Cold drinks are commonly "flavored", what are these spices? Are synthetic flavors bad for you?

What is spice?

Scents in foods such as soda and ice cream are just a few of the applications of spices. Spices are the raw materials of incense, and they can provide aroma or fragrance, which can be sensed by our olfactory and odoriferous organs. Spices can be divided into two categories, one is natural spices, one is synthetic spices.

Natural spices have a long history. In ancient times, there was a legend of "Shennong tasting 100 grasses". Shen Nong not only discovered some raw materials for food and medicine, but also some fragrant substances, namely spices. Of course, our earliest uses are natural fragrances, which are fragrances extracted from plant and animal materials. For example, riley extract can be extracted from jasmine flowers, and musk can be extracted from the mature male body sachets of musk deer.

A variety of common natural flavors

The most widely used synthetic flavors are only 150 years old. Through their own master of science and technology, the use of different raw materials to imitate natural flavors, through chemical or biological synthesis of the way to prepare or create a "single body" flavor is synthetic flavor, also known as artificial flavor.

When it comes to synthetic flavors, many people may think that synthetic flavors do not have the same flavor as natural flavors, but this problem does not exist. Most of the earliest flavors were not synthetic, but were made from natural flavors by isolating the main ingredients. For example, peppermint oil from peppermint, the main ingredient of peppermint oil is menthol, also menthol, we can crystallize the menthol from the natural peppermint oil, so the separated mint is called single spice. Originally we classified single pear as artificial, but now people tend to consider single pear as natural.

Synthetic fragrances are made entirely organically. But most synthetic flavors come from the flavor components of natural flavors, which have exactly the same strength as chemicals of the same structure in natural flavors.

Compared with natural flavors, synthetic flavors are more pure and convenient for perfumers to use. At the same time, natural spices also have unique advantages. Because there are at least hundreds or even thousands of ingredients or substances in each natural flavor, the aroma or fragrance of natural flavor is usually thick and soft, which can complement each other well with synthetic flavor. So, natural flavors are not necessarily better than synthetic flavors.

Are synthetic flavors bad for you?

Synthetic flavors are often feared to be less safe than natural flavors because they are chemically synthesized. In fact, both natural and synthetic fragrances must be guaranteed to be safe for humans before they can be approved for use, after a series of scientific studies. Specific performance in two aspects, one is daily spices, such as perfume, cosmetics, must have no irritation to the human skin; Second, edible spices can not cause acute, sub-acute or long-term harm to human health after entering the human body.

However, in daily use, we do not directly use natural spices or synthetic spices, the direct use of spices is very rare, because the fragrance or aroma of a single spice often does not make us feel particularly satisfied, except for some very special spices, there may be such a situation. One of the spices that is allowed to be used alone in our country is vanillin, also known as vanilla extract, which is mainly allowed to be used in large infant formula milk powder, but no essence is allowed to be used.

This is not for safety reasons, but mainly to make infant formula taste good. Otherwise, infants may not like breast milk, or older children may prefer formula and not eat other foods.

Most of the time we use is called flavor, strictly according to the logical relationship, should be called flavor, because flavor is the raw material of flavor, then flavor is made up of a variety of spices, including natural, synthetic, as well as the fragrance created by the art of the perfumer is a very pleasant mixture.

So the essence must be a mixture, some spices can be a single, can also be mixed. While natural flavors are mostly compounds, synthetic flavors are usually a single compound. In fact, general consumers rarely use fragrance fragrance directly, what we can feel is some products with fragrance, such as perfume, perfume is the liquor of essence with water solution, like Chanel no.5, CD and so on.

We are in daily contact with spices and spices for food. Food spices belong to the category of food additives. There are 22 kinds of food additives in our country, one of which is called food spice. Although food flavor is only one of the 22 categories, but its varieties account for the vast majority of the 22 categories of food additives in China, currently there are more than 2300 kinds. Among them, there are about 1,900 kinds of spices used in food, so sometimes people worry about food additives, also feel the worry about spices now. Of course, we do not have to worry about the safety of food additives, all of our country approved the use of risk assessment, proved to be safe, this point we can rest assured.

What steps do you need to go through after spices are developed?

It usually takes 1-2 years for a new spice to be developed and put into use, and the fastest time is half a year. After a new spice is developed, the first step is to conduct a risk assessment to prove that it is not harmful to human health. Then the spices should be sent to the flavoring division to deploy the essence, and then made into flavoring products (such as food, cosmetics, etc.). The flavoring products can be evaluated by consumers in the way of trial whether they can finally be recognized by consumers. After going through the whole process, new spices will be put into the market.