Why Panera Bread Is Not as Healthy as You Think Posted on 09 May 2015 at 06:36 Many of the other banned ingredients are similarly mysterious and indecipherable: butylated hydroxyanisole, an antioxidant used to keep products like butter oil, sauces, chocolate products, and cereal from going bad; DATEM (diacetyl tartaric acid), an emulsifier used in bread, coffee, tea, whipped cream, dried pasta, and processed cheese; benzoyl peroxide, used as a bleaching agent in flour and dried whey products, and the list goes on. Some are more immediately recognizable as unhealthy ingredients, though it may surprise some consumers that Panera was using them in the first place, like high fructose corn syrup, commonly found in sugary drinks, and partially hydrogenated oils, which gives us artificial trans fats. The above-mentioned food additives are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) substances, but a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that a loophole in federal law allows food companies to declare their own artificially developed ingredients as “GRAS” and add them to food, without ever having to inform the FDA or get its approval for such use.