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Read This Before You Eat Another Hot Dog!
Photo credit: bigstock
Meats that are used:
- Chicken, pork, beef, turkey, and others. Pork hot dogs cannot contain more than 20 percent meat due to the risk of pathogens.
The fillers:
- Dried milk, cereal grains, modified food starch, and corn syrup. This can make up as much as 3.5 percent of the hot dog.
- Salt: One hot dog can contain as much as 670mg of sodium, more than 30 percent of a daily recommended allowance.
- Preservatives: sodium phosphate, sodium diacetate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrate, and potassium lactate.
- Flavorings: Various spices are used including paprika, MSG, artificial flavors, carmine ( which is a dye from the shells of beetles, boiled in ammonia)
- Water: As much as 10 percent, which is allowed by law.
The casing:
- These often come from pork, lamb, beef, fibers, wood pulp, even plastic are sued. Many hot dog casings are removed just before they are packaged for the last time, so they don’t have to be edible. Some casings come from dissolved cowhide, and the intestinal tracts of slaughtered animals.
Of course, this is just the list of things that manufacturers actually use in their hot dogs. The process, though, leaves something to be desired as, according to reports released in the Freedom of Information Act, many foreign objects have been found in hot dogs including: maggots, razor blades, glass pieces, rat legs, used Band-Aids, and eyeball pieces. (We will wait while you go vomit) You can’t help but wonder; what happened to the rest of the rat?
Large factories can make out about 300,000 hot dogs every hour! When commercial establishments get this big, it’s not uncommon to find disgusting contaminants.
Think you are safe because you are eating “organic” hot dogs. Nope. So called “natural” or “organic” hot dogs must use a “natural” source of nitrates, so instead of chemical nitrates, they simply use organic ones, such as dried celery. It’s still a nitrate. In fact, the Journal of Food Protection published a study that showed that “natural” hot dogs had as much as 10 times the amount of nitrites that regular hot dogs do, depending on the brand.
Oh, and the “meat” from these organic hot dogs? No different than regular ones. If your hot dog says that it’s “all beef”, it truly is made from all beef. They simply used nothing but cow carcasses rather than a mix of carcasses. You are still eating the same thing as other hot dogs.
If you want to eat hot dogs or other types of processed meats every now and then, look for “uncured” varieties that state they contain NO nitrates. Also, it does help to choose hot dogs that say they are 100 percent beef or 100 percent chicken as this is the only way you can be sure that your hot dog at least is made from one species and will not include any byproducts or cross contamination.
Another great idea is to avoid “hot dogs” and buy sausages from small, local farmers that doe their own butchering and processing. They generally use all natural ingredients and they can tell you exactly how it is made and exactly what ingredients they used.
Sources:
David Echegoyen
Nov 13, 2014 at 2:00 pm
If every American eats 50 hotdogs per year and eating one hotdog per year increases cancer rates by 20%, then we should all be dead from cancer. The whole article is made nonsensical because of these ridiculous figures.
Horseman
Nov 13, 2014 at 2:40 pm
You can buy hot dogs now that are free of nitrates and from humanely raised animals. So, what’s wrong with those hot dogs?
FollowTheMoneyTrailDotCom
Jan 11, 2015 at 4:13 pm
This entire website is fear mongering marketing for overpriced allegedly “safe” food… That has really high margins, duh.