Blossom's Fake Video Exposed by food scientist | How To Cook That Ann Reardon

Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today due to popular demand I'm going to be testing the 'Is Your Food Fake?' video by Blossom! So many of you sent me this video and said: we know it's probably not true but it's causing doubts. First up we have cheese 🧀 ... they have processed cheese with chemicals is difficult to melt and natural cheese melts. Now there are a couple of things to look at in this video ... number one is the wording ... 'processed' with chemicals versus 'natural' assuming they're saying natural is good and processed with chemicals is bad. It's very interesting to note that processed with chemicals is something that a lot of people go oh it's got additives it must be bad and it's generally when it's chemicals that they don't understand what they are or what they do. So if I said to you most of the cakes that you buy and eat have the additive sodium hydrogen carbonate added to them to make them a little bit better then you might get worried about that. But if I told you that sodium hydrogen carbonate is the name of baking powder then you go oh that's fine I know what baking powder is I know what it does it makes the cake rise and without it it would be flat and not very nice. So you're familiar with it you understand it so you're not scared of it. That's the same with most of the food additives in the food chemicals they're added to the food for a reason to change something about its properties, to make it more palatable and nicer. If you want to add an additive to food that hasn't been used before you just can't until that's in the food laws and the food laws will test it and test it and find out the amount they know is safe and then that safe amount gets divided by hundreds or thousands and then that's the amount you as a manufacturer are allowed to add to your food. So if even people bought a hundred different foods with the additive in they'd still be below the safe intake of it. So that's how additives tend to work ... so not all additives are bad. Baking powder is a chemical additive - not bad. So don't go oh chemical additives bad. The other flipside of that is 'natural good' is natural good? I mean rat poo is natural and we don't want it in our food uranium is natural and it will kill us! ☢️ the problem with 'natural' is it's actually not been defined by law of what is natural and what isn't when it comes to food labeling. It's just such a hot debate as to what is and isn't natural and it gets so complicated. I mean they're the FDA in the US has asked for public comment on this they've been debating this for years now and they still haven't defined it so that should let you know how complicated natural is. so for the moment if you see natural on a food label it doesn't really mean anything! So just flip it over read the ingredients and decide for yourself. But let's actually do this test let's actually get some cheese and a flame and see what happens. Okay so we'll start with the cheese singles and you can see that these do in fact burn ... don't do this at home because you might actually burn your fingers you have a very very careful but it does in fact burn when it's exposed to an open flame. Now if we try with the natural cheese in front of the flame it melts and drips down. So why is that? Blossom have implied by their video that was because of the additives in the chemicals in the cheese singles that it burnt. But if we flip over the back of the packet which is what I'm encouraging you to do and read the nutrition information panel then you can see that this one the singles per 100 grams has eighteen point nine grams of fat ... remember that number eighteen point nine. Whereas the natural cheese has a fat total per 100 grams of thirty-three point three grams so it's nearly double the amount of fat in one cheese versus the other and it's the amount of fat that allows it to melt and is allowing that cheese just to flow over each other and just drip down. So the video really should look like this low fat cheese burns under an open flame high-fat cheese melts and drips down under an open flame but that's not really a shareable sensational type video so that's not what they went for. They've kind of showed you an experiment and then drawn the wrong conclusion 🤪 If I told you the more firemen that attend a fire the greater the damage will therefore firemen damage! Now you can see what I did there I took a true fact: the more firemen that are at a fire the greater the damage bill. And then led you to the wrong conclusion and you knew it was the wrong conclusion you knew that that's not the reason that's exactly what they've done with the cheese. They've taken a true fact one burns one melts and then led you to the wrong conclusion. Rice mixed with plastic bits to increase manufacturer profits. Surely plastic bits would cost more than rice itself ... rice is pretty cheap! This was disproved again and again the reason why it had so much testing was because it kept getting traction on social media and going viral in different countries. Articles about it saying this is a hoax this is not real this is not a health concern, people don't need to be scared about this but thanks Blossom for bringing it up again to do the rounds again. Baby food these are ground up rocks advertised as fortified calcium. What do you think? Do you think this is true or is this false? There are some truths in here so what do you think is this one a true one and how do you tell? Well let's get some baby food and put it into a bag spread it out and let me get a really strong magnet this one can lift the whole jar so it's pretty strong. I'm gonna run it across the baby food and absolutely nothing as expected. If I tip out some calcium lactate for you you can see here calcium is just not magnetic it is a mineral but it's not magnetic and it's usually white not black so that makes the whole video a bit suss from the beginning. So what did blossom add to their baby food to make this video? I was just trying to think in my mind what was easy to get hold of that I could use for this? So I actually got a magnet and smashed it with a hammer into little pieces and now I'm just gonna drop that into my baby food and mix it through really really well and now I've just used my magnet to pull all those little pieces to the bottom so you can't see them. Now on camera I can run my magnet across and you'll see that it pulls the black bits all the way over to the corner and the magnet is attracting those little bits of magnet that I have added that weren't in the baby food right to the corner. This is just the definition of scaremongering! This is going to make parents worried that can they use the baby food from the shop and again let me reassure you the food standard codes are so tight on baby food and what can be added. You can flip it over if you're concerned and check the ingredients it will tell you exactly what is in that food. Next we have vitamins on a tray in the oven. Synthetic supplements burn and natural ones won't. Now they don't tell us what temperature their oven is they don't tell us how long these are in the oven for so I'm just gonna randomly select some tablets (tablets are really expensive) and then we're gonna chuck them in the oven and film them which really this is the bit you wanted because this is the nice footage of watching tablets doing weird things in the oven. 🤢 my kitchen stinks and I'm sure these fumes are not good for me. The first one which has not burnt at all but surely must contain some food coloring additives in order to get that red colour is an iron tablet then we have a vitamin B tablet then a probiotic which has gone brown on the inside ... next a mega magnesium complex next to that the impressive one is an antibiotic not a vitamin I know but it's fun to bake. Next to that is esmaprezarol this is also not a vitamin but just showing you something that is completely synthetically made didn't burn at all in the oven ... next to that is nurofen again not a vitamin but didn't burn at all. then we've got fish oil which heated up and melted its gelatin capsule and leaked everywhere and then this one is burnt in bits in little patches it's actually a mixture of calcium magnesium and vitamin d3 so one of those burns and the others don't and then we have a fully burnt to a crisp vitamin C tablet. now the reason why that one burnt is because it has sugar in it which some may argue is natural and it's of course got sugar added because it's a chewable tablet and without sugar added it would be gross and then this tablet that when as big as a biscuit but didn't actually burn is an effervescent vitamin B complex. So according to blossom's very unscientific test these tablets are all-natural and these two are the only synthetic ones in the bunch. So as you can see chucking something in the oven and seeing what burns on what doesn't burn is absolute rubbish as far as the tests for what is synthetic and what is not. Okay next we have some meat "this is not fat it's actually glue used to bind unused meat scraps". Now this one is kind of based on a little bit of truth in a confusing way so let me explain it. So meat glue or transglutaminase is an enzyme and what it does when you put two proteins or two pieces of meat together it helps them to bind together or stick together ... it's used a lot in things like chicken nuggets things that are shaped or formed into particular molds. It's also sometimes used in things like sausages and those sliced meats like polony or Devon they will have it in as well. What they've pictured here though is completely different they've pictured it being used for like steaks and that sort of thing. So can it be used for that? Is it used for that? That's the question that we're looking at here. If we take little pieces of meat and glue it back together then we've got the bacteria not just on the outside but on the inside so that meat can't be served rare it would have to be well-done or it wouldn't be food safe from a bacterial point of view. So for that reason we have food laws here in Australia, America, UK that say if you want to sell steak or anything that's being cooked back together you must label this as 'formed meat' or 'reformed meat' ... you can't just sell it and say it's a steak if it's not a steak. That's the law. So check your label if it says it's reformed it's got meat glue or if it says transglutaminase or TG in the ingredients then it's got meat glue. I personally could not find any steaks or any roasts or anything that used meat glue because most butchers are very proud of the fact that they're good butchers and they can cut up all their steaks perfectly and don't need to reform anything together. If they've got little scraps they tend to serve them chopped up as things for stir-fry or cubed meat so you know it's just cubed meat or they can put it into sausages or something else there's so many different ways meat can be served ... hamburger patties, mince it up there's not really any reason to glue it back together. But of course because of videos like this some people are very worried that their meat is glued together. I've seen videos where people look at meat and go look it's got different sections you know so it must have been stuck together but you have to remember this meat is coming from an animal and animals have lots of different muscles all joined together with connective tissue so if you look at this piece of meat which does not have meat glue in it you can see there are several sections as a bit they're joined together by fat and then here if we separate it you can see the connective tissue in between it and it's a very thin layer and it's quite strong. This is not meat glue if you see this in your meat this is connective tissue. Just for comparison so that you can see the difference between meat glue and connective tissue I've actually gone out and bought some meat glue for you so that we can make some meat joined together or reformed meat so that we can see the difference. So what I'm going to do is get some pieces of lamb and lay them on the plastic wrap and a strip of fat on one end there and then just sprinkle that with a thin even layer of the meat glue. Stack those pieces on top of each other I probably should add a bit more on the edge there but never mind ... add the fat on top and then tightly wrap the plastic around it and you need to refrigerate that for four hours or more. Now while we're experimenting let's do some strange stuff let's join together some pork chicken lamb some fat and another bit of lamb we'll sprinkle them well with the transglutaminase and then stack it up. Let's start the with the chicken on top of that then the pork some more lamb and then the lamb fat and wrap that tightly ... tightly as you can so that you don't have a gap of air between the meat and four hours later our lamb now looks like one piece of meat and when I slice it that looks pretty good too. Now let's try cutting the Frankensteak! Look at that layers of different meat, that's fully weird. Now if we pull this it pulls apart reasonably easily at the join and you can see it's quite grainy or granular looking where the meat glue was. It's not like the connective tissue you can definitely tell the difference so what about when it's cooked which is what they had in their video let's fry up one of these Frankensteaks. It's stayed together really well when it was cooked let's slice through that. Oh that's just wrong let me know in the comments if you think that's good or wrong oh my gosh! it's harder to tell once it's cooked I mean apart from the fact that we have the different meats here the meat glue itself is pretty much invisible. So if you find chunks of white like they showed in their video in your meat it's likely to actually be fat or connective tissue and not meat glue the meat glue is put there in a really thin layer and once it's cooked virtually invisible. Next we have ice cream, put a squeeze of lemon juice on it if it bubbles it contains 'washing powder for shine and lightness'. This rumor seems to have come from a gossip type website in India back in 2012 and when I checked on the food Authority's website for India to see if there was any record of ice cream being adulterated using washing powder there was no records there at all not in India and certainly not in the rest of the world. Now if you think about this if you get some washing powder and you add an acid like lemon juice it is indeed gonna bubble up. The difficulty though is if you add washing powder to ice-cream, washing powder itself has such a horrible taste it's going to make the ice cream pretty inedible. So you're not going to sell in I scream if you do that anyway it kind of is a self-regulating issue there but if you want to create a viral video or impress your friends to tell them you found washing powder in your ice cream you just take a shot of you reaching a lemon over your bowl of ice cream giving it a squeeze then zoom into a closest shot and add a little bit of lemonade which indeed does bubble up when you add it over ice cream 🤫 you could of course just add the washing powder at the bottom of the bowl but then your ice cream would be inedible and where's the fun in that if you can't eat the ice cream afterwards. Next one all right salt fake salt contains chalk that makes the water cloudy. Okay so let's put some salt in water and as you can see it is a little bit cloudy now if you flip it over and check the ingredients which is what I keep telling you to do the salt has a small amount of anti-caking agent in it. This is because if salt is finely ground it tends to clump together and when you tip your salt you're not going to get anything out because it's going to be stuck together. So this is not fake salt it is 97% salt and then 3% anti-caking agent which allows the salt to flow over each other and into the glass and that's that very small amount of cloudiness you're seeing. If you don't want anti-caking agent you can get the salt that you grind and then that is just 100% salt and you can just grind it in there you can see it's not cloudy at all so what you're seeing is the anti-caking agent it is not fake salt! So if you look at that it's kind of based on a truth ... if it's got an additive to it it's going to make the water cloudy if it doesn't have the anti-caking agent then your water's going to be clear. So it's kind of based on a truth but then they've taken that to the wrong conclusion and highly exaggerated it saying that the salt is 'fake'. That is not true. So you can see how by mixing a little bit of truth with a little bit of liars you can make a viral video because people are is that really true and they get confused. This next one is really strange they claim that the coffee with additives floats and the pure coffee sinks ... now every reference I could find to this test has it flipped the other way round so they've got it completely wrong in this case. The coffee with additives like chicory root or burnt sugar which is sometimes added to make it bitter that sinks, the additives will sink whereas the coffee will float so the coffee that floated should be pure and good and the coffee that sinks should be bad. The problem with this test though is that sometimes pure ground coffee beans with nothing added can also sink so if I grind up my coffee beans that I've got here and I put it on the coarse grind setting and then I put that on to the water it floats. Now if I grind up some more of the same coffee beans the exact same ones and put it on superfine then it tends to float for a moment and then start to sink ... the finer the coffee grinds the faster that will start to sink the coarser it is the more it'll float. Nothing to do with good bad same coffee beans. Other things that can affect it are things like temperature of the water, the warmer the coffee beans or the warmer the water it will sink faster than if it's cold coffee beans on cold water. An easy one to make it sink is slight agitation just a little bit of a jiggle and that's going to make that coffee sink regardless of all of the other factors. There are other things that can affect it as well like the hardness if the water can affect whether the coffee sinks or floats on the top also things like the staleness of the beans how long it's been since it was roasted if they're stale some people will say they'll sink but then there's other people who've done experiments with two different types of beans roasted them on the same day same type of water same grind level on the thing ... one sinks and the other floats. So therefore that must be a difference then in the actual bean itself. So there are so many complicating factors in this it is not a good reliable test of good coffee. the best thing for you to do is check your ingredients number one see if it's hundred percent pure. 2. see if you like the flavor. We're onto spices ...hold it over a candle pure spices will burn or ignite and impure spices don't. Don't you find it a bit weird how they're just trying to burn every here and all of the first part of this video if it burnt it meant it was bad ... remember the cheese if it burnt it was bad if the vitamins in the oven burnt they were synthetic but now with spices if they burn it's good and if they don't burn it's bad. Like surely this contradicts itself enough to let you know that the whole video is bad. It's not giving you good information but let's have some more fun and see if we can set some turmeric on fire over a candle. Now I've been holding this over the flame for a good four minutes and it's not getting close to igniting. I can get it to smoke if I take the candle right to the edge but that's it there's no way this is going to ignite. the only way I can get it to actually have a flame is to just give it a bit of a blast with a blowtorch and even then it goes out pretty much immediately 🔥 let me just watch theirs again ... see here over the candle nothing's happening then they move it away from the flame and away from the heat and magically it ignites ... it's as if there was a blowtorch just off-camera that you couldn't see 🤫the company that put out this video that owns the channel Blossom is First Media who surprisingly also own So Yummy who are the ones who if you've watched my previous video about their videos puts out fake recipes that don't work, can't work ... just scientifically impossible but because they get shared because people go wow ice cream frosting made from ice cream whipped with icing sugar that looks yummy but it's physically impossible. I had so many comments in that previous video of kids who'd spent their pocket money buying ingredients to cook one of the So Yummy recipes and then them failing again and again and they thought that they couldn't cook and they'd stopped baking. And after filming that video I actually had one of the former video producers at So Yummy he used to work for them contact me and I spoke to him on the phone and he said "whether the recipes worked or not was never their concern" ... it was always about the the pacing and the timing to make it a viral, shareable, watchable video ... that was the concern.they'd refilm to get that just perfect but whether the recipe worked or not who cares! 😡 Now this is not just limited to an issue with First Media this is an issue across the whole of the social media platform and the reason why it's an issue is because this sort of stuff is getting promoted by the algorithm! I think unless the algorithm itself changes unless the platforms Facebook and YouTube take responsibility for what they're promoting there's just gonna be more of this because it works ... it would have made them so much money because they've got so many views so that tells other companies we should try and deceive and do fake stuff because that's gonna work it's going to get us views. Whereas previously if a newspaper did that then they're not gonna get views they're gonna get shamed and shut down and less people are gonna buy their stuff because it's not true whereas in this case YouTube and Facebook keeps promoting, keeps promoting, keeps promoting these same channels these same producers even though you go but they're deceiving the public!! I don't know what do you think what do you think the solution is? I actually just don't know what the solution is you try and solve the problem viral videos on social media not being true I'll leave that up to you. With thanks to my Patrons for sponsoring this channel and making videos like this possible, paying for meat glue and ingredients and all the things that go into making a video. If you'd like to join them you can go to patreon.com/h2ct and join them there. You can check out my other debunking videos here and some recipes that actually work here. Subscribe, turn on the Bell, make sure notifications are switched on on your phone and all those things you have to do to get notified nowadays. Make it a great week and I'll see you on Friday 😍

Channel: How To Cook That

Views: 5,227,006

Rating: 4.9214926 out of 5

Keywords: howtocookthat, how to cook that, ann reardon, HOW TO COOK THAT ANN REARDON, How To Cook That Ann Reardon 🍰🍫🍨🍭, Is my food fake?, What is meat glue?, how to tell if meat has been glued, how to tell if meat has meat glue, meat glued together, meat glue australia, transglutaminase recipes, synthetic vitamins, natural food labels, natural food, processed food documentary, youtube drama, blossom fake food exposed, exposé, is soyummy the worst channel in youtube?

Id: vSBSzWmjXO0

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CX-001]

That was extremely detailed and i rather hope for more like it.

[u/De_Oscillator]

I know this is a little off topic but it was like a 2 minute video that took 23 minutes of explanation to debunk.

This is why conspiracy is so attractive cause you can throw out a ton of baseless claims with how you feel about certain things without actually understanding the process of how reality works, and it takes forever to debunk and most laymen don't have the skillset to efficiently do it. The conspiracy is always the easier route.

It's a pretty dangerous mindset to fall into, because if you are so easily persuaded by this, what else can the same person fall for?

[u/pap_n_whores]

I like how all it takes to debunk every single scene is to just try it yourself

[u/ch00f]

The magnet experiment could have been real, but it's not calcium. It's iron. You can do this experiment with iron fortified cereals and pull out trace amounts of iron powder.

You need iron. It's in yer blood.

[u/electronstrawberry]

Anne Reardon is amazing and if y'all like this you should definitely check out her video where she tests So Yummy recipes, which she mentions in the above. It's super fascinating and level headed. Also all of the recipe vids on her channel are awesome as long as you don't watch them while you're hungry

[u/erbie_ancock]

Great vid. There is so much stupidity and hysteria out there.

[u/lenkavanka]

I love rational, reasonable things.

[u/informationtiger]

I'm so glad they did this. Even tho the original video has been debunked in the comments, a video response was necessary.

[u/nholoinhoi]

This is what the YouTube algorithm should suggest.