Awareness Wednesdays. Nerds.

As you can tell most of my Awareness Wednesdays will be about gelatin.  So this week I decided to change it up and talk about another sneaky food ingredient.  This one isn't even a food, it's a coloring.  I am talking about carmine color.  Carmine color is a red pigment.  While most red foods usually use Red 40 as the coloring agent, a rare few use carmine, since it is more expensive.  What is carmine exactly? Carmine comes from the scales of the cochineal insect.  The scales are ground up and the deep red color is extracted.

Most foods that use carmine are candies since they usually need some form of red coloring to be added.  One candy brand that uses carmine is Wonka.  Most commonly it is used in Nerds.

photo credit

photo credit

The alternative?  Well most candies do not use Carmine since it is more expensive.  So it is most likely that your red candy is colored with Red 40.  The reason some companies prefer Carmine is because it is natural while the Red 40 dye is artificial.  Or you can just get the best for both worlds and opt for natural candies colored with fruit juices. Yum!

Will you be cutting out Carmine from your diet?

Bye from the veggie side!