Ten Foods and Food Ingredients Americans Are Eating That Are Banned in Canada or the EU

The USA has many attractions, including relatively inexpensive food, but the quality of American food leaves a lot to be desired. Here are 10 common food ingredients that the United States permits but that other countries, notably Canada and the European Union, ban.

1. Arsenic.

Arsenic is one of history's best-known poisons. Arsenic was used in murder plots against Napoleon, King Faisal of Iraq, American ambassador Clare Booth Luce, Latin American independence leader Simón Bolívar, several of the Medicis and several Roman emperors. Although arsenic found in nature and bound to organic compounds is not especially toxic, inorganic arsenic can and does cause serious health problems. So would you really expect to find arsenic in your chicken nuggets.

Even China bans the addition of arsenic to chicken feed, used to give the meat a brighter color. In the USA, however, arsenic is OK in poultry feeds, and can appear in your chicken meals at fast food places.

2. Brominated or "bromated" flour.

Bromine is a Halogen, in the same class of chemical elements as iodine. When bromine gets inside the human body, it locks onto some of the cell receptors sites as iodine, keeping the thyroid hormone producing cells of the thyroid from absorbing the iodine they need to make thyroid hormone for example. But bromine is extremely useful in food processing precisely because it is extremely reactive.

Bromine in the form of potassium bromate (hence the term "bromated") is added to white flour to make it whiter. The result is whiter white bread and more colorful cakes, but the price is low-level thyroid damage in tens of millions of people, not enough to be medically diagnosed, but enough to interfere with feeling completely healthy. 

3. Brominated vegetable oil.

Bromine-treated vegetable oil tends to be especially stick. Blend brominated vegetable oil with a dye or colorant, and it blends through a watery solution. That's how brominated vegetable oil turns out to be an unlikely ingredient in American sports drinks and fruit juices (at least the ones that are so pale they have to dyed for consumers to recognize what they are). Brominated vegetable oil is legal in the USA but banned in over 100 countries. 

4.  Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT).

The two most common food preservatives in the USA are butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydroxytoluene, also know as BHA and BHT. It's hard to find any kind of packaged food, especially bread and pastries, that doesn't include them. Although the greatest amount of BHA and BHT is used for keeping bread fresh, these chemicals actually keep fats (which are included in bread) from becoming rancid.

BHA and BHT are antioxidants; in the USA, if you happen to be a street person, you will get more of your total antioxidants from BHA and BHT than you will receive from vitamin C. They also combine with lysine to fight certain kinds of viruses. However, they aggravate allergies and asthma, and have been linked to squamous cell carcinoma in laboratory studies with animals.

BHA and BHT are banned in the UK, Japan, and in many other countries.

5. Sunset yellow (dye).

Yellow dyes, such as sunset yellow, actually are permitted in many other countries, including the member states of the European Union and Canada. But that still doesn't mean they are a good idea. The yellow dye known as sunset yellow, also known as E110, FD & C Yellow 6, and Orange Yellow 6, is an Aspirin-like substance that naturally occurs in apples, cranberries, cloudberries, ligonberries, plums, prunes, dill, oregano, wintergreen, and peppermint. If you aren't allergic to Aspirin, it is not likely to cause you any problems. But if you are allergic to Aspirin, or you are "just a little" allergic to Aspirin and you take an Aspirin and then eat a food colored with the dye, you may experience a serious allergic reaction. Sunset yellow is used to color energy drinks, soup mix, marzipan, and lemon curd.

Five More Potentially Harmful Foods and Food Ingredients in the American Diet

Some of the most troubling products in the American diet are some of the most common.

6. Beef and dairy products from cows routinely given antibiotics in their feed.

American farmers have used antibiotics to treat beef and dairy cows at least since the 1950's. At one time, antibiotic use was basically a matter of being kind of a cow. If your cow cut her udder trying to jump the fence, or a calf injured its hoof while playing in the pasture, a quick injection of penicillin was used to prevent infection and discomfort.

But by the 1990's, mega-producers of beef and dairy products looking at the bottom line noticed that giving cattle antibiotics in their feed prevented infections and reduced the amount of time needed to take of cows. Knocking out udder infections (mastitis) before they started increased milk production, and giving cows confined to feed lots, sometimes literally eating each others' manure, prevented gastrointestinal infections.

Inhuman treatment of cows has implications for humans. Bacteria that survive antibiotic exposure are deemed "antibiotic resistant," and bacteria can transfer genes that make them antibiotic resistant from one to another through a process analogous to sex. The result is more and more infectious diseases that respond to fewer and fewer antibiotics, making human diseases harder to treat.

7. Dairy products from cows treated with growth hormones.

In the 1990's, scientists learned how to harness the power of bacteria to make synthetic versions of the hormones that encourage meat and milk production in cows. Although the use of recombinant bovine growth hormones in beef and dairy cattle is not universal, it is commonplace, and the increased growth of the cow leads to an increased need for antibiotics to fight infections, causing the problems mentioned above. Certain dairy products from cows given growth hormones, particularly sour cream, contain insulin-like growth factors that are known to stimulate the growth of human breast and prostate cancer cells.

8. GMO corn and soy.

At least 80% of the corn and soy products sold in America come from genetically modified plants. Proponents of genetic engineering point out, correctly, that farmers have been "genetically modifying" plants and animals by breeding for thousands of years, and that in any case, the human digestive tract breaks down corn, soy, and all other foods into their basic components, also breaking down plant DNA. And at any rate, a corn or soybean gene shouldn't "fit" in human DNA.

There are some indications, however, that sometimes the stomach doesn't produce enough acid to completely break down the DNA in plant foods, sometimes snippets of genetically modified genes find their way into the human body, and sometimes they cause "allergic" reactions of varying severity. Despite what you may read online, the connections between GMO and human disease are iffy and poorly researched at best, but most countries in the European Union don't want to take a chance.

9. Olestra (also known as Olean) in fat-free potato chips and French fries.

For potato chips and French fry connoisseurs, "fat-free" seems to miss the point, but some American food manufacturers make fat-free foods with the addition of a "fat-free fat" called Olestra. The problem with Olestra is that the human digestive tract isn't set up to digest it. Eating foods made with Olestra can lead to an especially unpleasant and potentially embarrassing complication called anal leakage, which is essentially bowel movements between bowel movements, bloating, and gas. Olestra also interferes with the absorption of fat-free vitamins A, D, E, and K.

10. Red 40.

It isn't just yellow dyes that may cause health problems. Austria and Norway ban the addition of a common red dye known as Red 40. Like yellow dyes, this red dye can produce allergic reactions and seems to be connected with hyperactivity in children, but it is found in foods ranging from ketchup to cinnamon-flavored "red hot" candies in the USA.