What's in Movie Theater Popcorn?

The salty, buttery popcorn sold in movie theaters is nigh irresistible, but there's zero butter involved. Learn what it's made of in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
I'm lorn vogel Bomb, and it's time we talked about
movie theater popcorn. That's salty siren of the cinema. You
come without nutrition labels and sizes that defy sensibility. We
consume you in the dark. You're inadvertently vegan and gluten free,
but that still doesn't mean you're good for us. So

(00:24):
what the heck are you made of? Anyway? Meet movie
theater popcorns. Two main ingredients after popcorn, of course, flavor
call and butter flavored topping. Let's break those down. Flavor
Call is a proprietary seasoned powder that goes on the
corn before it's popped. It contains only four ingredients, superfine salt,

(00:45):
artificial flavor, and two synthetic yellow dyes that helped give
the popcorn it's violently yellow buttery ish color. Butter can
naturally be yellow because of a pigment and vitamin called
beta carotene that's found in the fresh grass that dairy
cows are sub times fed, or butter can be dyed
that color when cows are fat other things. Flavor Call

(01:06):
has zero calories and zero fat carbs and protein, but
being mostly salt, it packs a wallop in the sodium department.
One teaspoon contains a hundred and sixteen percent of your
recommended daily intake of sodium based on the average two
thousand calorie per day diet, and depending on the recipe
and the machine being used, you'd get about a third
of a teaspoon in a small popcorn, So heads up

(01:29):
if you're monitoring your sodium consumption. Next up that butter
flavored topping, which is what gets squirted out in pumps
if you ask for it. Warning betrayal alert. It doesn't
have any butter in it at all. What it does
contain is partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a trans
fat that falls into the category of bad fat. These

(01:50):
types of fats have been linked to heart disease and
other cardiovascular problems. The topping also has some beta carotene
that pigment I just mentioned. Beta caroteen helps add to
the buttery color and can, by the way, either be
naturally derived from plants or made in a lab. That's
the difference between it being labeled a natural versus an
artificial color. The topping also has tertiary butal hydroquinone or

(02:13):
tbh q, which is a synthetic preservative that keeps oils
from becoming rancid as they sit. And polydimethyl silazane or
p d MS, which is a silicone based chemical that
prevents foaming in hot oil. It's also been preliminarily shown
to help hair cells grow when applied topically, but that's
a different episode. Don't rub butter flavored topping on your scalp.

(02:36):
The final ingredient, the one that gives movie theater popcorn.
It's irresistible taste. Buttery flavoring, a non dairy mystery chemical
that mimics the taste of butter. This and the artificial
flavoring and flavor call are industry secrets, but they're probably
one of a few lab synthesized molecules that taste and
smell like butter. Diaceetyal as a to in a SETL

(02:59):
propionyl or similar Those first two that I mentioned are
compounds that are naturally created in old fashioned cultured butter
by the friendly lactic acid bacteria that helps solidify cream
into butter. Butter flavor is basically a tasty byproduct sort
of like with beta carotene. These compounds can be naturally

(03:19):
derived from farmed bacteria or synthesized in a lab. They'll
make that butter flavored topping taste almost like the real thing.
The real slap in the face, though, is that movie
theater butter flavored topping has twenty more calories per tablespoon
than real butter. So if you're a large bucket of
plain popcorn is about one thousand calories with just the

(03:40):
flavor call seasoning on it, and you choose to add
a minimum of three tablespoons of buttery topping, or as
much as six if you opt for a squirt in
the middle and a scort on the top, the large
bucket you nauch on while watching the latest blockbuster could
be more than two thousand calories. It definitely means that
movie theater popcorn is a treat. Everything in moderation. Oh

(04:00):
and a side note about diocetle, one of those butter
flavor compounds. You may have heard that it causes health problems.
That is a real thing, but the story got sort
of sensationalized. Factory workers who breathe in a whole lot
of dioceetle do have an increased risk of a particular
type of lung disease, and one guy who was popping
two to three bags per day for a number of

(04:21):
years successfully sued a bunch of microwave popcorn producers after
contracting that disease. But there's no known risk in eating
this artificial flavor or in breathing in the amount you'd
a realized from popping a bag of popcorn in your
microwave every now and then, and the Flavor Call brand
has come out as being dioceetle free. Good news for
movie theater popcorn. Do watch out for it as an

(04:43):
ingredient in vape liquid though. Today's episode was written by
Carrie Tato and me and produced by Tyler Clang for
I Heeart Media. And how Stuff Works from one of
this and lots of other fresh hot topics, visit our
home planet, how Stuff Works dot com