I have some AH-MAZE-ING news to share with you all today! As you may already know, my book The Food Babe Way is coming out in only 2 weeks. As a pre-order bonus in December, I sent out an advance copy of the chapter that I wrote about alcohol and all of the sickening ingredients that are permitted in beer, wine, and hard liquor – completely unlabeled. One of these ingredients is Caramel Coloring Class IV, a completely unnecessary ingredient that is linked to cancer in animal studies. I also mentioned this chemical in my 2013 investigation into beer, and in my 2014 petition to Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors asking them to publish all of their ingredients for the world to see (which has now gotten over 61K signatures).

This all began because there was Newcastle in my fridge…

The biggest reason that I decided to investigate the beer companies a couple years ago was that my husband likes to drink beer on occasion, and Newcastle was his favorite – although we had no clue what the ingredients were. This was the only thing in my fridge that I didn’t know what was in it and I thought this should change. After contacting Newcastle for the first time in 2013, they wouldn’t tell me all the ingredients, but I had this to say about them:

    “Carcinogenic Caramel Coloring

    Newcastle, a UK brand, confessed to using what I would consider one of the most controversial food additives. Toasted barley is usually what gives beer its golden or deep brown color, however in this case, Newcastle beer is also colored artificially with caramel color. This caramel coloring is manufactured by heating ammonia and sulfites under high pressure, which creating carcinogenic compounds. If beer companies were required by law to list the ingredients, Newcastle would likely have to have a cancer warning label under California law because it is a carcinogen proven to cause liver tumors, lung tumors, and thyroid tumors in rats and mice”.

This initial blog post went absolutely viral, with millions of page views. This breaking information that Newcastle uses caramel coloring spread like wildfire, and was getting a lot of attention.