Natural flavors are prevalent in our food system, being found in everything from candy, milks, ice cream, bread, cereal, soups, sauces, dressings, soft drinks, yogurts, sparkling waters, and almost all snack foods to name a few. You will even find natural flavors in many foods that are claiming to be and are marketed as healthy or clean.If you can think of a food type, there’s a good chance there are products with natural flavors in it.
In the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) Food Scores database of over 80,000 foods, “natural flavor” is the fourth most common ingredient listed on labels. The only ingredients that outrank it: salt, water and sugar.
If natural flavors are so prevalent in our food system, it’s a good idea to know what they are.
So what ARE natural flavors?
Plot twist, Natural flavors are anything but natural.
Government regulations define natural flavors as flavorings that derive their aroma or flavor chemicals from plant or animal sources, including fruit, meat, fish, spices, herbs, roots, leaves, buds or bark that are distilled, fermented or otherwise manipulated in a lab. The issue here is although a piece of the flavor may be derived from a plant or animal source, it is then manipulated in a lab by engineers using chemicals that can range from additives to solvents to preservatives, making the final product anything but “natural.”
So in essence – companies can start with something from a plant, like an apple or a peach, then scientists in a lab can add hundreds of chemicals to it in order to enhance the flavor, make it sweeter, or make you addicted to the product and label it natural flavors.
The amount of natural flavors put into a product isn’t listed on the label, so there’s no way of knowing just how much natural flavor is used. For products like La Croix, where there are few ingredients, this could mean that a large amount of natural flavors is being used. (Spindrift is a good replacement for La Croix because they use actual fruit).
The goal for food companies when using natural flavors is to engineer a chemical that gets your brain hooked on the flavor of that food. Natural flavors can be hundreds or thousands of times sweeter than sugar (think a sugar free drink that you are hooked on). They hide this chemical engineering under the “natural flavors” umbrella.
What makes the use of natural flavors so nefarious is that it can be highly addictive. So without knowing, people can become addicted to unhealthy foods which leads to chronic disease, cancers, and preventable death. If a product is certified organic, the natural flavors are not quite as bad because they can’t have anything non organic in there, but it is still not good.
According to the Washington Post, “There are over 1,000 chemicals in the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) category that have not been researched or approved by the FDA or anyone else.”
That means over 1,000 chemicals that are currently being used in our food system and given to our citizens have not been researched or approved for their potential harm by anyone.
Natural flavors may also be as unhealthy as artificial flavors. The Washington Post reported, “Artificial flavors are created in a lab instead of being derived from a natural substance, yet what is fascinating is that the chemical structures of a “natural” strawberry flavor and an artificial strawberry flavor may be exactly the same, just achieved by different means. This suggests that a natural flavor may not be chemically any healthier than an artificial flavor.”
We recommend avoiding natural flavors as much as possible to reduce the chance of taking in ingredients that can have a negative effect on your body. With little effort you can find suitable replacements to the food and drinks you are consuming today that have natural flavors.
Easy swaps to remove natural flavors from your diet:
- Replace La Croix with Spindrift
- Replace any flavored yogurt with Lavva Yogurt
- Replace Clif bars with JonesBars
- Replace Silk Almond Milk with Forager plant based milks
- Replace Wheat thins and Ritz with Simple Mills
- Replace Lays chips and Doritos with Late July Chips
- Replace Heinz ketchup with Primal Kitchen Ketchup
- Replace Hellman’s Mayonnaise with Primal Kitchen Mayonnaise
- Replace Nature Valley granola with Purely Elizabeth
Due to the lack of transparency when it comes to natural flavors, we just don’t know what we are consuming when we consume natural flavors. It’s because of that reason we recommend avoiding them all together. It takes intentionality to avoid them, but every time we do we tell the food industry that we no longer accept hiding their ingredients.
You vote with every purchase you make, and by avoiding natural flavors, you are voting for a cleaner food industry.
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Link to FDA document on flavoring:
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22
Report on chemicals added to food in the US:
https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/safety-loophole-for-chemicals-in-food-report.pdf
