Trying to decide between protein powder flavors. Looked at the ingredients and there almost no difference but the flavors are. So im guessing they come from the “natural flavorings”…what are those?
Some are obscure flavors: cereal milk, coffee and walnuts, speculoos, cookies and cream, chocolate chip cookie, white chocolate raspberry, carrot cake, curcuma latte, banana, strawberries and cream…
In: Chemistry
In most base ingredients, like strawberries, there are one or two chemicals that are responsible for the majority of the ingredient’s flavor. Most industrially produced foods are not flavored with a whole ingredient but, rather, with the specific chemicals responsible for that ingredient’s flavor.
So, for example, if you’re buying a food that has a strawberry flavor to it, its very unlikely that whole strawberries were used to make that food. Instead, the food was likely flavored with Ethyl methylphenylglycidate – which is the chemical primarily responsible for a strawberry’s flavor. The FDA allows food manufacturers to group those flavorings into two categories: natural flavoring and artificial flavoring.
The FDA says that a natural flavoring is any flavor that was derived from some actual food. So, for example, natural strawberry flavor *likely* was produced by liquifying strawberries, evaporating the water, then soaking the mixture in hexane, then distilling the Ethyl methylphenylglycidate out of the hexane.
The FDA says that an artificial flavoring is any flavor that was manufactured from a chemical feedstock. So, for example, artificial strawberry flavor *likely* was produced from a reaction involving what is essentially acetone and vinegar.
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