BHA and BHT in Your Food – What are They?
[caption id="attachment_17284" align="alignright" width="440"] Ever feel like you're a Guinea Pig?[/caption] You enjoy good food when you can prepare it, but sometimes you must settle for store-bought. The box that comes in contains a huge list of ingredients in super small print. Most of them don’t sound like something you'd put in food! Among these are two items written as acronyms, only—BHA and BHT. BHA and BHT? What are they? BHA BHA stands for butylated hydroxyanisole. Now you know that’s not food. Butylated hydroxyanisole is actually a mixture of two chemicals. One is 2-tert-butyl-4-hydroxyanisole. The other is 3-tert-butyl-4-hydroxyanisole. Its structures are seen at left. It is an antioxidant. Yet, it is not so much an eating kind of antioxidant, but in the preservative sense. It may be either added to…