21 Fascinating Food Facts
There's a lot of serious articles being written at present, so we thought we’d lighten the mood a tad by sharing these 21 fascinating food facts
Show off your newfound nerdiness to the family this evening and bathe in their warmth of appraisal and admiration…or, fend off gibes from the kids who inquisitively ask what you really do when you say you’re “working from home”.
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1. Natural flavouring isn't natural. lndeed, just one natural flavouring can contain up to 3,000 chemicals including one which is harvested from a beaver's anus sack - yep, you read that correctly.
2 Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. A campaign by a cereal company – surprise surprise – used the term heavily in marketing campaigns and it stuck. But there’s no scientific basis to it.
3 Russia classed beer as a soft drink until 2011. Any drink under 10% ABV was classified as a soft drink until legislation was introduced to reduce underage drinking and combat health issues.
Would you believe it? Pound for pound, THIS has more protein than steak!
4 Spirulina has more protein than steak. Pound for pound, spirulina – often considered the world’s most nutritious food – contains more protein than steak. At a whopping 60% protein, it makes steak (a paltry 22%) look quite feeble
5 Soft drinks contain cr@p, literally. One study in 2010 found a whopping 48% of soft drinks contained faecal matter. And 11% contained e-coli. Grim.
6 Some people have an actual fear of peanut butter. I know, I know. What craziness is this? But arachibutyrophobia is a real thing: the irrational fear of getting peanut butter stuck on the roof of your mouth. Hopefully none of you reading this are in that crowd…we don’t want your kind here.
How could anyone possibly have a fear of this wonderful stuff?
7 Coconut water can be used as blood plasma. With low levels of potassium and high levels of sodium, in extreme circumstances coconut water will work as blood plasma.
8 Bananas are berries but strawberries are not. To be classified as a berry, a fruit must be produced from one flower with one ovary and will typically have several seeds. So, bananas are berries but, botanically speaking, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries are not.
9 Honey is bee vomit. When you consider that bees drink nectar, store it in their stomach while flying back to the hive and then regurgitate it, you can see why.
Technically speaking, honey is bee vomit
10 Eat early evening to increase fat burning. It’s true, ensuring you don’t eat late at night increases the amount of fat you burn at night. You also don’t need to eat every two or three hours.
Read our Beginner’s Guide To Intermittent Fasting
11 Food found in genital lube. It’s true. Some ingredients are ‘good’ enough to use in both genital lubricants and sports nutrition. Ewww, gross.
12 Nutmeg is a hallucinogen. Rich in myristicin, nutmeg contains enough of the mind-messing compound to leave you in an LSD-like trance which can last for two days (but can also kill you, so don’t try it).
It looks innocent enough, but this spice is enough to send you doolally
13 Ginger heals. A study in the Journal of Pain found ginger contributed to the reduction of exercise-induced pain – often called DOMS – by up to 25%
14 Corned beef has been to space. Astronaut John Young smuggled what we’re guessing was his favourite food - corned beef sandwiches - into space in 1965.
15 Chia seeds are hydrophilic. That means they can absorb a lot of water - 10x their own weight of water, in fact. That’s why they’re so popular with the Tarahumara ultramarathon runners in Mexico, and why they’re the basis of our Chia Energy Gel.
Inspired by the Tarahumara Indians, we used chia seeds as the basis for our Chia Energy Gels - all natural, all-day energy and 100% customisable to your taste
16 Bananas are as old as the hills. Yep, bananas are the oldest known fruit, originating more than 10,000 years ago. While we're on the topic of bananas, did you also know they float and their skin relieves the itching from a mosquito bite?
17 Sandwiches are named after royalty. It's said the sandwich was invented by the Earl of Sandwich. As the story goes, the earl was on a 24-hour bender (or gambling streak, depending on your source) when he decided he needed food delivered to him rather than leave the table. So food was brought to him stuffed between two pieces of bread, and the sandwich was born.
18 McDonalds by numbers. McDonalds sells 2.5 billion burgers each year.
That's 6.8 million per day...283,000 per hour...80 burgers every single second.
A whole lot of these chaps are sold every minute
19 Potatoes are 80% water. Crazy when you think about how dense, wholesome and filling they are, but 'tis true - they're mostly just water.
20 Tonic water glows in the dark. Due to its high quinine content, tonic water actually glows when the light dims.
21 Brown sugar and white sugar are the same. It might have a healthier reputation, but brown sugar is no less refined than its white brother. The only real difference lies in the fact that some of the molasses lost during the refining process gets added back.
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