7 ms·

Why it’s so easy to believe our food is toxic

97 points by kafkaesque 12y ago

Terr_ 12y ago
> But behind the unified front (all processed food is dangerous!) lies a tangled web of factoids. Some are clearly not true [...] Others are true, but [...] A factoid, by definition is untrue or at least uncertain. The suffix -oid denotes that it resembles a fact, but cannot be classified as one. (Or if you like recursion... "Factoid: A small fact is a factoid.")
- eli 12y ago
  I think you'll find most dictionaries list both definitions.
- aylons 12y ago
  You may define a word whatever you please in your text, but you cannot state the definition for the common use of the word. This prerogative are for its users, as a group. Dictionaries (which do not define, but only catalogs accepted meaning) defines "factoid" not only different than you do, but also in accordance to the intended meaning of the text [1][2][3]. Some people (specially engineering and math types, myself included) tend to put too much weight in a word morphology to extract its meaning. But linguistics is not that straightforward and meaning for a word can even change over time. [1] Merriam Webster: "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print", http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid [2] "A brief or trivial item of news or information." and "An assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact." http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/factoid?q=factoid http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng... [3] Cambridge: "an interesting piece of information" http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/factoid?q=factoid http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/factoi...
  - loongpoke 12y ago
    Excellent rebuttal, my friend. I tip my hat
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    > an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print Are you blindly copy-pasting? That's exactly what I just said about it not being a real fact. In addition, your second link specifically denotes the "small fact" interpretation for what it is: A very recent and predominantly-north-American neologism. http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/jan/17/mind-your-language-factoids http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/jan... Perhaps in time it'll be like "decimate", where the false version has obliterated the original, but I don't think we're really at that stage yet.
lotides 12y ago
I'm not sure the point of this article. She didn't spend much time attacking specific myths. I see so many people these days running to defend these giant corporations and their processes from creating food as quickly and cheaply as possible. They don't need defending. They've won. Most Americans rely on their products, whether they like it or not. I can't make the schools serve my kids healthy foods, I can't make the prisons serve prisoners real foods or make my local grocery store stock foods that are safe and healthy. Let them defend themselves. They'll be fine. If I make the decision that I don't want HFCS in my bread or certain GMO products in my lunch, why do you care? Why block the nutrition label from saying that a product is GMO? It doesn't effect you. If you're positive that no negative consequences come from us engineering our food, then go ahead and eat as much as you want. But stop attacking those of us that want to be able to find foods that meet our own personal standards. We all should have the right to know what's in our food and where it comes from. I care a lot about what I eat and the foods I make for my family. I know a lot of misinformation is out there but the appropriate response is to correct the misinformation, not attack everyone that is just trying to do what's best for themselves. For those of you that want to start caring about what you put in your body, http://examine.com http://examine.com is a good place to start. Good luck.
- plorkyeran 12y ago
  > Why block the nutrition label from saying that a product is GMO? Who has ever tried to do that? Opposing mandatory labeling and trying to forbid labeling are very different things.
  - bpodgursky 12y ago
    Advertising a food as GMO free is banned for good reason. Labeling is supposed to be informative to the consumer, and alert them to nutritional information about the food which could impact their health--and GMO foods have decisively been shown to have no health impact. If food manufacturers were free to advertise the absence of irrelevant nutrients, they would immediately begin barraging consumers with useless or harmful information-- "now free of pyridoxal phosphate!" "no phylloquinone used in the production of this cereal!" Should the average consume have to know that these are actually vitamin K and B6? Of course not, the nutrition facts are there to inform them, and the FDA makes sure it cannot be used just for branding purposes or to confuse the consumer. Since GMO food is unequivocally proven safe, the manufacturer will not be helping the consumer make an informed decision by advertising the absence.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rdtsc 12y ago
It is easy for a few reasons (I am not saying all these are 100% sound just presenting a few of them): * FDA and the supposed agencies entrusted by public to protect the public from poisons in the food have deemed to have failed many times. There is a revolving door between large agribusinesses and FDA. Department heads and CEO/COOs play musical chairs back and forth between. Trusting FDA to police the industry is like trusting the industry to police itself at this point. * People are not educated enough to understand what is what. They see strange things on the labels and get scared. * Everyone only has only one life + the life of their children to experiment on. So while a "rational" argument to "we don't know if it will poison us", is let's apply "science" and do an "experiment". Ok who wants to ingest this new formulation to be the guinea pig? Who wants to give to their infant son or daughter to later monitor and find out if they'll get cancer by the time their are 5 or not... Because the thing is, you don't get a do-over like you do with other things. "Oh the program segfaulted. Darn,..., fix bug, recompile and restart". Those are a few of the reasons. So as the article points out people try to figure out it on their own and kind of feel around in the dark. Facebook groups. Friend of a friend found out about this new superfood item or something. Or I read on Facebook that pickles have lead in them. Whole Foods type place and other "health" food places take advantage of this fear and uncertainty. Others make fun that. Gee so and so is such a hippie eating sprouted beans or thinking GMOs are going to kill you. They don't know science, haha! The other side is making fun of those that don't eat organic hand massaged free range cows and how they are poisoning their kids with pesticides. There are those who want to live the libertarian dream. Just abolish the FDA and let everyone go shopping with a radiological, chemical and bacteriological assay kit. Gee I would buy this cabbage but my portable DNA sequencer shows its DNA structures has been modified and it has been spliced with a DNA of a frog. I am afraid, I'll have to find another seller. Funny thing is -- these places exist. Just go to any poor country where government regulation is even more non-existent. That is the above dystopia. You want to buy baby formula? Ah well. It could be baby formula or could be chalk mixed with water and poisons chemical that someone packaged in a basement. Who knows, you decide.
- jdreaver 12y ago
  > There are those who want to live the libertarian dream. Surely, there are people that care about the quality of what goes in their body (certainly you and I do, at least). Those people would be willing to pay a small price to ensure that what they eat is not poison. Without the FDA, there would probably be numerous entities that evaluate food products and place their mark of approval on those products that pass a rigorous set of tests. Consumers that care about food quality will be willing to spend more to buy food with that mark of approval. If the company approves too many bad products, they lose reputation and go out of business. In fact, there are already organizations that test the quality of products, like Consumer Reports. Personally, I find Amazon reviews to be very helpful when purchasing things, and if I bought my food from Amazon (I hope so one day!) I would read the reviews before buying food I don't know about. > FDA and the supposed agencies entrusted by public to protect the public from poisons in the food have deemed to have failed many times. I agree. Let's get rid of the FDA, we don't need.
MisterMashable 12y ago
Sugar is the stuff life runs on but at our modern level of consumption it's undoubtedly the number one food toxin. Sugar is the secret to addicting the consumer and peddling high profit mush. It doesn't really matter much what form it's in sugar, evaporated cane juice (euphemistic term for what sugar actually IS), corn syrup a.ka. HFC (vilified but not substantively different than table sugar), molasses, wheat, corn starch, rice flour, etc. Modern wheat actually has a higher glycemic index than table sugar! Most of our food isn't toxic, just barely acceptable and sometimes poisonous e.g. food born illnesses. Our food is great at killing us slowly, lowering the quality of life and overall health and most of all attracting huge government $ubsidies! It's all about the money after all. Anyhow, I blathered on about this because it's probably the single most effective thing anyone could do for their health, keep their blood sugar stable and avoid cheap high glycemic addictive foods. BPA in tomato cans and other 'problems' deserve very low priority in relation to the sugar epidemic.
tokenadult 12y ago
This is a good summary of the information trade-offs consumers deal with in deciding what foods to eat. The author identifies some of the worst purveyors of misinformation about food in this interesting article. As a good teacher, she tries to understand her students' preexisting misconceptions, misconceptions that often show up in Hacker News threads about food or nutrition. I especially like the author's curated collection of hyperlinks in the article, which lead to several important sources of information on some of the hottest nutrition debates we often see here on Hacker News. Her recommendation of the Grist series on GMOs[1] is especially helpful. [1] http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/ http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/
mgamache 12y ago
It's so easy to believe our food is toxic because the people selling it have no long term concern for our health. If it doesn't cause an acute health issue they've done their job. Food that is sweet, long lasting and attractive is what we are told to buy with marketing dollars and shelf space that is paid for by food companies. Supermarkets in the US devote 80%-90% of it's food space on products that are not fit for regular human consumption. Companies driven by quarterly profits are not worried about some health problem that might happen at some future date. The C level executives will be retired and cashed out the stock options long before they'll be called on the carpet. I know it's supply and demand, but it's also deceit and manipulation.
jsudhams 12y ago
If you have to "Get educated" to select and eat food then i would avoid. The issue with GMO is that there is a very little observation done. I agree that for that matter many of the other food/medicine is same. We really do not know if i take all GMO food for say 5 years what will happen? Does some not-GMO react differently with GMO? how about places like India where you can get anything certified as long as some professor or doctor says it is no problem to eat unless it is related immediate death.
Goladus 12y ago
That's a good article on why it's good to be skeptical of people claiming "our food is toxic," however there are a at least two important pieces of evidence that anyone can observe: 1. Obesity rate, along with diabetes or "metabolic syndrome" has skyrocketed in the past 2-3 decades. Food supply is on a very short list of probable causes for this. 2. Processed foods often contain additives you would do without given the option, regardless of whether there was any scientific evidence about adverse effects.
loongpoke 12y ago
> ll this misinformation is a version of the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt tactic that’s been recognized as a marketing tool in other contexts. This reminds me of computer security. With the recent exponential growth of vulnerabilities and backdoors, people are talking about moving to more secure languages like Haskell and Rust, installing airgaps, etc. But when you think about it, why does it matter? Look how "vulnerable" credit cards are, every time you use with a new vendor, you increase the risk that one of those vendors will take all your money. But this never actual is a problem in practice because the credit card company actually knows you in person, and if they see that any suspicious behaviour happened, they will just revert the transaction. With the advent of the third wave of computing, the cloud, the Internet of Things, and whatnot, I think everything will just become a pseudo-intelligent big ball of semantics. Take the web for example. Nobody actually knows what a web browser should do. They just know that when you use a well battle tested browser, it will probably work on most sites, and usually wont be more than slightly degraded even on the sites it doesn't work well on. These days protocols are evolving more into, just say what you want, and the machines will figure it out through their vast pools of information. This same kind of thing will make security issues irrelevant, because the Internet of Things will just know who you are (by various means obtained by their evolution), and you'll never have to worry about an actual attacker doing damage to you.
anuraj 12y ago
The article scuttles the basic issues like 1. How credible is the bio safety of GM products. Why is the consumer not having the choice to know if a product uses GM ingredients? 2. What is the level of pesticide residues in food we eat? What are the harmful effects? For example, many organo chlorides are known to be persistent pollutants and can cause severe damage to nervous and endocrine systems and can even affect fetuses. 3. Why there is no transparency of information regarding toxicity of chemicals found in food?

97 points by kafkaesque 12y ago

Terr_ 12y ago

> But behind the unified front (all processed food is dangerous!) lies a tangled web of factoids. Some are clearly not true [...] Others are true, but [...] A factoid, by definition is untrue or at least uncertain. The suffix -oid denotes that it resembles a fact, but cannot be classified as one. (Or if you like recursion... "Factoid: A small fact is a factoid.")

eli 12y ago
I think you'll find most dictionaries list both definitions.
aylons 12y ago
You may define a word whatever you please in your text, but you cannot state the definition for the common use of the word. This prerogative are for its users, as a group. Dictionaries (which do not define, but only catalogs accepted meaning) defines "factoid" not only different than you do, but also in accordance to the intended meaning of the text [1][2][3]. Some people (specially engineering and math types, myself included) tend to put too much weight in a word morphology to extract its meaning. But linguistics is not that straightforward and meaning for a word can even change over time. [1] Merriam Webster: "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print", http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid [2] "A brief or trivial item of news or information." and "An assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact." http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/factoid?q=factoid http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng... [3] Cambridge: "an interesting piece of information" http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/factoid?q=factoid http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/factoi...
- loongpoke 12y ago
  Excellent rebuttal, my friend. I tip my hat
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print Are you blindly copy-pasting? That's exactly what I just said about it not being a real fact. In addition, your second link specifically denotes the "small fact" interpretation for what it is: A very recent and predominantly-north-American neologism. http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/jan/17/mind-your-language-factoids http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/jan... Perhaps in time it'll be like "decimate", where the false version has obliterated the original, but I don't think we're really at that stage yet.

lotides 12y ago

I'm not sure the point of this article. She didn't spend much time attacking specific myths. I see so many people these days running to defend these giant corporations and their processes from creating food as quickly and cheaply as possible. They don't need defending. They've won. Most Americans rely on their products, whether they like it or not. I can't make the schools serve my kids healthy foods, I can't make the prisons serve prisoners real foods or make my local grocery store stock foods that are safe and healthy. Let them defend themselves. They'll be fine. If I make the decision that I don't want HFCS in my bread or certain GMO products in my lunch, why do you care? Why block the nutrition label from saying that a product is GMO? It doesn't effect you. If you're positive that no negative consequences come from us engineering our food, then go ahead and eat as much as you want. But stop attacking those of us that want to be able to find foods that meet our own personal standards. We all should have the right to know what's in our food and where it comes from. I care a lot about what I eat and the foods I make for my family. I know a lot of misinformation is out there but the appropriate response is to correct the misinformation, not attack everyone that is just trying to do what's best for themselves. For those of you that want to start caring about what you put in your body, http://examine.com http://examine.com is a good place to start. Good luck.

plorkyeran 12y ago
> Why block the nutrition label from saying that a product is GMO? Who has ever tried to do that? Opposing mandatory labeling and trying to forbid labeling are very different things.
- bpodgursky 12y ago
  Advertising a food as GMO free is banned for good reason. Labeling is supposed to be informative to the consumer, and alert them to nutritional information about the food which could impact their health--and GMO foods have decisively been shown to have no health impact. If food manufacturers were free to advertise the absence of irrelevant nutrients, they would immediately begin barraging consumers with useless or harmful information-- "now free of pyridoxal phosphate!" "no phylloquinone used in the production of this cereal!" Should the average consume have to know that these are actually vitamin K and B6? Of course not, the nutrition facts are there to inform them, and the FDA makes sure it cannot be used just for branding purposes or to confuse the consumer. Since GMO food is unequivocally proven safe, the manufacturer will not be helping the consumer make an informed decision by advertising the absence.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rdtsc 12y ago

It is easy for a few reasons (I am not saying all these are 100% sound just presenting a few of them): * FDA and the supposed agencies entrusted by public to protect the public from poisons in the food have deemed to have failed many times. There is a revolving door between large agribusinesses and FDA. Department heads and CEO/COOs play musical chairs back and forth between. Trusting FDA to police the industry is like trusting the industry to police itself at this point. * People are not educated enough to understand what is what. They see strange things on the labels and get scared. * Everyone only has only one life + the life of their children to experiment on. So while a "rational" argument to "we don't know if it will poison us", is let's apply "science" and do an "experiment". Ok who wants to ingest this new formulation to be the guinea pig? Who wants to give to their infant son or daughter to later monitor and find out if they'll get cancer by the time their are 5 or not... Because the thing is, you don't get a do-over like you do with other things. "Oh the program segfaulted. Darn,..., fix bug, recompile and restart". Those are a few of the reasons. So as the article points out people try to figure out it on their own and kind of feel around in the dark. Facebook groups. Friend of a friend found out about this new superfood item or something. Or I read on Facebook that pickles have lead in them. Whole Foods type place and other "health" food places take advantage of this fear and uncertainty. Others make fun that. Gee so and so is such a hippie eating sprouted beans or thinking GMOs are going to kill you. They don't know science, haha! The other side is making fun of those that don't eat organic hand massaged free range cows and how they are poisoning their kids with pesticides. There are those who want to live the libertarian dream. Just abolish the FDA and let everyone go shopping with a radiological, chemical and bacteriological assay kit. Gee I would buy this cabbage but my portable DNA sequencer shows its DNA structures has been modified and it has been spliced with a DNA of a frog. I am afraid, I'll have to find another seller. Funny thing is -- these places exist. Just go to any poor country where government regulation is even more non-existent. That is the above dystopia. You want to buy baby formula? Ah well. It could be baby formula or could be chalk mixed with water and poisons chemical that someone packaged in a basement. Who knows, you decide.

jdreaver 12y ago
> There are those who want to live the libertarian dream. Surely, there are people that care about the quality of what goes in their body (certainly you and I do, at least). Those people would be willing to pay a small price to ensure that what they eat is not poison. Without the FDA, there would probably be numerous entities that evaluate food products and place their mark of approval on those products that pass a rigorous set of tests. Consumers that care about food quality will be willing to spend more to buy food with that mark of approval. If the company approves too many bad products, they lose reputation and go out of business. In fact, there are already organizations that test the quality of products, like Consumer Reports. Personally, I find Amazon reviews to be very helpful when purchasing things, and if I bought my food from Amazon (I hope so one day!) I would read the reviews before buying food I don't know about. > FDA and the supposed agencies entrusted by public to protect the public from poisons in the food have deemed to have failed many times. I agree. Let's get rid of the FDA, we don't need.

MisterMashable 12y ago

Sugar is the stuff life runs on but at our modern level of consumption it's undoubtedly the number one food toxin. Sugar is the secret to addicting the consumer and peddling high profit mush. It doesn't really matter much what form it's in sugar, evaporated cane juice (euphemistic term for what sugar actually IS), corn syrup a.ka. HFC (vilified but not substantively different than table sugar), molasses, wheat, corn starch, rice flour, etc. Modern wheat actually has a higher glycemic index than table sugar! Most of our food isn't toxic, just barely acceptable and sometimes poisonous e.g. food born illnesses. Our food is great at killing us slowly, lowering the quality of life and overall health and most of all attracting huge government $ubsidies! It's all about the money after all. Anyhow, I blathered on about this because it's probably the single most effective thing anyone could do for their health, keep their blood sugar stable and avoid cheap high glycemic addictive foods. BPA in tomato cans and other 'problems' deserve very low priority in relation to the sugar epidemic.

tokenadult 12y ago

This is a good summary of the information trade-offs consumers deal with in deciding what foods to eat. The author identifies some of the worst purveyors of misinformation about food in this interesting article. As a good teacher, she tries to understand her students' preexisting misconceptions, misconceptions that often show up in Hacker News threads about food or nutrition. I especially like the author's curated collection of hyperlinks in the article, which lead to several important sources of information on some of the hottest nutrition debates we often see here on Hacker News. Her recommendation of the Grist series on GMOs[1] is especially helpful. [1] http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/ http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/

mgamache 12y ago

It's so easy to believe our food is toxic because the people selling it have no long term concern for our health. If it doesn't cause an acute health issue they've done their job. Food that is sweet, long lasting and attractive is what we are told to buy with marketing dollars and shelf space that is paid for by food companies. Supermarkets in the US devote 80%-90% of it's food space on products that are not fit for regular human consumption. Companies driven by quarterly profits are not worried about some health problem that might happen at some future date. The C level executives will be retired and cashed out the stock options long before they'll be called on the carpet. I know it's supply and demand, but it's also deceit and manipulation.

jsudhams 12y ago

If you have to "Get educated" to select and eat food then i would avoid. The issue with GMO is that there is a very little observation done. I agree that for that matter many of the other food/medicine is same. We really do not know if i take all GMO food for say 5 years what will happen? Does some not-GMO react differently with GMO? how about places like India where you can get anything certified as long as some professor or doctor says it is no problem to eat unless it is related immediate death.

Goladus 12y ago

That's a good article on why it's good to be skeptical of people claiming "our food is toxic," however there are a at least two important pieces of evidence that anyone can observe: 1. Obesity rate, along with diabetes or "metabolic syndrome" has skyrocketed in the past 2-3 decades. Food supply is on a very short list of probable causes for this. 2. Processed foods often contain additives you would do without given the option, regardless of whether there was any scientific evidence about adverse effects.

loongpoke 12y ago

> ll this misinformation is a version of the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt tactic that’s been recognized as a marketing tool in other contexts. This reminds me of computer security. With the recent exponential growth of vulnerabilities and backdoors, people are talking about moving to more secure languages like Haskell and Rust, installing airgaps, etc. But when you think about it, why does it matter? Look how "vulnerable" credit cards are, every time you use with a new vendor, you increase the risk that one of those vendors will take all your money. But this never actual is a problem in practice because the credit card company actually knows you in person, and if they see that any suspicious behaviour happened, they will just revert the transaction. With the advent of the third wave of computing, the cloud, the Internet of Things, and whatnot, I think everything will just become a pseudo-intelligent big ball of semantics. Take the web for example. Nobody actually knows what a web browser should do. They just know that when you use a well battle tested browser, it will probably work on most sites, and usually wont be more than slightly degraded even on the sites it doesn't work well on. These days protocols are evolving more into, just say what you want, and the machines will figure it out through their vast pools of information. This same kind of thing will make security issues irrelevant, because the Internet of Things will just know who you are (by various means obtained by their evolution), and you'll never have to worry about an actual attacker doing damage to you.

anuraj 12y ago

The article scuttles the basic issues like 1. How credible is the bio safety of GM products. Why is the consumer not having the choice to know if a product uses GM ingredients? 2. What is the level of pesticide residues in food we eat? What are the harmful effects? For example, many organo chlorides are known to be persistent pollutants and can cause severe damage to nervous and endocrine systems and can even affect fetuses. 3. Why there is no transparency of information regarding toxicity of chemicals found in food?