As a consumer, I believe I have the right to know exactly what I’m putting into my body. However, companies like Coca-Cola often list vague terms like “natural flavoring substances” instead of specifying every ingredient. How are these companies legally allowed to keep certain ingredients secret, and why isn’t full transparency required?
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It’s awful I agree I have to call and constantly ask if some things are in stuff that I’m allergic to.
Because rival companies will copy it and make the same product.
Proprietary information. We allowed corporations to lobby Congress and congress has no reason to listen to the people since we aren’t the ones paying them.
You know you have the option to just NOT drink coke or other products with ambiguous ingredients?
>As a consumer, I believe I have the right to know exactly what I’m putting into my body.
You are correct. But remember; Nobody is forcing you to consume their product. You do not have the right to require a product to be provided to you and also require their intellectual property.
Your right to know what is going into your body is yours alone. That means if somebody doesn’t tell you what their product is, then you have the right to not consume it.
What *exactly* does “specifying every ingredient” mean though?
If something contains “sugar”, is that enough? or do we need to know if it’s type of sugar: fructose, sucrose, lactose, galactose? because each of those is metabolized slightly differently our bodies.
What exactly is “full transparency”?
Do we need to know the exact molecular ingredients of “caramel color”? or is that term enough?
How much space would be required on each can of Coke to tell us “caramel color contains ammonium compounds, and may contain a chemical called 4-methylimidazole”?
There’s probably an MSDS sheet on Coca Cola, which would list ingredients, albeit not the ratios that make up the recipe.
>How are these companies legally allowed to keep certain ingredients secret
In the US, the FDA categorizes certain things as “natural flavors”. These certain things include:
> the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.
I believe the FDA considers these ingredients benign and not worth detailing in a list of ingredients. And because the FDA dictates what needs to be on the label (in the US), that’s how companies are able to legally do this.
YMMV if you are in a different country.
If it was mainly made of “natural flavoring substances”, they were required to disclose it. But when it’s a minor ingredient for flavour and it is not a known allergen, then there is no right to demand disclosure of that ingredient.
Shouldn’t you be more concerned about the well disclosed phosphoric acid then about those few secret drops of
cat piss?because you’re not living in a system built for consumers… you’re living in a system built for corporations. and in that system, “trade secrets” are more sacred than your right to know what you’re putting in your body.
companies like Coca-Cola hide behind these vague terms because the law lets them. the FDA allows it under the justification that revealing exact formulas would hurt competitiveness. so instead of transparency, you get marketing. instead of ingredients, you get “flavorings.” and it’s all perfectly legal… because the rules were written by the same people who sell the product.
and it’s not just Coke. it’s everywhere. perfumes, processed foods, cleaning products… half the stuff you interact with daily is a chemical cocktail you’re not allowed to fully identify. and when people start asking questions, they get told it’s too “complex” or “proprietary” to explain.
the real joke is that even when you do know the ingredients, you still don’t always know what they’re doing to you. long-term effects, interactions, low-dose accumulation… not studied. not funded. not profitable. so it gets ignored.
so yeah, you should have the right to know. but in this system, your right to know ends where corporate interest begins. and that line was drawn a long time ago.
Ingredients are a legal requirement but I guess it’s quite difficult to accurately define what counts as an ingredient and what doesn’t. There are laws around being clear about some things – allergens and genetically modified foods – but I’m not sure how you’d differentiate “natural flavouring substances” with whatever else you’d like them to be called in law.
It’s not “companies like Coca Cola” … it’s ALL companies. And it’s because they don’t want to give you the exact recipe for their product, it’s considered proprietary, or they reserve the right to make small changes based on availability, or they just don’t want the label to be ginormous.
You can go ahead and cook for yourself from scratch if you need to know every ingredient. No one is forcing you to drink a soda.
because profits matter more than people
Because that’s how the FDA says certain things can be listed on an ingredient label.
And what about those 13 herbs and spices KFC coats their chicken parts with?
Trade secrets.
let’s be honest, if you are drinking full sugar coke you probably don’t care about your health that much.
i used to be addicted to the stuff, that was a long time ago, i can’t even consider drinking any sugar loaded drink these days, just makes my teeth feel like they are rotting.
Because they probably don’t want to list the fact they still use the coca leaves for flavor.
They list every ingredient up to what is generally agreed as a reasonable level of detail. And more importantly to what the regulators say is acceptable level of detail. You really want the ingredients list to take up the length of your arm on every product or be printed so small toy can’t read it?
I mean he’ll, if you really push them to list EVERY ingredient they’ll just say “quarks. Lots of them” and be done with it. That would truly be listing every ingredient but would be no help to the average consumer. Its a fine balance, give enough detail to tell the consumer what they need to know, yet not so much detail as to make the packaging too cumbersome and the information too complex to be practical to the average consumer.
At the end of the day, if you don’t like the level of information provided don’t consume it.
They follow the rules as provided.
I just ate some packaged potato salad from my local grocery store. I looked at the ingredient list. Do you know what’s listed? Natural flavor.
The fact that they have to disclose ingredients at all used to be a very progressive thought, unpopular with businesses. FDA has determined some ingredients that they deem to be negligible health wise, and in an effort to appease businesses (who I think have a decent argument here), they allow those ingredients to be kept hidden to avoid trade secrets being leaked out. I don’t really have a issue with this, honestly, because if you knew everything that went into CocaCola flavoring wise, it would take less than a year for someone else to come along and make a literal identical product. Now, how those ingredients are determined to be inert or not is a process I’m not sure about and I would bet money has some greased palms somewhere in the process.
If you call Coca-Cola’s customer service and ask if a certain ingredient is in Coke, apparently they’ll tell you yes or no.
That’s how I found out there’s cinnamon in Coke, and now I only taste cinnamon in it.
You have the right to demand to know everything you’re putting into your body but you do NOT have an absolute right to consume Coca Cola. You can choose to consume it with the information provided or choose not to.
I feel the exact opposite. You don’t have a right to force others to do anything. You being a consumer doesn’t grant you that.
You have the right to not consume anything you don’t feel comfortable consuming.
There’s a lot of theories around the “secret” of Coca-Cola and stuff like KFC’s 7 herbs and spices. Some even believe its just marketing and not actually all that unique. Colonel Sanders had his wife start a diner in southern Kentucky that allegedly uses the same 7 herbs and spices in their fried chicken.
There are a lot of “home made” versions of Coca-Cola and KFC’s 7 herbs. The companies of course claim no one has cracked the code, or that the recipes out there are from outdated documents
It does? At least in eu, only the proportions can be unknown (even here are probably exceptions)
They do disclose all ingredients; just not their proportions.
Some things they have to list. Some things they don’t. You’re free to not purchase.
Coca Cola is still using some extract from coca leaf. Weird that they would still go to that much bother. Must be effective in some way.
If you are drinking Coke you don’t care.
How much effort should we put into splitting hairs about how bad each individual junk food item is? We know as much about pop as we do about smoking – it’s bad for you. Avoid.
If the ingredients are hidden, avoid.
You do have the right. You exersize that right by not drinking Coca Cola.
Natural Flavor Substance = Sweat dripping off a workers forehead into the vat of syrup. Best you don’t think about it.
You absolutely have the right to drink something else….
The answer to all of these questions are always the same:
Because large companies have more money than you.
That’s it.
It’s always, at the root, that. They convinced the rule makers with more resources than you have that it should be this way. Otherwise it would risk their “intellectual property” and doing business in america would be much less attractive. You can’t have doing business be less attractive. A business owner can’t be paid as much as just any schmuck on the street.
You might be under the misapprehension the government exists to protect you from companies, or exists to make things as fair as possible between entities that have a lot of resources and entities that have few, so everyone can be equally informed and have a good time — but that’s not true in practice.
If you’re concerned about “exactly what I’m putting into my body”, then you should be avoiding Coca-Cola.
I demand WingStop tell me every single seasoning they use on their fries! I have a right to know. Totally not to copy their recipe. /s
You do have the right to know what you’re putting in your body. And if Coke won’t tell you don’t put it in your body. See how simple this is?
It’s the coca plant that only they are allowed to use
Mostly because in this here capitalism, the big corporations have all the lobby power.
Us citizens have next to zero.
>I believe I have the right to know exactly what I’m putting into my body.
Is someone somewhere forcing you to drink Coke?
I’m in Atlanta and we don’t even do that here.
It falls under trade secrets. Although, I have read a couple of places where Coca Cola divulged the ingredients to a Rabbi who then proclaimed it to be completely Kosher ingredients. That was around the 40s or 50s IIRC.
Because the FDA says they don’t have to.
It’s actually extremely fucked up.
I was diagnosed with celiac last year, and because only wheat is listed as an allergy that must be disclosed gluten does not. So I have to memorize what ingredients like “natural flavors” or more obvious barley has gluten in it.
Medicine doesn’t even have to list allergies. I’ve learned to read labels but it truly sucks to try and figure it out to avoid vomiting for 8 hours .
Ingredients and recipes are two very different things
You do have the right to know what you are putting in your body. So stop drinking it. They aren’t forcing you to do it.
They do just not the exact amount.Major difference between them and Pepsi is they use oranges and Pepsi uses lemons,ingredients are basiclyy the same after that,just in different amounts.
I can answer this after working with big bottling companies. It’s to protect trademark secrets. They are in such small quantities that it is statistically irrelevant to list each ingredient so it is lumped together to avoid giving out the entire recipe.
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That’s how they keep the coca in the cola!
“Coca-Cola’s natural flavors, which are kept secret, are known to include ingredients like vanilla, cinnamon, and citrus oils, as well as trace amounts of other spices and essential oils. The specific blend is proprietary, but these are the core flavor components StrangeLove Beverage Co says.”
Why do you think you have that right? You have a right not to drink Coke, and Coke needs to ensure you won’t get poisoned, that’s about it. If you don’t like it, don’t drink it.
You don’t need to know what you put into your body because nobody ever does, it’s impossible, this is why we have society and a civilization. Even if you get a list you’d have to trust some other source as to what that mumbo jumbo of a word salad means, don’t pretend it would do anything for you to know it.
IIRC, to get qualified as kosher, Coca-Cola submitted a list of potential ingredients. Hundreds or thousands. The exact recipe wasn’t sent, but there was a chance one of those ingredients might be in it.
Because they’ve bought the people who make the rules. Regulatory Capture is the term
You do have a right to know. You can choose not to consume products that are not transparent.
Time to roll this out again. Here is the ‘sacred formula’ for Coca Cola:
Ingredients:
Citrate Caffein 1 oz.
Extract Vanilla 1 oz.
Flavouring 2.5 oz (detailed below)
F.E. Coco 4 oz
Citric Acid 3 oz
Lime Juice 1 quart
Sugar 30lbs
Water 2.5 Gallons
Caramel sufficient
Flavouring:
Oil Orange 80
Oil Lemon 120
Oil Nutmeg 40
Oil Cinnamon 40
Oil Coriander 20
Oil Neroli 40
Alcohol 1 quart (let stand for 24 hours)
These are all in US Imperial measurements and the flavouring units are in minims or mins. One min is literally one drop of liquid.
That flavouring section, combined with the Vanilla extract is what is collectively known at the company as 7X – the ultra secret 7 things which make the flavour – the alcohol is only used to extract the flavours and doesn’t end up in the final drink.
Your right ends at your personal responsibility to decide whether or not you have enough information about a product before ingesting it. I don’t know every ingredient in pop/cola/soda, but I know enough about it to decide I want none of it.
You have the right to decide what you eat. You don’t have the right to know what manufacturers put in their formulae. You can choose not to eat it if you don’t want to take the chance.
This is balanced with a requirement that manufacturers disclose regulated ingredients, so consumers aren’t risking exposure to the most hazardous substances.
This balance won’t meet everyone’s approval.
You can still know what you’re putting into your body. Just don’t drink coke if you don’t want to. They are not infringing on that “right”.
In my country they list all ingredients but I guess they change them to comply to each country’s regulations.
I think it’s because the releasing of their recipe would be considered giving away of Trade secrets which if disclosed would harm the company.
In Europe they are.
Coca leaf medical waste.
No, as recipes are proprietary.
As with most anything else, follow the money. Companies like coke want to keep their secret formula – in the past it was probably because no one would be able to reverse engineer their recipe and it would protect them from clones. These days, as others said, its probably more for the mystique because someone could probably reverse engineer it close enough that it wouldn’t make a difference.
Regardless, the FDA’s #1 priority isn’t really protecting you and me. Its finding the right balance between maintaining credibility with the public and promoting business interests, most of which lobby and throw their money around, if not directly at the FDA, then at the FDA’s political bosses.
Don’t drink / eat things whose ingredients you don’t know. Problem solved.
It’s mostly high fructose corn syrup and flavor. You don’t need to know all the ingredients to know it’s not healthy so don’t drink it.
You are within your right to not consume that product.
That’s why.
I think it should be required but also it’s better to just give up soda altogether.
Off topic but related. Did you know someone tried to steal and sell the recipe? Pepsi turned them in.
I feel like the people who post this type of thing are the ones who think they know better than legitimate scientists
In the EU they have to provide a full list of ingredients – which is why for many products they are noticeably different in Europe. Some the ingredients that are okay in the US are just banned, others just do not look good and put consumers off.