These Are All The Foods That Share An Ingredient With Sunscreen

Sunscreen isn’t a particularly appetizing soup. Despite the insistence of some brands on making theirs smell like some sort of robot banana, nobody’s cracked open a bottle of SPF 50 and heard their stomach growl. Also, unlike other things that we assume taste bad, unless you apply it with the precision of a NASA satellite launch, you probably do know for a fact it’s disgusting. Unless you want a ring of fire around your mouth that looks like you French-kissed a hot pipe, you’re going to get some in your mouth at some point, and understandably sputter.

It would seem, based on that criteria, that food would do its best to share as few ingredients as possible with sunscreen. There’s no need, what with the inside of your body, barring a much bigger problem, being famously dark. Yet, there is one ingredient in sunscreen that rears its head in a shocking amount of common foods: titanium dioxide. 

Before you point fingers, let’s establish that this isn’t just a base misunderstanding of how chemistry works, like one of those pranks where you scare people by telling them they're ingesting dihydrogen monoxide. Titanium dioxide is questionable enough in terms of food safety to have been banned altogether in the EU. Even worse, it’s not something helpful or necessary, like an effective preservative. It’s just a colorant that gives food a delightfully bright white tinge. As such, it’s referred to plainly as a “food whitener,” which feels plucked straight from cyberpunk dystopia.

Of course, as you might guess, here in the U.S., they couldn’t give half a shit about how much titanium we’re ingesting. While Petco has banned it in pet food, the FDA gives it a big thumbs-up on the human side. In fact, it’s so prevalent in what we put in our stomachs that I will not, as promised in the title, list all the foods it appears in, mainly because nobody’s making it through a listicle with more than 3,000 entries.

But here at least is a starting point for all the ways you're chugging titanium…