elite.
McDonald's Apple Pie Is Made With Duck Feathers
No matter how much I eat at McDonalds there’ll always be room for dessert, and there’s nothing like biting into one of their hot and sweet apple pies. But although Mickey D’s aren’t known for being healthy, their famous dessert contains a particularly gross secret ingredient that’s made with duck feathers!
McDonalds uses an amino acid called L-cysteine in their apple pie dough, which essentially weakens the dough to speed up mixing while also acting as a preservative that increases the dessert’s shelf life. Most L-cysteine comes from China, and while it can be made synthetically this is more expensive, and the amino acid is believed to be derived from duck feathers approximately 80% of the time. That sounds pretty nasty, but believe it or not, the process for obtaining it used to be even grosser. Back in 2010 a Chinese company that produces L-Cysteine stated that most of it was extracted from human hair. See, the amino acid also grows on our heads, and manufacturers would collect chopped hair from the floor of salons and barbers in China to source the ingredient, before exporting the amino acid to be used in products all over the world. If you’re not a fan of McDonald’s don’t be smug, because the
amino acid is also found in most loaves of bread, frozen pizza crusts and bagels. So, the bread you’re eating now is likely sourced from duck feathers, and the bread you were eating back in 2010 was likely sourced from a pile of hair on a barber’s floor.
Phthalates In Mac & Cheese
We all have our favorite comfort foods, and for me nothing’s better than crashing in front of the TV with some boxed mac and cheese. But I might have to kick my mac habit, because in 2017, four environmental advocacy groups found concentrations of a potentially dangerous chemical called DEHP phthalate in ten popular mac and cheese boxes.
Phthalates are plasticizers, which means they’re added to hard plastics to soften them and make them more flexible. They’re not all considered health risks. But research into DEHP has linked the compound to increased rates of infertility, cancer and blocked testosterone production in the human body when ingested, posing the biggest risk to pregnant women and young kids. As a result, kids toys made from more than 0.1% of DEHP are completely banned in the US and the EU, so finding it in your dinner is pretty concerning.
The chemical isn’t intentionally added to your mac as an ingredient, so experts believe that the contamination likely comes from plastic packaging and equipment used during the manufacturing process. It’s worth noting that the amount of DEHP found in mac and cheese is very small, but, the FDA don’t know how much DEHP it takes to cause harm, and they’ve stated that they won’t know whether the amount in these boxes is truly safe until more research is carried out. Still, there’s probably no need to completely panic and throw out your mac. Scientists have said that while consuming any DEHP isn’t good for you, they think you’d probably need to eat multiple boxes a day to actually see negative health effects.
Wendy’s Troubles
With their square burgers and Frosty’s, the food at Wendy’s is pretty tasty. But that little ginger isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and there’s one item on her menu that has a bit of a controversial past. In 2005, a customer called Anna Ayala was dining at a Wendy’s in San Jose, California, when she found a rather disgusting addition to her chili a human finger.
The discovery gave a new meaning to ‘finger food’ and when she shared her story with the press, it blew up and received attention from big newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. Afterwards, Wendy’s lost roughly $21 million in business as customers stopped eating there, and soon after, Anna hired an attorney to help her sue the company. However, as the San Jose PD investigated the case they discovered that the entire story was a hoax! See, Anna had a friend who’d lost their finger in a workplace accident and kept the severed digit, so she came up with a plan to con Wendy’s out of some lawsuit money. She cooked the finger at home, before heading to Wendy’s and covertly sneaking it into her chili.
She almost got away with it, but fortunately forensic testing could confirm that the finger wasn’t cooked in the chili and the police simultaneously established that none of Wendy’s cooks or their factory workers had lost a finger. Anna was caught red-handed, and instead of defrauding Wendy’s for money, she ended up in jail for fraud and was
sentenced to nine years in jail!
So, thankfully Wendy’s chili isn’t really made with human flesh. But its beef still contains some interesting ingredients that might put you off ordering it. One of them is an anti-caking agent called silicon dioxide, which is actually the main component in sand. Wendy’s chili contains loads of the stuff to stop the sauce from clumping together, and although it’s safe to eat, the idea of chowing down on sand at lunch is kind of gross. Additionally, according to an ex-Wendy’s shift manager, the meat in the chili is made from expired burgers. They take leftover meat that has been stored for too long and is too tough to be used in the burgers, and instead use it to make their chili!
Andouillette: French Fart Sausage
France is well-known for its unique food, and lots of people are grossed out by the idea of eating snails and frogs legs. But most would rather have a bucket of snails than the monstrosity below.
This Frankenstein finger is a type of sausage called andouillette, that’s made from a pig’s bowel, stomach, and colon, all wrapped up in an intestine casing. If you flunked biology like me, the colon is a part of your intestines which processes feces, and even after it’s cleaned, the smell never fully leaves it. So, Andouillette is famous for literally smelling and tasting like pig poop. Food standards in France do make sure that all physical poop is cleaned out of the sausage before it’s served, so it’s safe to eat if you can get it down without throwing up. Some brave tourists who’ve tried the delicacy say it’s truly offal.
British food historian tries andouillette (tripe sausage) for the first time. It doesn't go well. by The British Food History Channel
But lots of French people who’ve eaten Andouillette their whole lives love the flavor, and claim it’s delicious. Still I don’t know if I could stomach it, and if you ever go to France I’d recommend looking out for andouillette on the menu and avoiding it!
Toilet Cleaner Chemical In Potato Chips
If you’re eating chips while reading this article, then you might want to put the bag down.
Before you start to panic, rest assured that unlike the other food-products we’ve covered so far, your favorite chips aren’t made from stuff like dead wasps, plastic, or mushy slime, and they really are crafted from good old fashioned potatoes. But once the potatoes have been cut, they’re often treated with a pretty disgusting chemical.
It turns out, lots of chips are bleached white with a specific chemical called sodium bisulfite, which is used in
toilet bowl cleaning agents! Bisulfite releases sulphur dioxide gas that prevents bacterial growth, killing the germs in your toilet and on your chips. This gives chips a longer shelf life, and it also bleaches them to stop discoloration and make them look tastier.
In small quantities, the FDA considers it safe enough to go in your food. Yet, some people can have sensitivities to this bisulfite, which can potentially cause respiratory reactions, low blood pressure and gut problems. Although it’s extremely rare, these conditions can occasionally be life-threatening, especially for people who suffer with severe asthma. But unfortunately, a safer substitute hasn’t been found to bleach out discoloration and extend a chip’s shelf-life. So for now we’re stuck with the bisulfite and if you have severe asthma, keep your inhaler handy or opt for a new snack!
Critters Allowed
Rats, insects and maggots have a reputation for being dirty and carrying disease. But if you eat chocolate, pasta, tomatoes or mushrooms, you might be consuming parts of these critters on a regular basis.
In the US, the FDA allows 60 insect fragments and one rodent hair as a byproduct per 3.5oz of chocolate. Furthermore, they allow up to nine rodent hairs in a 16oz box of pasta, up to three maggots in a 26oz can of tomatoes, and 20 maggots and 75 mites in a 3.5oz can of mushrooms.
These ghoulish ingredients are enough to turn an Italian dinner into creepy-crawly cuisine. But unfortunately, the FDA have explained that it’s impossible to keep produce entirely free from natural defects from farm to table, so they have to make these allowances.To make matters worse, in some common food-products insects are intentionally added as ingredients. It turns out most red-colored candy contains a dye made up of small South American insects, called
cochineal. The critters live on cacti, so they’re harvested from the plants, before being dried out and crushed up with about 70,000 insects yielding only a pound of dye. Even if your favorite candy isn’t red, you should know that its smooth, shiny coating is created with shellac flakes, a substance derived from the lac bug of Thailand and India.
The bugs secrete shellac as they move around, and when it’s collected and dissolved in alcohol, it creates a glaze that’s used on a ton of candies like jelly beans.
Toxic Toothpaste
Brushing your teeth every day is pretty essential, but it turns out you should be careful about the toothpaste that you use to clean your pearly whites. Some popular toothpastes contain parabens, which are chemicals that are regularly used as preservatives in cosmetics.
They’re used specifically to increase a product’s shelf life by preventing the growth of mold and bacteria. But studies have shown they can actually cause hormone disruption when absorbed by the body by imitating the hormone estrogen. This makes your hormone receptors think you have more estrogen than you actually do, which increases your breast cell growth and increases your risk of growing tumors and developing breast cancer. But the dangers don’t stop there.
Other toothpastes contain a chemical called triclosan, which is also included to kill bacteria. However, some studies have found that exposure to triclosan can lead to skin irritation, and cause people to develop new allergies and sensitivities to certain foods. Furthermore, Triclosan is an endocrine-disrupting chemical too, which means it can also mess with your hormone system. Unlike Parabens, studies have shown that high exposure to
triclosan can actually lower your testosterone or estrogen production, leading to decreased fertility rates in both men and women!
As these studies were released, the FDA completely banned the use of triclosan in antibacterial soaps in 2016. But surprisingly triclosan and parabens are still allowed to roam free in our toothpastes, because the chemicals are typically spat out after you brush your teeth, greatly reducing your exposure. The FDA found that the intake of parabens in toothpaste corresponds to around 0.21mg after brushing three times a day. For context, the average person ingests around 0.23mg each day through the food that they eat, so the small amounts in toothpaste shouldn’t cause any major effects unless you have a reaction.
Parabens and Triclosan are effective at reducing plaque and gum disease while keeping your toothpaste mold free, so the FDA believes the benefits of using them outweigh the risks. However these chemicals are genuinely harmful in higher doses, and some toothpaste brands don’t use them while being just as effective. So it might be advisable to read your toothpaste’s ingredients and avoid them, just to be safe.
Sugar Excess
Lots of popular energy drinks like Monster and Red Bull are famously made with taurine, an energy-boosting ingredient that was first isolated from bull bile in 1827. Somehow, this led to a longstanding myth that taurine was actually created from bull semen, and a rumor that some popular energy drinks actually contain this disgusting ingredient. However, while Red Bull did allegedly get its name from taurine’s nasty origins, the taurine used in the drinks is now produced synthetically in labs, so it’s totally sanitary for us to drink.
That sure is a relief, but we’re not in the clear. Because what energy drinks do contain, is a bucketload of sugar. A
2015 survey of 197 energy drinks found that half of them contained an average of 9 teaspoons per 11fl oz serving. It noted that a standard 16oz monster energy contained around 13 teaspoons of sugar, but even they’re beaten out by Rockstar’s tropical guava flavor, which contains a whopping 20 teaspoons per 17fl oz. This is already 3 times the maximum recommended daily intake for women in a single can.
[HD] How much Sugar is in you Fizzy Drinks? by Body Transformation Personal Training To make matters worse, the strongest drinks surveyed also contain an insane amount of caffeine. Bang Energy Drinks contain up to 300-miligrams per can, which is more than 3 cups of coffee alone! The FDA maintains that 400mg of caffeine a day is the safe limit, and exceeding it can lead to headaches, muscle tremors and an irregular heartbeat. So in lots of cases, just one energy drink is almost your entire daily quota! Of course, energy drinks aren’t the only products that are stuffed full of unhealthy ingredients. The best spread on bread has to be Nutella but, unfortunately, it’s another shameful sugar fiend, and we find it guilty as charged.
Did you know that 57% of that hazelnutty spread is just sugar? That means that if you eat 2 tablespoons of Nutella, 1.4 tablespoons of it was pure sugar, which is 75% of a woman’s recommended daily intake and one-third of a man’s.
So if you have some Nutella pancakes and an energy drink in the morning, it’s likely that you’ve far exceeded your sugar quota! As we all know, regularly consuming too much sugar will ultimately lead to problems like diabetes, heart disease and rising blood pressure, to name just a few. So experts reckon if we want to avoid an early death, we should probably treat these products like a rare treat instead of a part of our daily diet. If you were amazed at these things you'll never buy again, you might want to read about things you'll
never eat again. Thanks for reading!
