I had no idea..........Processed Foods Make Up 70% of the U.S. Diet [View all]

[dixiegrrrrl]

“Nobody set out to dominate the American diet, to make everything we’re eating so highly processed and so highly technical — it was a gradual revolution,” said Melanie Warner, the author of the new book, ‘Pandora’s Lunchbox.’ “It basically started 100 years ago.”

"Warner said that there’s an estimated 5,000 different additives that are allowed to go into our food, but:
“The FDA doesn’t actually know how many additives are going into our food.
This is in part because regulations are not only self-regulatory — so the food industry is doing the testing — but it’s also voluntary,” she said. “The ingredient companies don’t actually have to tell the FDA about a new ingredient. If they choose to, they can simply just launch it into the market. The FDA doesn’t know about them, and nobody else really knows about them.”

( Basically the entire story at the link is the above excerpt...I was just stunned at the %)

http://www.mediachannel.org/processed-foods-make-up-70-of-the-u-s-diet/