Consider this your warning: after reading the following information, you may not want to eat again. Ever.

If you've ever wondered what ambiguous terms such as "natural flavor" on the side of food labels mean, you aren't the first to do so and you won't be the last. There's a very good reason food manufacturers don't proclaim this information from mountain tops. Those odd-sounding chemicals you glance at aren't nearly as innocuous as these companies would have you believe. Don't believe it? Read on for the five additives you've likely already ingested today, or at the very least, this week.

Shellac
Jelly beans are colorful and shiny which, besides their sugary taste, make them appealing to kids and candy-loving adults. Candy producers don't hire a team of dedicated professionals to shine each of the beans though. Instead they use shellac, the same products that shines the surfaces of furniture and guitars. That's not the most disturbing information about this additive. Shellac is made  from the sticky excretion created by Kerria Lacca insects (found in Thailand). The bugs use the excretion to stick on trees. Manufacturers aren't too concerned with sorting the bugs away from their residue either. Instead they scrape trees - bugs, excretion and all - and make shellac out of the mixture.

Staying away from candy won't help you avoid this nasty substance either - your apple a day that keeps the doctor away is coated in the stuff, as is the Advil you took for your last headache.

Bone Char
To make sugar from sugar cane a pure, appealing white, some companies use bone char. The easy definition of bone char is cow bones bleached in the sun, used by the gelatin industry and then passed along to sugar producers, who use it to filter sugar.

Carmine
Before you gorge on a handful of M&Ms, you may want to consider setting aside the red ones. Actually, maybe "setting aside" is putting it mildly; burning and exorcising with holy water might be more effective. Carmine is known as a host of different names on labels - Crimson Lake, Cochineal, Natural Red 4, C.I. 75470 and E120. This is mainly because it sounds a lot more appetizing than "the crushed abdomen of cochineal insects." The fertilized egg-filled stomach is separated from the rest of the beetle's body, ground up and cooked to extract that vibrant red hue that will soon be coating those aforementioned M&Ms.

Natural Flavor
Ah, if it's natural, it has to be good for you, right? Right? Not as much as some people want you to believe. Natural flavor is vague enough that food producers can basically call it the miscellaneous category of food additives. If something is too disgusting to actually put on a label (animal feces for example), but is still safe for consumption, producers file it under "natural flavor." Beef lard used in McDonald's fries? Yes, that's natural flavor at work for you.

Bacteriophages
The FDA approved the use of six bacteriophages to fight listeria microbes found on lunch meat, sausages and hot dogs (it's called 'mystery meat' for a good reason). Bacteriophages at their simplest definition are viruses. These viruses are used to kill the microbes that are blames for hundreds of deaths each year. There's an easy way to explain why this is so disturbing:

The battlefield on which this virus vs. microbe war plays out is the bologna that you used this morning to prepare your afternoon lunch. Around the same time the hollow headed bacteriophages were storming the beach at listeria, you were lifting that bologna sandwich to your mouth. Just as the phages were thrusting their hollow, viral DNA-filled tails into the host cells (also living on your sandwich), you were jamming the whole nasty battle right down your oblivious gullet.

Now that that's over, who's ready for some breakfast?

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