Ever notice how almost every packaged product’s ingredient list ends with those two seemingly harmless words, natural flavor. The FDA hasn’t officially defined the term “natural”, which means it can be used to describe almost any food. Natural flavors can be highly processed and contain many chemical additives, preservatives & solvents. These lab-created flavor concoctions can contain more than 100 ingredients in addition to their original flavor source, like propylene glycol, sodium benzoate, polysorbate 80, BHT and hidden forms of MSG. Can you believe that these so called "incidental additives" are not even required to be labeled by the FDA!

Natural flavors are remarkably like artificial flavors in terms of their chemical composition. The only safety criteria are that these ingredients are on a “Generally Recognized as Safe” list of substances by the FDA, when consumed in moderation. I guess the question is, would you buy a product that had up to 100 additional, hard to pronounce, chemical ingredients listed on the package if they were actually required to be disclosed by the manufacturer? It’s hardly that unprocessed, minimal ingredients, quality, real food you thought you were buying. Talk about BS. You see, they don’t want you to have the blueberries that nature intended, they want you to only experience the best 1 millionth part of the taste, causing you to overeat and buy more. Natural flavors are also used to mask the taste of other unappetizing ingredients in the product. Not to mention, blueberry flavor, created in a lab, is so much cheaper to use than real blueberries.

When you open a Raw Crunch bar, the smell of blueberries & lemon won’t resonate across the entire room, but I can assure you that our ingredients are derived from Mother Nature herself, not by flavor chemists. Raw Crunch are nutritionally satisfying for natural appetite control and if you are addicted, it’s by the way they make your body feel, not by chemical trickery. So simply put, avoid processed foods with natural flavors as much as possible by eating whole, unprocessed, real food and make more of your own snacks from scratch. Let’s bring real flavor back!

Some sauces I love that are free of natural favors with only quality, organic ingredients are Date Lady BBQ Sauce and Date Lady Sweet Chili Sauce. Also, for things like ketchup, the store brand organic version often does not contain natural flavors, but the Heinz ketchup does. The La Croix carbonated drinks contain natural flavors, but the Spindrifts don’t. In fact, you should try one of each of these drinks. It will be a real eye opener as to how many chemicals you will taste in the La Croix and not the Spindrift.