Why American Food is Banned in Europe | Irish Girl Reacts

追加: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]So today we're going to check out why American food is banned in Europe. I am very interested in this right now because I just had my lovely friend Derva visit in a maxi dress. Look at that.

[00:00:18]>> It doesn't even You don't even make it look like it's hurting you or anything.

[00:00:21]>> I'm not a real person.

[00:00:24]>> Derva is like very educated about nutrition and I am not.

[00:00:28]>> She's not kidding. I'm not.

[00:00:30]>> I'm very much girl dinner, if you know what I mean by that. The video we're reacting to comes from a channel called Plain Capital. So, let's check this out.

[00:00:40]>> McDonald's operates in 118 countries. In the UK, their burger bun has about a dozen ingredients, but in the US, the same bun has over 25. And up until 2016, one of those ingredients was a dough conditioner. That's also >> a decarbonomide.

[00:00:58]AIC carbonomide. Oh yes, I eat that every day. Honestly, I think sometimes in these sorts of videos, not saying this one particularly, but when they break down like stuff that's in things, it can be a bit too clinical. Like they'll be like, "Oh, this thing that goes in concrete you eat." And it's like, well, yes, if you make that extreme comparison, but you don't have to, you know, it might be also ingestable.

[00:01:23]>> Used to manufacture yoga mats and shoes.

[00:01:25]And the CEO of McDonald's just went viral recently eating one of these burgers on camera calling >> this video was very funny. It looked like the first time he had ever eaten a burger and I must say he did react to the uh verality of it in good humor. So that was nice. Um but yeah, it was funny >> at the product the entire time. Not the burger, not the food, the product. And honestly, that might be the most accurate description of American food right now because there are over 3,000 additives approved in the US that are restricted or banned in other developed countries. And every single one of them got there through a regulatory loophole that was created in 1958 and hasn't been meaningfully updated since. So the question isn't whether these companies can make food without these chemicals.

[00:02:14]They make cleaner versions of the same products for every other country they sell yet. The question is why they choose not to do it here >> cleaner.

[00:02:25]>> To understand how this works, let's forget about the history for a second and just follow a product. Let's say a food company develops a brand new chemical, never been tested, never been reviewed, and they want it in a box of cereal by next month.

[00:02:38]>> I know this has nothing to do with the video, but that man has lovely skin.

[00:02:41]Okay, >> let's call it Compound X. Here's what happens. The company would hire a panel of scientists to review the safety data on Compound X. Many of these scientists have financial ties to the company paying them and every single time they reach the same conclusion. Compound X is generally recognized as safe or GR.

[00:03:02]That GR label is so important because it's basically a golden ticket. Any ingredient that gets classified as GRA is completely exempt from the FDA's normal approval process. No safety review, no testing requirements, no waiting period. It skips the entire line.

[00:03:19]>> What we have seen over time is that companies are creating new ingredients, having their own scientists or hiring outside scientists to make their own determinations that an ingredient is safe. And >> okay, this is indicative of a larger problem. um which is like testing and statistics. And without getting too serious here, um you can make data say anything you want to if you skew it in the right direction in my personal opinion. Um you know, it's all a matter of perspective and spin.

[00:03:54]>> And then once they self-declare that their ingredient is safe, they don't have to go through that pre-market process. The FDA created this designation in 1958, and it was originally meant to cover things like salt, vinegar, and baking soda, stuff nobody needed to test because humans had been eating it for centuries. But by the 1990s, the FDA had a problem. You see, as food became more and more industrialized, hundreds of companies were submitting applications to try to get that golden ticket for the new ingredients they were using. and the agency didn't have the budget or the staff to review them all. The backlog was so long that it would take years to clear. So, in 1997, under pressure from the Clinton's administration's push to cut costs and speed up federal agencies, the FDA made a decision that changed everything.

[00:04:43]>> There was an announcement today by the Food and Drug Administration. Patina Gregory has the story.

[00:04:48]>> Instead of requiring companies to submit their safety data for review, they made the whole process voluntary. That means the company doesn't have to submit its determination to the FDA. It doesn't have to share the safety data.

[00:05:01]>> That's insane. Like that is insane. They could be putting and are probably and I'm not just talking about America. Uh like very addictive things in our food.

[00:05:11]Um I watched a video a wonderful video by I think the creator is called Kiara Doertr. Uh, and she was talking about Doritos and um how every single decel to of your crunch is like manufactured like so the sound makes them addictive and how they dissolve on your tongue and stuff and it just makes you want more and more more without ever satiating you. This does not surprise me. I think that we live in a world though where it's like how do we trust anything? We can't. We can't trust anything. Always question everything. Am I a real human?

[00:05:45]Probably not. It doesn't even have to tell the FDA that Compound X exists. It can just start putting it in food and shipping it to stores. Think about that for a second. That's like a student grading their own exam and the teacher saying, "You don't even have to show me the test. I'll just take your word for it." And this isn't a hypothetical edge case.

[00:06:05]According to a 2022 analysis, companies have used the system to self-approve nearly 99% of new food chemicals since the year 2000.

[00:06:16]The Pew Research Center estimated in 2013 that roughly 1,000 ingredients had entered the food supply through this pathway without the FDA even knowing about them. The FDA's own former deputy commissioner for food admitted in 2014 that we simply do not have the information to vouch for the safety of many of these chemicals. So the system that was designed in 1958 to exempt salt and vinegar from paperwork is now the primary pathway that the entire food industry uses to put new chemicals into your food without any oversight. And this is where you start to see why the same food tastes different depending on which country you buy it in. This is so true. Food tastes so different depending on what country you're in. Like something that's an American brand in Europe tastes completely different in Europe and vice versa. By the way, if you're feeling really afraid watching this video, don't worry about it. At the end of the day, to the people trying to sell sell sell you stuff. They just want you to buy bye bye. They don't care if you drop dead. Now, could you become a very anxious, stressed out person listening to this, yes. Will it get you anywhere? No. You could grow all the food in your own garden and raise chickens and cows. That's probably the only way you're going to be safe.

[00:07:29]Otherwise, you got to stick your head in the clouds a little bit. That's just my advice. Turn off the news. We're all going to die.

[00:07:40]>> Take a mac and cheese from Craft for example. For decades, the US version got its color from something called yellow five or six.

[00:07:49]>> They are synthetic dyes derived from petroleum. But the UK version used something way healthier. They use paprika extract and beta carotene which is an orange pigment naturally found in carrots.

[00:08:00]>> I have been taking beta carotene to try and make myself less blue. Is it working?

[00:08:07]Not really. This is two layers of fake tan. I am very pale.

[00:08:11]>> Not because craft can't make it without the artificial dyes in the UK. It's because in Europe, yellow five and yellow six dyes requires a mandatory warning label that reads may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children. Rather than putting a warning on the box, craft just formulated for the European market. But in the US, no warning is required. So the artificial version stays on the shelf. Another good example is the popular drink Mountain Dew. It contains brminated vegetable oil in America. a pretty bad oil for your heart, but not in Europe or Japan because they're banned in those countries. Bread products across dozens of American brands contain potassium bromeate, a dose strengthener banned in Canada, the UK, the EU, China, and Brazil because research linked it to kidney damage and cancer in animal studies. California banned it in 2023, but at the federal level, it's still approved, which means a chemical that most of the developed world considers unsafe is sitting in the bread aisle of grocery stores in 46 out of 50 American states. None of these companies, >> look, petition people if you want to.

[00:09:25]Great. You should like you should. You should. And that is the right thing to do. Um, but also you could die of lung cancer having never smoked a cigarette a day in your life. So, you know, >> are being forced to use these ingredients. They're making a financial calculation that using cheaper inputs in the American market is worth it because the regulatory system doesn't penalize them for doing so. The US operates on an innocent until proven guilty standard where an ingredient is assumed safe until enough evidence accumulates over years or decades to prove it's harmful.

[00:10:02]Europe uses the precautionary principle which flips the logic. If there is uncertainty, a new ingredient doesn't get approved until the manufacturer can scientifically prove it's safe. And >> okay, on paper, this all sounds great.

[00:10:15]Yay, Europe. But also, they're screwing us, too. The governments, oh, they're going to hate this video. Oh, they're not going to watch it. They're They're screwing us all. They don't have our best interests. They just want to make us bye bye bye. We are buying robots.

[00:10:30]Consumer. They don't care about us. So, they're they're saying you're you're okay. Yay. Europe legislation in this area seems to be better on the surface.

[00:10:40]They're screwing us in other ways. Don't be fooled. And there's nothing you can do about it. There's nothing. Well, I mean, you you might be a person who's a better person than me who believes you can change things. I don't believe I can change anything, but I do make funny videos on the internet. So, enjoy.

[00:10:56]>> Both sides benefit from keeping it the way it is. For the FDA, reviewing every new additives would take years per ingredient and require a budget that they don't have. For the food companies, it's even simpler. Why spend millions on independent safety testing and wait two years for FDA approval when you can pay a fraction of that to certify food safety yourself? Back in 2010, when one company was questioned by the FDA about the safety of an ingredient called a Theo Brahmen, they simply withdrew their voluntary notification, hired an independent contractor to declare it safe anyway, and kept using it. The FDA had no mechanism to stop them. the agency can't afford to enforce stricter rules and the industry has no financial reason to follow them. That's how a loophole stays open for almost seven decades. The GS loophole is basically a multi-billion dollar subsidy for whoever can exploit it most creatively and the company's exploiting it the best part.

[00:11:52]>> Money. Say it with me.

[00:11:57]Money money.

[00:12:01]Just try and be your happiest life you can live. That That's what I suggest. Do what makes you happy. Try not to hurt other people.

[00:12:11]We're all going to die eventually.

[00:12:14]Hopefully not immediately, but we are.

[00:12:16]It's true.

[00:12:16]>> The ones you've never heard of.

[00:12:22]Go to your kitchen right now and pick up the first packaged food you see. Could be a bag of Doritos, a can of Coca-Cola, a cup of yogurt, or a box of Cheerio.

[00:12:31]Flip it over and look at the ingredient list. Somewhere on there, you are almost guaranteed to see two words: natural flavors. That phrase is doing a lot of work because in most cases, the formulation behind those two words wasn't created by the brand on the front of the box. There are three major firms that engineer the flavors in almost everything Americans eat. The food brands hire them the way a restaurant hires a chef. Except these chefs serve 300 million people and nobody knows their name. The biggest is Swiss company called Jividon. The second is an American company called IFFF which stands for international flavors and fragrances. And the third is another Swiss firm called a Fermanich. Together they control over 55% of a market worth over $40 billion a year. Juvenile alone holds roughly a quarter of the global markets and offers over 2,200 different strawberry flavors in its category, not 20.

[00:13:27]>> I don't eat strawberries because they are far too fluffy.

[00:13:32]I don't like the pips, but also I thought strawberries just came in strawberry flavor, but apparently I'm wrong. to not 220, over 2,200 variations of a single fruit flavor.

[00:13:47]Each one optimized for a different product and a different consumer base.

[00:13:51]IFFF purchases roughly 8,500 raw materials from 2,300 suppliers worldwide, blending them into proprietary compounds that get licensed to the brands you see on the shelf. And every single one of those formulations is illegally classified as a trade secret. So, when you read natural flavors on the label, you're looking at a formula that could contain dozens of individual chemical compounds, solvents, and preservatives, none of which have been disclosed because trade secret law overrides ingredient transparency laws in the US. And here's why the secrecy matters so much to them. These formulations aren't just about making food taste good. They are engineered to make you eat more.

[00:14:31]>> Yep, they are. This is true.

[00:14:35]Food scientists call it the bliss point.

[00:14:38]The precise combination of sugar, salt, and fat that triggers the strongest craving response without ever making you feel fully satisfied. It's why you can eat entire bag of chips without feeling full, the same way you would after a home-cooked meal.

[00:14:52]>> Your body isn't registering food the same way because the formulation was specifically designed to bypass your satiety signal. The part of your brain that's supposed to tell you, "Okay, you're full. Stop eating." And the bliss point isn't a general target. It's calculated down to the milligram for each individual product. Researchers have found that there is a specific concentration of sugar where the craving response peaks. And if you go even slightly above that concentration, the product starts to taste too sweet and people would eat less of it. So the flavor company aren't just making food tastes good. They're finding the exact mathematical ceiling of how much pleasure your brain can process before it tells you to stop. And then they're parking the formula right below that line. That's why you reach the bottom of the bag and think, "I didn't even realize I was still eating." That was the design working as intended. And the reason these companies guard these calculations so aggressively is because getting the bliss point right on a single product can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.

[00:15:51]Ultrarocessed foods built on these formulations now make up nearly 60% of the average American adults diet. And the number has been climbing up for decades. And studies are now linking high ultrarocessed food consumption to increased rates of obesity, type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive decline. But the FDA has no regulatory category for ultra process.

[00:16:14]This means the fastest growing segment of the American diet exists in a complete regulatory blind spot. But the good news is that the FDA was directed in 2025 to explore closing the GRA self-affirmation loophole. But the rulemaking usually takes years and food industry will lobby against any changes that increase their costs and thousands of FDA scientists were fired in April 2025 due to cost cutting measures. Means the agency now has even fewer resources to enforce the rules it already has. If you want to protect yourself today, here's something you can do the next time you're at the grocery store. Before you put something in your cart, flip it over and count ingredients. If the list has more than five ingredients you can't pronounce or wouldn't find in home kitchen, just put it back. If natural flavors appear in the first five ingredients, the product is more engineered than you think. And if you really want to know whether what you're buying is safe, check if the same product exists in the European version.

[00:17:12]If the European label is shorter, you know that the American version contains things that at least one developed countries decided weren't worth the risk.

[00:17:21]>> Look, he's right. He's right. He's totally right. Also, he has a beautiful tone to his voice. He's right. Whether you do that is up to you.

[00:17:29]>> I'm curious to know what you think about ultrarocessed food. And let me know your thoughts in the comments. If you enjoyed this deep dive on food, here's another video where I dive even deeper on a different topic.

[00:17:40]>> I want to have McDonald's. Well, let me know below in comments what you thought of that. I definitely found a lot of it very enlightening. Will I be thinking about what I consume more?

[00:17:50]No, I'm really lazy. I'll probably just have a sandwich for dinner. Shout out today to a couple of patrons. Our first lovely shout out today comes from Brian Ediger, and he wants to shout out all of our pets. Whether they're fur or feathers, scales, or skin, they are all a bit of calm in our chaotic world. How right you are, Brian. Thank you so much.

[00:18:07]Our second shout out comes from Jason Moira, and he wants to shout out all of the families who've lost loved ones in conflict. We honor the individuals and the heavy price their families have paid, and we remember those left behind.

[00:18:18]Peace to you all. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you so much, guys. That's it for Daisy on the other side.