Mystery Ingredients in Your Food? There's an App for That

Reading labels on processed foods can sometimes seem like a tongue twister. Benzyl 2,3-dimethylcrotonate sounds like it should be on a chemistry quiz and not on the list of things you're about to pop into your mouth.

Even common ingredients, such as lecithin, may have mysterious origins — and allergy risks. So what's a hungry shopper to do if he or she doesn't have a degree in food science?

Well, you can start by eating unprocessed foods, but when you have a hankering for that occasional bag of Cheetos, try the new iPhone App, "Don't Eat That."

The app is actually a massive database of just about everything you'd find in processed food. It's divided into categories such as "harmful to kids," "carcinogens," "allergies," "genetically modified," and a few others.

The app was built by Dwayne Ratleff, who, after hitting his 50th birthday decided he wanted to take better care of his body, and that meant trying to decipher what was actually in the food he was eating. His Web site lists the sources that he used for information when building the database, but each ingredient is not sourced on the app.

His handy little app is a wealth of information and is more than a bit scary. And looking through it can be addicting (at least for me). On my first ride, I found M-Cresol, "a synthetic flavoring substance obtained from coal tar. Coal tar is a known carcinogen." Delicious.

Is that better or worse than Castoreum extract "a natural flavoring substance made from the glands of beavers"? It's a tossup.

While the app is amusing in a perverse way, it's also a great tool for people with food allergies or chemical sensitivities. If you've got an allergy to something like soy, these days it can be near impossible to know if you're eating it because it's hidden in so many foods and assumes a litany of different descriptors. That's true for lots of other ingredients, too.

Of course my enthusiasm for Ratleff's database is based on the fact that I have an iPhone and therefore can walk around with his thousand hours of research in my pocket. But what about shoppers without one? How do we make this kind of information available to more people? I'm imagining the whole point of food labels were to make it clear what was actually in a product (at least that's my naive guess), but these days that's far from the truth.

There are really two separate battles here: the first is to make sure that companies aren't making products for consumption that contain things like coal tar. Seems like a no-brainer. And the second is to make labeling laws stronger and better, so that consumers can actually decipher ingredients lists.

Oh and of course, there is the much larger battle to help make actual, healthy, non-processed food available and affordable to everyone. But that's a different blog altogether — but there's an app for that, too.

Photo credit: qmnonic