Pasta... peanut butter... crackers... canned tomatoes... what do they all have in common?

Under FDA regulations, they are all permitted to contain a certain amount of insects, insect parts, or rodent parts. As long as the "ick" factor doesn't cross the FDA's threshold, a few bugs in your food have been deemed totally fine.

Now, from a safety standpoint, these unwanted additives in your food won't hurt you. But it's still an unsavory thought that every time you break open your favorite box of cookies, you're also snacking on some uninvited guests.

Fortunately, I can point to a couple of easy fixes to the "bugs in your food" problem. Even better, these changes will also improve your diet and that will mean better health for you and your family.

5 Bugs That Are Part of Your Diet

Food processing plants just don't have the capacity to clean away all the bugs from the foods they receive. They also cannot guarantee that bugs won't get in the processing line and contaminate the food.

The bad news is that means all processed foods contain bugs. There's just no way around it.

The good news is that the bugs are cooked and processed right along with the actual food product, so you can't see them. The parts are just too small.

To give you an idea of what you're dealing with:

• Frozen veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach routinely contain aphids.
• Mites regularly infiltrate grains like flour and rice.
• Canned foods often contain maggots – mushrooms are the worst offender. The FDA allows 100 maggots for every 100 grams of canned mushrooms.
• Fruit juice contains an average of five fruit flies per serving.
• Frozen or canned spinach usually has caterpillar larvae in it.

All right… I've probably sufficiently grossed you out. So let's move on to three ways you can avoid most of the insects that are sneaking into your food.

Three Ways to Bug-Proof Your Diet

I'll emphasize again that these insects don't present a health risk, but if you'd rather enjoy your food bug-free, you'll also enjoy a healthier diet because you'll eat fewer processed foods and refined grains.

Step One: Ditch the Processed Foods

By far, most of the bugs in your diet come from processed foods. At home, when you wash a small batch of fresh fruits or vegetables for a meal, it's easy to see you've rinsed away all the bugs. Big food-processing companies clean food on a massive scale. It's impossible for them to see that they washed away every last bug.

Anything that's canned, boxed, frozen, or otherwise packaged is going to contain insect parts. If you buy fresh fruits and vegetables instead of the canned options and avoid highly processed foods like packaged cookies and crackers altogether, you'll go a long way to minimizing your unwanted bug intake.

lee@email.americanlanternalerts.com