A Fourth of July Unpleasant Surprise

This Fourth of July holiday, collectively Americans will eat some 150 million hot dogs, according to industry analysts. U.S. supermarkets alone sold more than $1.6 billion worth of hot dogs last year. That’s a lot of beef—and pork, and turkey, and chicken. Beef, pork, turkey, and chicken, surprsingly, are all components in making your average Fourth of July hotdog.  As of last year, hotdogs made by industry Oscar Mayer got knocked out of first place for most-consumed dogs by Sara Lee’s Ball Park brand; however nobody truly knows what goes inside these hotdogs.

Ball Park Hotdogs:
Turkey is produced by forcing bones, with attached edible tissue, through a sive or similar device under high pressure.

Pork is produced by using any "meat"  that can be taken off the bone by "advanced meat recovery (AMM) machinery" which separates the edible meat from the inedible without breaking the bone.

Water say that hot dogs must be less than 10 percent water under Ball Park Franks.

Corn syrup is often used to add texture and sweetness, but has many dangerous health risks when served at high amounts.

Each of these hot dogs contain about 20 percent (480 milligrams) of the recommended daily allotment of salt.

Potassium lactate is a common meat preservative because of its properties as an antimicrobial which means that it is capable of killing off harmful bacteria, but is not good for your liver.

Sodium phosphates is any of three sodium salt of phosphoric acids that can be used as a food preservative or to add texture.

Flavorings are a very repulsive idea. Most combinations of flavoring agents are okay to just be listed as "flavor" rather spelled out individually, so the packaging doesn’t have to tell you what the artificial flavor is really made up of.

Beef stock is usually made by boiling water with pieces of muscle, bones, joints, connective tissue and other parts of the carcass.

Sodium diacetat helps to fight fungus and bacterial growth and is often used as an artificial flavor for salt and vinegar chips; however, it is also what they use to make hand warmers warm.

Sodium erythorbate helps keep meat-based products pink, even when they really shouldn’t be or are not pink.. Some people report side effects, including dizziness, gastrointestinal issues, headaches and, if consumed in large quantities, kidney stones..

Sodium nitrate is a preservative that helps meats retain their color; unfortunately, animal studies have linked sodium nitrates to an increased risk of cancer. It’s also frequently found in fertilizers and fireworks!

Oscar Mayer Classics have a similar list of ingredients which consists of: mechanically separated turkey, mechanically separated chicken, pork, water, salt, ground mustard seed, sodium lactate, corn syrup, dextrose, sodium phosphates, sodium diacetate, sodium acorbate, sodium nitrate, and flavor. The two top companies, Oscar Mayer and Sara Lee Ball Park Brand now offer at least 34 hot dog varieties between them, ranging from Ball Park’s Cheese Franks to Oscar Mayer’s XXL Premium Beef Franks, all made with almost no real, healthy meat.

 http://www.scientificamerican.com/report.cfm?id=barbecue-food-science