Hey Thoughty2 here. Do you know what you’re
eating? I mean, do you really know? Because you may think you do, but you’ve been lied
to your entire life. Now this may be hard to stomach, but a lot of the food you eat
is fake. Okay, this is not true for everyone watching. Different countries have vastly
different food regulations and some countries are far, far worse offenders at dishing up
fake food to its citizens, I’ll reveal the worst countries for doing this in a minute
but first let’s take a jar of harmless honey. It’s touted as one of nature’s superfoods,
it can prevent cancer and heart disease. It’s a powerful probiotic and it boosts your immune
system. And all of that is true, if you’re eating real honey that is. Germany is the
world’s largest importer of honey; those Germans love their honey! But the world’s
second largest honey importer, America tells a different story when it comes to this supposedly
wholly natural product. A study found that over 75% of honey sold in the US doesn’t
contain any honey. According to the FDA, honey has to contain pollen, otherwise it isn’t
honey. It was discovered that the vast majority of commercial honey brands on the shelves
of American stores contained no pollen at all and therefore were not actually honey
at all. So if all this honey isn’t honey, then what
is it? Well there are many different, carefully engineered cocktails of artificial ingredients
that are used to replicate real honey and each producer uses their own unique mixture.
Most are mainly made up from the infamous high-fructose corn syrup, sometimes labelled
as Maltitol syrup, cut with sucrose syrup and water. Sometimes some plant extracts and
essential oils are thrown in there, if you’re lucky. So you thought you were being healthy
by swapping your pancake syrup for honey, but in reality it’s probably the exact same
thing. So why do American honey producers sell billions
of dollar’s worth of artificial sugars labelled as honey? Simple economics; real honey is
expensive, just think about what has to happen to make honey. Bees have to visit 2 million
flowers to produce just one cup of honey, travelling 55,000 miles in the process. And
over its entire lifetime a single bee will produce just half a teaspoon of honey. High-fructose corn syrup and other similar
ingredients are incredibly cheap to produce and so companies can sell fake honey for much
cheaper to consumers, who are non-the-wiser. There are also no regulations in place in
America concerning the actual percentage of real honey-content required. In Europe there
are very strict rules about what can be labelled and sold as honey. European regulations dictate
that anything sold as “honey” must contain at least 60% actual honey and cannot contain
more than 5% sucrose, i.e. syrups. The vast majority of honey sold across Europe was found
to be 100% honey. Through no fault of their own American’s
are also not use to the idea that honey crystalizes very quickly and 100% raw honey will usually
already be highly crystalized when you take it off the shelf. Honey never spoils and crystallization
is completely normal, after all, it is a sugar and sugar just loves to crystalize. Europeans
have always been sold crystalized honey and so, are use to the idea. A survey found that
most American’s would wrongly consider crystalized honey to be spoilt. But when you’re selling
syrups disguised as honey, you don’t have to worry about crystallization. 2.3 Billion cups of coffee are drank around
the world every day but what goes into your cup? Let me guess, ground coffee or instant
coffee (if you’re an animal), hot water, then maybe milk or cream and perhaps some
sugar. Oh and of course, let’s not forget the wheat, soybeans, seeds, corn, twigs and
dirt. Yes, you heard me correctly, your ground coffee, which should just be coffee and nothing
else, surely? …actually contains a whole array of fillers and more often than not these
fillers contain twigs and dirt. Well you did say you like coffees with an earthy flavour. Coffee is in trouble, big trouble. Coffee
is very sensitive, it doesn’t like being called names, but it’s also very picky about
where it’s grown. The plant will only produce coffee seeds, known to us all as coffee beans,
in humid, and very altitudinous mountainous areas. According to several experts, climate
change is threatening these sensitive environments and forecasts show that by 2050, half of the
regions in the world where coffee can be grown will be lost and by 2080 coffee could go extinct.
Due to growing fears, some unscrupulous ground coffee manufacturers have resorted to padding
out their coffee using fillers such as soybeans, acai seeds, brown sugar, barley and corn. Some by-products of coffee production that
should be removed from the final product are also purposely being left in to fill it out.
Such as wood, twigs, parchment, husks and even soil. If you buy whole beans then don’t
worry, there won’t be any fillers in there. Brazilian scientists were so concerned about
this that they developed a brand new technique using liquid chromatography and statistical
analysis that allowed them to detect exactly what percentage of a bag of ground coffee
is actual coffee. The procedure is 95% accurate. What they discovered was that some brands
of ground coffee have such a high percentage of fillers in them that they must be purposely
added in, there’s no way it’s an accident. If coffee isn’t your thing, then maybe orange
juice is. You may have been told many times that most orange juices are artificial, but
do you really know just how artificial? What if I told you that the flavour of most major
orange juice brands is 100% fake? To make orange juice you squeeze oranges right? Maybe
throw in some preservatives and added sugar. No, that would just be too easy for big brand
orange juices! They squeeze oranges then remove all the oxygen from the extracted juice, this
allows the juice to keep for a year without spoiling, yes your morning juice is anywhere
from a few months to a year old. But that’s not all that removing oxygen does, it also
removes all of the natural flavour and I mean all of it. So you’re left with a very old,
completely tasteless liquid that slightly resembles something that came out of an orange
once. The orange flavour is then artificially re-added
to the juice using a concoction of artificial flavourings. But why purposely remove the
flavour then put it in again, if it only makes it worse? I mean that’s not easy or cheap
to do. It’s all about consistency, each big brand orange juice has their own unique
flavour that customers are very familiar with. Imagine if the taste of Tropicana changed
slightly, millions of people would notice. The natural flavour from oranges is just not
consistent enough to stick a brand name on it and have people associate that flavour
with that particular brand, because the flavour would constantly change, depending on the
variety, location of the oranges and time of year. Orange juice manufacturers spend millions
hiring flavour and fragrance experts. The very same people that work for large perfume
companies, to create a unique and recognisable orange-juice-like flavour, just for their
product. The worst part is that the flavourings don’t even have to be listed under the ingredients,
because they’re derived from orange oils. Which is a dubious claim, but it technically
means these artificially flavoured drinks can be sold as 100% orange juice. So I bet you’re wondering which of your
favourite foods I’m going to ruin next. What about a simple steak? “No! Not the
steak!” A steak is just a single cut of beef right? What could possibly be suspicious
about that? Well if you opt for cheaper steaks, whether it be from the supermarket or even
your local butcher, you could be eating tens of different cows in a single steak. You’re
purchasing Frankenstein steaks that have actually been glued together from a whole array of
offcuts. And this doesn’t just happen with beef, it could be lamb, pork, venison, or
any meat really. When many animals are being turned into various
types of small food products, ready to throw into a pan at home, a lot of waste is created
and general chunks of meat that would most likely get thrown away. Some unscrupulous
companies and butchers use a meat glue called “transglutaminase”, that’s well known
within the food industry and completely untraceable within the final product. They basically glue
together the leftover pieces, which could have come from many different cows, to create
a Frankenstein steak, for your enjoyment. Transglutaminase is so good at fusing meat
together it would take an expert to examine a steak closely to detect any wrong doing.
The best part? It’s not a legal requirement to list it as an ingredient. So to be safe,
just stay away from cheap steaks, but what if you already do? Maybe you are a cow connoisseur
who opts to spend 40, 50 or even 100 dollars or more on a single steak in a restaurant.
And your favourite steak of all is the very pricey Kobe beef. The Kobe beef craze has
taken America in particular, by storm. Thousands of restaurants all over the country and many
large chains now offer highly-priced Kobe beef burgers, Kobe steaks and other Kobe beef
products on their menus. Kobe beef comes from Kobe cows, a breed of
Wagyu cattle that comes from Japan. The steaks they produce are prized by chefs the world
over for their impressive fat-marbling, flavour, and melt-in-your-mouth texture. It is the
ultimate steak. But it’s incredibly exclusive, Kobe beef can only come from Japan and just
3,000 cattle are deemed worthy enough to be slaughtered and turned into Kobe beef each
year. They are all fathered by just 12 highly-prized bulls, that are considered “genetically
ideal”. Sounds to me like they’re trying to create a cow master-race over there. Kobe
cows are fed beer and sake to improve flavour. Every cow is massaged daily to improve fat
marbling. Hell, I want to be a Kobe cow. That’s some serious dedication to creating
a tasty steak and it doesn’t come cheap, it varies but it will cost you on average
about $350 to eat a real Kobe steak in a restaurant. Because supplies are purposely kept small
to focus on quality, the amount of real Kobe beef that reaches the US each year would only
feed 77 Americans. Yet millions of Americans are going out and regularly eating Kobe beef
in restaurants and buying it from the store to cook at home, for far, far less than $350
per steak. So what’s going on here? It’s one of the biggest food scams in America’s
history. As you have probably guessed by now, the vast, vast majority of so-called Kobe
beef sold in America is just plain old regular beef, that has never even been to Japan. It’s
just outright lying and clever marketing, if you can call it clever. Some farms in America
are now creating fake Kobe beef for much cheaper, often called “Faux-be beef” by those in
the know. This fake Kobe is sold in thousands of restaurants for upwards of $100 a steak.
But in reality there are only 9 restaurants in America that sell real Kobe beef, imported
from Japan; yes, just 9 and they have a special license, allowing them to cook and sell it. The fake food you consume in the average day
is sickening. Your olive oil is actually peanut oil, soyabean oil and palm oil. Your cheese
and even bread contains wood pulp, yes wood pulp, which the FDA says is safe to eat. Thanks
for the advice, but last time I checked I wasn’t a beaver. Your dried spices contain
a large amount of garden weeds. Your tea contains sawdust and sand. Blueberries are often faked, most products
containing blueberries, such as muffins, cereals and pancakes contain precisely zero blueberries.
Real blueberries are expensive and so food scientists have perfected a recipe of sugar,
purple dye and other questionable ingredients to craft imitation blueberries, with no health
benefits whatsoever. In America most of the Champagne sold is not
actually Champagne, most people believe that it’s illegal to sell sparkling wine as “Champagne”
if it doesn’t originate from the Champagne province in France and produced is using the
“Méthode Champenoise”, a second fermentation within the bottle. Well yes, this is true,
in every country in the World, except America. A 100-year-old legal loophole allows any American
sparkling wine, a simple bottle of Californian bubbly for example, to be sold as Champagne
within America. Do this in any other country and French lawsuits would take your fake Champers
off the shelves faster than you can say “Is this the bloody French inquisition or what…” Of course all of this changes depending on
where you live in the World. Every country has its own unique food regulations and different
levels of food quality. But which countries have the most fake food and which have the
least? British charity, Oxfam conducted a study comparing the quality of food in every
country in the World. The best countries in the world overall for food quality, and lack
of food-related health issues were found to be The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Denmark
and Sweden. But shockingly, at the other end of the spectrum was America, for quality and
health issues the USA ranked 120th out of 125 countries, putting it in the same league
as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Ethiopia and Chad. It’s one of life’s great ironies that
the world’s wealthiest superpower has some of the lowest quality food in the world. But
it’s not the fault of the American peoples, large American food companies that have monopolised
the market use every trick in the book and some horrifying techniques and chemicals to
make terribly poor quality food seem more appealing to shoppers. And in America and
some other countries, the regulations just aren’t in place to properly regulate what
goes into people’s food, at least they’re nowhere near stringent enough. But just remember,
every time you shop, you are voting. Avoiding cheap, processed and general dodgy-looking
produce will reduce the demand for it. Choosing to instead shop at local stores with real,
high quality food will make a difference, and you’ll live a longer, happier life as
well, for the sake of a bit less convenience. You wouldn’t eat garbage out the bin so
don’t settle for buying it off the shelves. Thanks for watching.
Fittingly, the European Parliament just voted for stricter controls and harsher penalties to prevent food fraud two weeks ago.
Here's the ranking. Europe's beating the world.
Don't know why he only mentioned Denmark and Sweden because Belgium and Austria ranked 4th as well.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) I consume none of these products myself. Here in the Netherlands, we have a tv show produced by the public broadcaster, that deals exclusively with this issue. It's called Keuringsdienst van waarde, the products in this youtube video are just the tip of the iceberg.
Some products that are, in my opinion, more interesting than the ones mentioned in this youtube video:
Palmoil that is added to white-yellowy foods like cheese, to make the end product cheaper, this is disgusting, unhealthy and also bad for the environment, the unholy trinity of fake food.
Pesto and pesto sauces, this is not a particularly shocking one, but it is an interesting product to investigate. Pesto is made from basil, pine nut seeds, olive oil, parmesan cheese. All these products are both expensive and difficult to replace. Now I challenge you to find out what disgusting crap is in the prepackaged pesto. It doesn't even resemble the product they're trying to emulate anymore.
As somone who produces and sells 100% pure honey, us europeans are also quite shitty about understanding that pure honey does, in fact, chrystalize.
otherwise, our products are on a completelly different level from some other imported crap that you can spot without even tasting it.
The issue with honey is real, I haven't been able to buy honey which actually crystallyze even in specialized stores since I moved from my town and this was bought in a little butcher store from local producers. I guess problems with bees and now agravated with asian wasp have something to do with it.
I'm very interested in this subject, although I haven't heard about coffe fillers before, guess I have to buy a coffe grinder now. Anyway, I think the best mental state is believe by default that every food you buy which is not a piece of fruit or a vegetable is, in some level, fake. And you have to be careful even with that, you have to check the origin of what you're buying, it's so easy they seell to you a south african orange disguised as a valencian one (even if you live in Valencia, which is my case), I'm glad to see Europe have better regulations that I thought and judging by the graphic we are pretty high in the ranking so maybe I can relax a little.
I, for one, think that good regulation is never too much regulation.
Recently spend 3 months in the US and thought the honey tasted weird. Tried to explain it to my friends there and the did not agree. This explains why.
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/good-enough-to-eat
According to this link (to the study that's been cited as source in the video), the United States are nowhere near the bottom when it comes to food quality.
I really wonder what's going on here. Why does this guy quote sources if he then actually blatantly lies about them?
Not very surprising though. I'm also not sure to agree with his conclusions when he says the US situation is not the fault of the American people but of the big corporation. Who, if not the American people, allowed those big corporation to happen and thrive?