I am so excited to be introducing this new project to our homeschool health studies this coming school year!  As we’ve become more and more aware about all of the additives in our food, I thought it would be a fun and enlightening project to spend this upcoming school year doing some research about food ingredients.  Even the kids are flabbergasted at times when they find out about a chemical additive in certain foods, so why not try to figure out what all of it actually means?!  So many of the ingredients are a bit of a mystery, and I don’t like not knowing what they are.  In fact, one of my gatekeeper methods for saying “yes” or “no” to a food that the kids are asking to purchase is challenging them to correctly pronounce all of the ingredients on the label.  If they are able to do that successfully, it’s usually a reasonable purchase.

For this project, we’ll collectively choose one well-known packaged food item to research each week.  We’ll go through the ingredient list, look up each item, and make notes of what they are, how they’re derived, side effects, etc.  I’ll blog/Instagram our findings each week, which should give us a nice list at the end of the school year.

My goal for this project is to bring more awareness and understanding about what’s actually in our food.  Nowadays, it feels like consumers need to be serious detectives to decipher what the ingredient labels truly mean.  So many additives, non-food items, and sugars lurk behind seemingly innocent name tags.

For example, did you know that the synthetic vanilla substitute, vanillin, is created in a lab using petrochemicals and byproducts of paper-making?  Yes, that’s right.  It’s essentially wood pulp and petroleum.  All because it’s cheaper to manufacture.  Say what?!?

I’m hoping that removing the veil of nutrition labels a bit will help our family to make smarter food choices in the long run.  Or at the very least, it’ll make us more aware of what we’re putting into our bodies.  I’d love for you to follow along on this project!  Let’s become smarter consumers together!