Feeding You Lies: How to Unravel the Food Industry’s Playbook and Reclaim Your Health

The news that RXBARs decided to place their ingredients label on the front of their packaging stunned me as if I had walked into a glass door. A few years ago, I predicted that companies would make this move because consumers care about ingredients. I shared my prediction with the ex-CEO of Whole Foods after he asked me about future trends in food packaging.

At first, I was delighted at the thought my prediction had come true. But upon closer inspection of the RXBAR labels (even the ones for kids), I was shattered. While the packaging has the appearance of transparency—the company brags that “one look at our wrapper, and you can see what we’re all about”—I noticed that the back of the label had its own ingredients list in small print, which included “natural flavors,” a term that not only raises my eyebrows but keeps them up there all night. Why doesn’t RXBARs list “natural flavors” on the front of their package like the other ingredients? My guess is that it’s because they know the truth about this suspicious ingredient and don’t want to put a spotlight on it.

In a subsequent e-mail from the company, they told me, “Natural flavors are purified extracts from natural sources, such as a spice, fruit, or vegetables. In order to be used in food, natural flavors must meet strict FDA guidelines and safety criteria. The natural flavors used in RXBARs come from the real food ingredients such as fruit and chocolate and do not include propylene glycol, synthetic, artificial or GMO derived ingredients.” While this is helpful information, it does not excuse the fact that they don’t list “natural flavors” on the front of the package along with the other ingredients. I find this highly misleading. We also still don’t really know what’s in those flavors. Why can’t RXBARs use just 100 percent real food? This was around the time I started to question what even the health food industry was doing to my food and began considering taking matters into my own hands.

In the fall of 2017, I started Truvani, my own food product line. It was a move I’d been resisting for years. Although I’d been approached countless times by executives in the food industry eager to brand foods with the Food Babe label, I’d always said no. And that’s because I saw myself as an outsider. I was an advocate for healthy foods. I was worried that if I became part of the food industry, I would lose the ability to fight for better products.

At a certain point, however, I realized that it wasn’t enough to fight from the outside. My epiphany began with yogurt. For a while, I’d been enjoying a grass-fed vanilla yogurt from an organic dairy farm. But then the small company got bought by a bigger manufacturer. They promised to maintain their principles but then, a few months later, I noticed that the yogurt now contained a bunch of thickening additives, and they had replaced real vanilla with “natural flavors.”

This same story has played out so many times over the years. A company starts out with great intentions. The company gets acquired. Then, the company changes their ingredients to cut costs. It’s frustrating. It makes me really angry and sad. Isn’t our health worth a few extra pennies?

And that’s when I decided that this would happen for the last time. Although being an activist had produced real change, it still hadn’t led to products that I wanted to consume. We’d gotten rid of plenty of bad stuff, but too many products were still missing the good stuff.

So I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to create what I wanted to eat. The mission of our new food company would be simple: we would sell real food without added chemicals, products without toxins, and labels without lies. This would be food I’d be proud to feed my family.

The process has been very educational, to say the least! The first thing I learned was just how hard it is to source real, healthy ingredients. While I knew it might be a bit more expensive to get the good stuff, I couldn’t believe the price difference. It was also much more difficult to source clean ingredients that passed our rigorous tests for toxins, pesticides, and heavy metals.

And that’s when I truly began to understand the shortcuts taken by nearly every food product you find in the grocery store. These Big Food companies don’t fight for the best ingredients, which is why it is so hard for us to find good suppliers. And they certainly don’t spend the extra money on sourcing foods that are healthy and delicious.

Because they don’t need to. These companies know they can get away with selling us cheap junk because of a dirty secret: the flavor industry.

I bet if you go to your kitchen cabinet right now and pick up the first food package you see, you’ll find the word “flavor” somewhere on the ingredients list. Am I right?

Yep, the processed food industry adds flavors to almost everything. Wonder why? When a food is heavily processed with machinery in a factory, pumped full of preservatives, and poured into a package that gets shipped across the country to get stored on a shelf for months, it loses flavor. That’s why there is a multibillion-dollar flavor industry dedicated to creating chemicals that make all that processed food taste like … well … real food.

Not only do these flavors make fake food taste real, but they also give it a special “kick.” The natural and artificial chemicals that flavor manufactures engineer have been synthesized to trick your mind into wanting more and more. Why do Americans eat more calories than any other industrialized nation? It’s not because we have more money or are more hungry. It’s because our food supply is chemically produced and enhanced with these “flavors” and they’re everywhere—and we are being targeted.

You see, they don’t want you to have the full essence of the strawberry; they want you to only experience the best 1 millionth part of the taste, so you get “addicted” and keep having to go back for more and more, searching continuously for gratification—eating more of that product, which in turns fills Big Food’s pockets. Big Food is hijacking your taste buds one by one.

The notion that the added flavors in our food are natural is a lie. The term “flavors” on a package is highly misleading. It sounds innocent and is on so many products that we are desensitized to it. Flavor companies own these proprietary formulas, making it nearly impossible to find out exactly what’s in them.

You’d like to think that “natural apple flavor” is just some juice extracted from an apple and inserted into the food. Nope. That “natural apple flavor” needs to be preserved and stabilized and has agents added to help it mix well into a product. This is why flavors can contain upward of 100 different chemicals, like propylene glycol, polysorbate 80, BHT, BHA … all considered “incidental additives” not required to be labeled by the FDA.¹ The FDA doesn’t require companies to tell you what is in the flavors they use. It’s a complete mystery ingredient. I’d like to know if my vanilla yogurt secretly contained butylated hydroxyanisole (a preservative banned in foreign countries and linked to cancer²), wouldn’t you? In natural flavors, their secret is safe. It’s quite the racket.

Hint flavored water was hit with a lawsuit because their drinks—which boast they only contain “natural flavors from non-GMO plants”—tested positive for propylene glycol, an artificial solvent frequently used by the flavoring industry. Wouldn’t you rather just drink plain water with a squeeze of lemon? It’s not only much cheaper—I’d argue it’s much better for you.

Natural flavor can also legally contain naturally occurring “glutamate,” an additive that mimics MSG, a known excitotoxin. Excitotoxins can have far-reaching and damaging effects on the body. They infiltrate the bloodstream and can overexcite cells throughout the nervous system. Worst of all, excitotoxins also make food irresistible to eat and can thus contribute to obesity.

Then there are the “yuck factor” natural flavorings, such as castoreum, a substance used to augment some strawberry and vanilla flavorings. It comes from “rendered beaver anal gland.” (What, you don’t want beaver butt with your strawberry protein bar?)

So-called “natural” flavorings can also be laced with GMO-derived ingredients (unless the food is organic or Non-GMO Project verified).

There is absolutely no health benefit provided by these natural flavors; they are not adding any extra nutritional value to your food. Most of the time, they are simply there to cover up the highly processed nature of what you’re eating.

Taken together, these facts are proof that natural flavors are not natural, and they’re definitely not good for you.

Who Is Overseeing the Safety of Flavors in Our Food? You May Be Surprised …

The fox is guarding the henhouse. You see, there is no governmental or independent agency that approves or oversees the safety of the food flavors. Instead, a flavor industry trade group, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA), has assembled their own panel of scientists who review and approve new flavors as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). These scientists are paid by FEMA (who ultimately get their funding from flavor companies).³

And, of course, the FEMA panel scientists are supposed to be independent and free of conflicts of interest, but many questions have been raised about their closed-door evaluations and lack of transparency with the public. The fact that this panel is assembled and paid for by a flavor company trade group is concerning to say the least, don’t you think?

Public advocacy groups have questioned FEMA’s processes and called on the FDA to ban certain flavor substances that have known links to cancer,⁴ but little has been done. Some chemicals used to make flavors, like diacetyl (which is used to make buttery flavor), are highly dangerous for those that work around them … but we are supposed to eat them and be okay? Consumers want to know what’s in these flavors and what research has been done proving their safety, but we essentially get the door slammed in our faces when we ask. This is yet another reason to be wary of the flavors in your food.

Food companies know they can get us hooked on junk food—and one of the ways they do it is by creating tantalizing food flavors in food labs and then lying to us about how natural those flavors are. They know that consumers prefer “natural” because “artificial” has the wrong connotations and doesn’t sell.

Because of flavor technology, processed food can be addictive. I confess that once in a while, I crave Annie’s Chocolate Bunnies. Once I open the box, I literally can’t stop eating them. (I’m thinking about them right now, and my mouth is watering.) It’s like these little cookies short-circuit my self-control.

But here’s the strange twist: I don’t have the same gotta-have-it feeling when I make homemade cookies. Although my homemade cookies are delicious, I don’t want to eat the whole batch at once. It’s only those chocolate bunnies that I can’t resist.

Turns out, it’s way more than just sugar. Not long ago, I sat down with Mark Schatzker, author of the acclaimed book The Dorito Effect.⁵ The book borrows its title from the tortilla chip that became a nationwide sensation after it was flavored with a delectable taco taste. In his book, Schatzker delves into the reasons why food doesn’t taste the way it used to. The story begins with the move toward mass production, which requires Big Food to skimp on quality ingredients for the sake of higher profits. Instead of seeking out deliciousness, Big Food focuses on yield, pest resistance, and cost. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at tomatoes, strawberries, wheat, or broccoli: the food industry has systematically bred out flavor in pursuit of more practical “virtues,” like whether or not a tomato can be shipped thousands of miles without bruising.

There are two big problems with this approach. First, it makes our food less nutritious. When we breed crops to satisfy the Big Food industry, we end up growing fruits and vegetables with dramatically fewer health benefits.

The second problem is that those industrial ingredients lead to really bland food. (There’s nothing tasty about GMO corn and soy by-products. And those mass-grown tomatoes usually taste like cardboard.) To compensate for this blandness, Big Food companies have engineered ways to make synthetic flavors that are so enticing and addictive we can’t stop eating them.

Take Doritos. They started out as a plain tortilla chip with a little salt, hardly like the ones you’ll find in stores today. This inaugural version of the chip was a market failure; sales were dismal because they didn’t taste like much. However, a marketing executive at Frito-Lay named Arch West decided that the chips would sell better if they were coated in an intense orange powder that resembles taco flavor.⁶ And thus was the modern Dorito born, a food that has become a template for countless other highly processed junk food products that hide their tasteless ingredients by dousing them with tasty chemicals.

These chemical flavors can save the companies a huge amount of money. I was recently in a supermarket and came across some blueberry English muffins. Sounds fairly healthy, right? But here’s the catch: the muffins contained no actual blueberries. Instead, the ingredients listed something called “blueberry flavored bits,” which were made of sugar, wheat flour, natural and artificial flavors, Blue #2, and Red #40. Sugar and blue dye, I guess, are cheaper than real berries.

And it’s not just blueberries. Dannon Oikos Triple Zero strawberry yogurt contains zero strawberries. (They trick you into thinking otherwise by adding some vegetable juice concentrate for red color and “natural flavors.”) Although they position the yogurt as a healthy food with “0 fat” and “no added sugar,” wouldn’t it be healthier to eat some real berries with your yogurt?

Or consider vanilla. If you see vanilla flavor in a mass-produced product, chances are it’s just a “natural flavor” and not the real thing. Why? Because the real thing is expensive: a pound of pure vanillin (from vanilla beans) costs $1,200. Big Food, however, can create that same flavor for about $6 a pound, which is why so many products, from those yogurts to baked goods, rely instead on this fake flavor.

Diet Coke recently came out with four enticing new flavors: Zesty Blood Orange, Feisty Cherry, Twisted Mango, and Ginger Lime, which are designed to appeal to a younger generation. But you’ll find no actual blood orange, cherry, mango, ginger, or lime in these drinks. In fact, they all have a nearly identical ingredients list to original Diet Coke (complete with caramel color, aspartame, and phosphoric acid), each spiked with a new “natural flavor.” They’ve simply taken an old product and repackaged it as something new and trendy.

This is the Dorito model of modern food and it’s been a catastrophe for our health. By making junk food palatable, the flavor industry has helped drive the obesity epidemic, not to mention high rates of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Because the famous Frito-Lay slogan “Betcha can’t eat just one” is essentially true: these counter-nutritional snacks are expressly designed to make you want to eat the whole bag. In an interview with 60 Minutes,⁷ flavor scientists from Givaudan, one of the leading flavor companies in the world, essentially admitted that one of their chief goals was making food addictive:

Givaudan scientist #1: In our fruit flavors we’re talking about, we want a burst in the beginning. And maybe a finish that doesn’t linger too much so that you want more of it.

Givaudan scientist #2: And you don’t want a long linger, because you’re not going to eat more of it if it lingers.

60 Minutes reporter: Aha. So I see, it’s going to be a quick fix. And then—

Givaudan scientist #1: Have more.

60 Minutes reporter: And then have more. But that suggests something else?

Givaudan scientist #1: Exactly.

60 Minutes reporter: Which is called addiction?

Givaudan scientist #1: Exactly.

60 Minutes reporter: You’re tryin’ to create an addictive taste?

Givaudan scientist #1: That’s a good word.⁸

You want salad dressing on your salad? You want a little mustard or mayo on your sandwich? Some salsa with your chips? These products are all laced with “natural flavors,” designed to keep us stuffing our face with food that would otherwise be bland and boring. But I don’t want to eat foods that trick my taste buds into downing almost a whole box in one sitting (like those Annie’s Bunnies!) or make real food seem like second best. I like to know exactly what I’m eating, and with “natural flavors” I’m left in the dark. Sticking with real food is just simpler, healthier, and oftentimes cheaper too.

Flavor Cheat Sheet

There are some stark differences between artificial flavors, natural flavors, natural strawberry flavors, organic raspberry flavors, and others. And while these are all largely the same, some of the flavors added to food are better than others. Here’s a summary of what these mean when you see them on a label. (Note: “X” stands for a specific flavor, such as “strawberry” or “vanilla.”)

Artificial Flavors or Artificial “X” Flavors

Artificial flavors are chemical mixtures made with synthetic (not natural) ingredients in a lab. They’re produced by fractional distillation and chemical manipulation of various chemicals like crude oil or coal tar. Artificial vanilla flavor can be made from wood pulp. With artificial flavors, chemists can make anything taste like a strawberry without any actual strawberries (or any actual food, for that matter), which is a really horrible thing if you care about health. But it’s a great thing for food manufacturers because artificial flavors are much cheaper than using real food (or even natural flavors).

Natural Flavors

Natural flavor is practically the exact same thing as artificial flavor, but it’s derived from substances found in nature (plants, animals, etc.). So, the flavor is derived from natural things, but it’s important to remember that this isn’t all it contains. Remember: flavors typically contain preservatives, emulsifiers, solvents, and other “incidental additives” that can make up 80% or so of the formulation, even the “natural” ones. Flavor chemists create these complex formulations in a lab, isolating and blending specific flavors extracted from upward of hundreds of compounds, some of which may be GMOs. These compounds can come from substances that are nowhere close to the actual thing. For example, they might take some castoreum from a beaver to make a flavoring that resembles a raspberry—without ever using any raspberries. But, hey, it’s “natural” because it’s from a beaver.

Natural “X” Flavor

In general, if you see something like “natural cinnamon flavor,” this means that the flavor is derived solely from the named fruit, vegetable, animal, or plant, which in this case is cinnamon. In other words, if you see “natural raspberry flavor” on a product, the flavor didn’t come from a beaver, but actual raspberries. Incidental additives still apply, of course.

Natural and Artificial “X” Flavor*

You’ll see a label like this when there are both natural and artificial flavors in a product. It doesn’t necessarily mean any of the named source (i.e., a cherry) is used.

“X” Flavor, with Other Natural Flavor

Sometimes on the front of a package you’ll see the statement “raspberry flavor with other natural flavor” … which sounds redundant. This means the food contains a flavor derived from raspberries, but also other natural flavors that don’t come from raspberries. This doesn’t need to be disclosed on an ingredients list but is required on the front panel of the package if they want to describe the flavor on the front.

Organic Natural Flavor

A lot of people are surprised that organic foods can contain natural flavors. While it’s not ideal, at least “organic natural flavor” is made just like other organic ingredients and needs to follow the same regulations. That means that organic flavors won’t contain synthetic solvents or preservatives. Some of the “incidental additives” banned from organic flavors include propylene glycol, mono- and diglycerides, BHT, BHA, and polysorbate 80.

Natural Flavors (in a “USDA Certified Organic” Product)

Sometimes you’ll just see “natural flavors” listed on a Certified Organic product (instead of “Organic Natural Flavors”). This means that the flavor itself is not organic, but it is compliant with organic regulations, such as no synthetic ingredients or GMOs. So, ultimately, these flavors will have a cleaner profile than the average natural flavor.

I highlighted my copy of The Dorito Effect like crazy and immediately reached out to Schatzker because I was so impressed with the investigative work he has done. Here are some of the takeaways from our conversation:⁹

True natural flavor is an indicator of nutrition to animals—and was also to us, apparently, before our palates were tricked and befuddled by junk food. Both animals and human infants demonstrate considerable “nutritional wisdom” when left to their own devices. Schatzker described a riveting 1926 experiment that allowed children to select their own foods for six years. While you might think the kids binged on sweet stuff, they all ended up settling on extremely nutritious and balanced diets. One girl had liver and orange juice for breakfast; a boy with rickets would guzzle cod liver oil occasionally until he got over the illness. In the end, the children in this group were markedly healthier than those fed by nutritionists.

That’s because flavor in nature is almost always a mark of nutrition. Flavors are the cue that tells us where to find the nutrients we need. For example, the flavors we love in tomatoes are synthesized from essential nutrients like beta carotene, amino acids, and omega-3s. The flavor, in other words, is a chemical sign that tells your brain there’s good stuff in here—you should eat one.

Junk food turns this healthy instinct against us. Our stores are full of foods that taste like all kinds of different things but don’t come with the same nutrients. You can create a food that tastes like a tomato or blueberry without any nutritional value at all—and that’s a problem.

Those natural flavors can also make you eat things you wouldn’t normally eat. Soda without flavors is just carbonated water and sugar. No one would drink that without the flavors added. It’s not just the sugar; flavor is the missing piece of the puzzle.

In recent years, “flavor chemistry” has become a huge business and highly specialized science. Schatzker, for example, explains how Big Food can engineer the flavor of a blueberry without using any actual blueberries. They begin by identifying the key chemical compounds that give rise to that wonderful blueberry flavor. Of course, real blueberries are expensive, so the companies don’t want to get those compounds from the healthy fruit. Instead, they seek out cheaper sources for these same compounds, such as tree bark, grass, and yeast. “When the process is complete, you have a test tube full of pure chemicals, none of which came from an actual blueberry,” Schatzker writes. “Chemically speaking, these compounds are identical to an artificial blueberry flavoring. But the government says you can label it natural.”¹⁰ That’s how we end up with “blueberry flavored bits” in English muffins that are made up of sugar, flavoring, and artificial dyes, with absolutely no blueberries.

I must emphasize that natural flavors aren’t necessarily toxic. I think the biggest hazard added flavors pose, by far, is the way they create food addictions and entice us to eat junk. What they do is tantalize us to eat unhealthy foods in unhealthy quantities. We all think we have the mental ability to control what we eat, but flavor technology makes us crave foods we wouldn’t normally go near. Eating these foods in excess (like unhealthy soda or chips) can make you sick and maybe send you to an early grave.

Don’t be fooled. “Natural flavors” may sound harmless but that doesn’t mean they’re good for you.

The Dangers of a Whiff of Flavor: Popcorn Workers’ Lungs

Food companies might not want to publicize all the details about “flavors,” but some emit toxic fumes, putting flavor company employees in harm’s way. In particular, the flavoring ingredient diacetyl has been linked to lung disease among employees at flavoring production facilities.¹¹ This chemical was commonly used to give a fake buttery flavor to microwave popcorn; thus the medical condition it caused was coined “popcorn lung.” It’s rare and irreversible, and there’s no good treatment for the disease short of a lung transplant. Since this was discovered, major food manufacturers have eliminated this chemical from their flavors.

We don’t know what these manufacturers have substituted for diacetyl, and there’s the possibility that some brands still use it because it hasn’t been banned. A possible substitute for diacetyl is 2,3-pentanedione, which is also linked to lung damage in animal studies.

2,3-pentanedione and diacetyl are designated “generally recognized as safe” by the FDA for use in foods. But here are my questions: If these flavor chemicals are too dangerous to inhale, why would we want to swallow them? And why are food companies willing to put the health of their workers at risk to save a buck? Flavors might be cheap, but are they worth the cost of worker health?

The food industry’s flavor trickery makes it really important (and hard) to be a smart consumer. When looking at your food, ask yourself, as Mark Schatzker expertly says, “Did someone engineer this to be delicious or did nature engineer this to be delicious?”

Remember that the word “natural” on a product is virtually bogus. It doesn’t equate with good. Take time to read the ingredients list found on the package, and read the fine print. If they list artificial or natural flavors, put those foods back on the shelf and look for an alternative. Feel free to call up a company and ask questions. Look for products that use real food to flavor their products. Above all, let’s stop food companies and flavor factories from getting us hooked on processed foods.

As for me, I’ve learned to stop buying Annie’s Chocolate Bunnies. I don’t know why I can’t resist them. But one look at the ingredients list with “natural flavor” tells me that I probably should.