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Pretty amazing this entire article never mentions trans fats.. which cause approx 500,000 premature deaths worldwide each year. For decades, Original Crisco ha
by asdf21 7y ago
Pretty amazing this entire article never mentions trans fats.. which cause approx 500,000 premature deaths worldwide each year.
For decades, Original Crisco had four grams of trans fat per tablespoon.
- aiphex 7y agoThat's a stunning number.
- jotm 7y agoHydrogenation itself creates trans fats, original Crisco sounds pretty unhealthy
- viburnum 7y agoIt's insane. Crisco was basically an industrial product disguised as food. It took almost ninety years for science to figure out that trans fats caused heart disease. Whenever somebody tells me how safe a new food product is, I think about how many people were killed by trans fats before anyone knew how bad they were.
- cowmoo728 7y agoThe history of crisco is also eye-opening. It was a waste product from cotton production - chemists were given the task of finding ways to extract money out of left over cotton seeds. Cottonseed oil was previously used to make lamp oil and candles, but that business was dying out. They came up with partial hydrogenation to make it look close enough to lard, and then marketed it as a food product even though very little was known about it at the time. It was also shortly after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, so people were excited about a vegetarian alternative to potentially contaminated animal products.
- superkuh 7y ago> It was also shortly after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, so people were excited about a vegetarian alternative to potentially contaminated animal products. History just keeps on repeating itself. The same kind of anti-animal product fashion trend right now is making industrially processed vegetarian and vegan 'meat'-like products viable.
- zajio1am 7y agoUntil you have modern approach to health science, you would not notify such long-term effect for any food, so there is no reason to assume any traditional food is more safe w.r.t. such kind of effects.
- viburnum 7y agoNope, pretty sure millions of years of evolution have better equipped humans to eat the wild plants in their environment better than whatever they came up with in a lab yesterday.
- BubRoss 7y agoBased on what? The Chinese used to chew on cinnabar which they believed to be healthy and give longevity but was toxic, since it is actually mercury sulfide.
- riffraff 7y agonot just the chinese, mercury was used as a medicine in europe until the 20th century.
- viburnum 7y agoThat’s not a plant.
- Nasrudith 7y agoBeing a plant has nothing to do with it being available to exposure for our evolutionary history as cinnabar certainly predates humanity. Selective pressure is neither quick nor perfect.
- BubRoss 7y agoSucralose a potent sweetener in sugar free drinks but was apparently discovered while developing insecticide. The legend goes that the head guy says 'test it' and the assistant thinks he said 'taste it'. Too much sucralose can start to kill gut bacteria for some people. (Take all this with a grain of salt, I don't remember where I got this from)