At the store the other day I saw something new. In the section with the sugar-free drink mix powders there was a new option – liquid flavorings. These are little bottles where you put a few drops into whatever you’re going to be drinking, and it flavors it.
Of course nobody expects these things to be the healthiest options on the planet, but I was curious. I grabbed a bottle to look at the ingredient labels – mostly to see what they were using to sweeten the liquid.
I didn’t get that far. Water, citric acid, wait….propylene glycol?
If you think you’ve heard that chemical name before, you’re probably right.
What The Heck Is Propylene Glycol?
The short answer is that it’s the main component of certain types of automotive antifreeze. Yikes!
Before I freak out too much about something, I try to think it through rationally. After all, the fact that something is present in automotive antifreeze doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. Water is present in antifreeze too, and I drink plenty of that!
So I moseyed on over to Wikipedia to look up propylene glycol, and get an idea of specifically what it is, and how it affects our bodies. It’s a decent-sized article, but here’s the most relevant snippet. It describes what your body does with propylene glycol when it breaks it down:
propylene glycol is metabolized in the human body into pyruvic acid (a normal part of the glucose-metabolism process, readily converted to energy), acetic acid (handled by ethanol-metabolism), lactic acid (a normal acid generally abundant during digestion), and propionaldehyde (a potentially hazardous substance).
Ah yes, propionaldehyde. If that name sounds eerily familiar too, it should. Propionaldehyde is a cousin of something you’re probably already familiar with – formaldehyde. If you’ve ever taken a high school biology class where they’ve dissected anything, you’ll remember the smothering fruity odor of formaldehyde coming from the science lab. Propionaldehyde has the same type of smell, and is part of the same chemical family.
Of course there’s a paragraph or two in the Wikipedia article talking about how it’s unlikely that one could reach toxic levels of this chemical by consuming food products, and the reassuring statement that “the potential for long-term oral toxicity is also low”, but that doesn’t exactly reassure me.
It’s unlikely that one could reach toxic levels? And the potential for long-term toxicity is low? If I had my choice, I’d prefer “impossible” and “nonexistent” to “unlikely” and “low”. But that doesn’t address the biggest question in my mind.
What’s A Known Toxic Chemical Doing In My Food?
Based on my limited research, it would seem to be an emulsifier – which translates to “it makes stuff stay mixed that normally wouldn’t”. Put a little differently in this case, “it prevents you from having to vigorously shake the little bottle before you put the drops in your water”.
Y’know, because small doses of potentially toxic chemicals are an acceptable price to pay for not having to shake up the little container.
This Real Point
This post isn’t about why eating antifreeze is bad. I figure that’s obvious enough that you’ve already come to that conclusion on your own.
The point of this post is that propylene glycol, along with a bunch of other questionable stuff, falls into a category called “GRAS”, which is an FDA acronym for “generally recognized as safe”. From a manufacturing point of view, propylene glycol isn’t a contaminant – it’s a government-approved food additive.
This flavoring product I’m talking about is sold on your local grocery store shelves, and is even labeled as having “natural flavor”. And this is considered to be okay.
The Solution To The Problem
The unfortunate reality of modern life is that you can’t always know 100% what’s in your food – but you can try to know. You can read labels. You can cook for yourself. You can take some control over your situation, rather than coast along and let anonymous people behind a desk decide how much antifreeze you can safely (but unnecessarily) consume in one sitting.
This stuff is important, and this stuff is one of the many reasons I’m passionate about helping people learn to cook for themselves. When I’m making a big pot of chili, the idea of dumping a shot of antifreeze in there to help emulsify the liquid doesn’t even come up, because it’s completely unthinkable – which is precisely the point I’m driving at.
Speaking of big pots of chili and cooking at home, we’ll be back to our cooking series in the next post. Are there any questions or topics I can address to help you? Let me know in the comments!