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Easter Basket Buzzkill: Your Candy Contains Beaver Buttholes
Photo by Krista Simmons/LAist
Here's yet another reason to buy local sweets this Easter season: Your candy-filled baskets might have a lot more in them than you bargained for. We're talking things like the anal glands of beavers and a petroleum product that's used to make wood varnish.
According to the health team over at HuffPo, even a modest Easter basket contains a minimum of 1,000 calories worth of sugar alone. But that should be the least of your concerns.
Cadbury cream eggs contain an artificial sweetener called castoreum, a derivative from the excretions of beaver anal glands that's often in "natural" flavoring for vanilla and raspberry flavored-products. Just because the dam-builders are on Nat Geo doesn't mean they're natural and should be in our bod. Geeze.
Sadly one of our favorite Springtime sweets, the Reese's Peanut Butter Egg, is also on the list.
"The preservative TBHQ (tertiary butyl hydroquinone) is a derivative of petroleum that's found in cosmetics, wood varnish and this candy. The FDA approved the drug at less than .02 percent of a food's fat content because higher doses can be toxic. In fact, 5 grams of the stuff can be deadly and 1 gram can cause reactions like nausea, vomiting and ringing in the ears."
Then there are the things that would thoroughly freak out vegans, like the gelatin that's made from collagen in the skin (and hooves and nails) of horses and pigs in Peeps, or the "shellac" or confectioner's glaze made from secretions of female lac bugs that coats jelly beans.
So you may want to be passing on that Peep cocktail after all, and head straight for the sustainably raised ham. Or the barf bag. We're still gagging after the thought of beaver buttholes.
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