An American kitchen will always have a squeeze bottle of ketchup stored in their refrigerators. You can never go wrong with ketchup and even kids love it, especially the Heinz brand. You can use it on your hamburgers, hotdogs, and even other American staples. However, according to health professionals, using too much ketchup can be dangerous to your health. This may be the most common condiment all over the world but everyone should be aware of the bad things that doctors are warning us about.

Ronald Reagan may have pushed ketchup to be categorized as a vegetable, it cannot be denied that this contains harmful chemicals that can negatively affect your health. You might think that it’s made purely of tomatoes and this is the only ingredient that you can find on a bottle of ketchup. If you are one of those who believe this, think again! Heinz, for example, does not use fresh tomatoes, but instead, they use tomato concentrate which is a dried version of red tomatoes where water needs to be added during the process.

After the tomato concentrate, the manufacturer will then add distilled vinegar, two kinds of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup, and the regular corn syrup. They also add salt which increases the possibility of high blood pressure, spices, onion powder, and also natural flavoring. Heinz ketchup and other leading brands use “double” of the sugar to make it more addictive and appealing especially to younger children. However, nobody called them out on this because it is listed the ingredients not as a “sugar” but as “corn syrup” which are basically fancy names for sugar.

According to Mr. Eastcoastman, a 1.3-liter bottle of Heinz ketchup contains 33 tablespoons of sugar. This means that it has more than 2 cups of sugar in it! An average serving of ketchup has two teaspoons of sugar. In addition to that, “natural flavorings and spices” might sound appealing to you but in reality, no one really knows what they are, except for the manufacturer that we trust an patronize to provide us with a product that should be good for our health.

Hidden Ketchup Secret of Most Restaurants

Many of us are tired after a long day at work and we usually don’t have the time to cook anymore. The easiest option is to drop by a restaurant before heading home for a quick dinner! However, you don’t really know what’s lurking behind those kitchen doors as soon as the server sent your order to be prepared in the kitchen.

One of the most disgusting practices of unsanitary restaurants is combining ketchup. As a restaurant, you expect that everything is fresh even with their ketchup. However, some restaurants do not throw away the leftover ketchup and clean the bottles. Instead, they refill them and just combine all of the leftover ketchup in a single bottle and serve it the next day. Aside from microwaving food and serving low standard meals, recycling ketchup is one of the proven bad practices of some restaurants that you should know of.

When it comes to your health, it is important that you know how to take good care of your body to avoid health complications in the future. Ketchup might already be part of our lives and would be difficult to stay away from, but the best idea is to use it in moderation. Think about the ingredients that were used to make a bottle of your Heinz ketchup and you be the judge.