Thought for Food: TBHQ

Title inspired by The Colbert Report's segment "Thought for Food."

A few hours ago I was sitting on my bed, catching up on my shows, when out of nowhere my stomach felt like it was going to explode from the inside. For a while I thought I had a double-duty stomach bug with a fever thrown in. Fortunately no such symptoms arose, and the pain eventually did subside. Wondering what would cause this acute gastro distress, I reviewed what I had recently eaten: for dinner, polenta with scrambled eggs, both of which I had eaten recently and experienced no adverse reactions; and Dove dark chocolates with almond pieces for dessert. I had five, which is the serving size on the package. Yes, serving sizes are often bad metrics for how much of something one should eat, but I provide that detail so you know I didn't eat the whole bag.

The list of ingredients was short: sweet chocolate, which had a parenthetical list of ingredients with legit ingredients except for "natural and artificial flavors"; almonds (no surprise here); and TBHQ. Hmm. I'm no chemist, but my gut literally and metaphorically told me something was off. Turns out I was right, or at least not entirely wrong.

A simple Google search taught me that TBHQ stands for tertiary butylhydroquinone, a preservative found in a variety of products such as cosmetics, pet foods, baby foods, and "oily and fatty foods" for humans past babyhood. It's somehow related to butane and/or other petroleum products, but again, I am not a chem major. It makes an appearance in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. According to the FDA, no food product can contain more than 0.02% TBHQ. Among the many short-term side effects I found tinnitus, delirium, collapse, and the triad of nausea, stomach pain, and vomiting. Aha. Over the long term, correlations exist between TBHQ ingestion and stomach cancer as well as DNA mutations. Jinkies.

I get why food preservation is a benefit. Isn't it nice that we don't have to clean out our fridges and pantries every other day, for fear of finding mold fuzz and other nasties? What's more, we don't have to go grocery shopping as frequently, and when we do, we don't have to consume everything we bought immediately for fear of spoiling. I'm the first to admit that I'm paranoid about expiration dates, and most foods that have passed their expiration dates, even seeming 'forever foods' like pasta, I will chuck. This is especially true with yogurt, any kind of milk, and leftovers. However, after all the ominous borborygmi and sharp pain, my stomach and I are saying, "Hold the phone."

I'm not here to preach about what people should and shouldn't eat or how liking sweets (or 'salties') makes you a bad human. I would like to think I disprove any direct causation between enjoying sweet foods and being a generally unpleasant person, at least most of the time. I love ice cream, chewy cookies, muffins, candy, and the occasional chocolate chip cookie-brownie. I'm aware of the dearth of nutrients in all of these, and I accept that risk with full knowledge. That said, what would happen if our foods weren't crammed with preservatives and other chemicals we can't pronounce? How different would our lives be? Would they be greatly inconvenienced? What if such foods were not associated with health-food stores but with all markets? Would that be possible?

I posit these questions because I honestly have no idea. I can rather safely hypothesize that foods wouldn't last as long as they do today. A bummer yes. But more of a bummer is having a rip current inside your digestive system. Or having your stomach contents emptied in an 'abnormally accelerated' manner. Or dying from poisonous additives of which you should be wary, but you didn't know that because it's not like food companies are going to brag about including them in their products. My thinking is that we have survived ages before we knew about these chemical preservation techniques, and we still managed to feed ourselves. We didn't have the same variety of victuals that we do today, but the fact remains that we sustained ourselves long enough to get to this era. Why don't we revert back to the 'old' way (no pun intended) of eating? My digestive system gives its full support.

A few of my sources:
http://miami-water.com/blog/1812/list-of-tbhq-products-petroleum-foods-are-toxic/
http://www.naturalnews.com/031318_TBHQ_food_preservatives.html
http://preventdisease.com/news/14/011914_This-Is-What-Happens-In-Your-Stomach-When-You-Consume-Packaged-Ramen-Noodles.shtml (video does have a yuck factor in my opinion)