5 ms·

>“Well, I’m a computer scientist, so I had to take a lot of engineering courses for that,” says Hari, with an awkward laugh. He bores in. “But you are not a foo

>“Well, I’m a computer scientist, so I had to take a lot of engineering courses for that,” says Hari, with an awkward laugh. He bores in. “But you are not a food scientist. You’re not a chemist. You’re not a scientist in that aspect.” Then he quotes an editorial, in which a Yale School of Medicine neurologist calls the Subway claims “the worst example of pseudo-scientific fear-mongering I have seen in a while.” Sums up my feelings on this sort of activism perfectly. "You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" is an ignorant claim deserving of ridicule. Yet Another misinformed anti-GMO/"natural food" advocate yawn "Did you know the salt in your potato chips is also used as a chemical agent to melt ice on roads! Ban salt! Chemicals are poisoning your body!!!!!" EDIT: http://foodbabe.com/2012/10/31/getting-conned-cheap-toxic-chocolate/ http://foodbabe.com/2012/10/31/getting-conned-cheap-toxic-ch... ^ This actually highlights lactose as a "toxic" ingredient in chocolate.

aaronbrethorst 12y ago
This actually highlights lactose as a "toxic" ingredient in chocolate. Where?
- wcummings 12y ago
  >Just look at the ingredients in popular chocolate candy out there; they are despicable and it’s why I don’t buy these brands any longer, even for an occasional “treat”: Below it is the following image (mirrored to avoid hotlinking): http://i.imgur.com/FpnP87r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/FpnP87r.jpg Notice "lactose" highlighted in an alarming orange color next to Almond Joy
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - fleitz 12y ago
    You're reading it wrong, I think she just highlighted the words she needs to look up later in the dictionary. Clearly she understand the word milk, but is confused by lactose, so she needs to look it up later so she can figure out that lactose is in milk. Then when she highlight the bad ingredients she can highlight milk AND lactose. I'm interested to know her opinions on breastfeeding and whether lactose, HGH, and IGF-1 are bad for babies.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    Her basic point -- as should have been obvious from reading the article -- is that chocolate should have: cacao beans, cane sugar, and vanilla. And milk for milk chocolate. Everything else may not be in your interest to eat. Including sugars extracted from milk with who-knows-what processing done to it. Not eating ingredients you can't pronounce or recognize is a great rule of thumb, particularly in the incredibly permissive US food regulation regime.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Quickly checking Wikipedia sort of favors the lactose for having a cleaner process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Refining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Refining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose#Isolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose#Isolation
    - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
      > Not eating ingredients you can't pronounce or recognize is a great rule of thumb Bullshit. So because we call cacao beans cacao beans, they're okay to eat, but because we call whatever whatever, it's not? Do you really base your decisions for what's okay and not based upon whether you've heard the English word for a substance? How do you cope when you travel to a place wherein you do not speak the language? Do you engage in a panic when someone tells you about residual radioactivity in almost every living thing on the planet? So you have vanilla in your chocolate. Should I explain to you the chemical composition of vanilla? What you call "vanilla" is actually a compound of unpronounceable things; would you be concerned if I told you a number of them have MSDS sheets? The primary component of vanilla is vanillin. You know what vanillin is really called, its IUPAC name? 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde. Your comment represents everything wrong with the Internet era of pseudoscience. Absolutely everything. You're really in the same bucket as Jenny McCarthy with a comment like that. I realize this is a mean reply (I'm honestly just passionate about willful and flagrant misinformation on the Internet), but come on. You are actively harming the public if you proselytize stuff like this, especially considering that most people just parrot what they hear without comprehension; one need look no further than Jimmy Kimmel's "which is better, the ACA or Obamacare?" segment for evidence of that.
saryant 12y ago
Beware of dihydrogen monoxide. http://www.dhmo.org/ http://www.dhmo.org/
tim333 12y ago
>Ban salt! I'm guessing you're parodying the Subway yoga mat ingredient azodicarbonamide. It's banned in Europe and Oz as a food additive but if you'd like it in your sandwiches feel free.
- Crito 12y ago
  Do all your chips/crisps come unsalted or something?
- SirWart 12y ago
  I loled at the yoga mat comparison because unless I'm mistaken no one is eating their yoga mats
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Someone is probably eating one right now. People are weird.
    - DrStalker 12y ago
      Our pet foxes ate one once, does that count?
      - lotsofmangos 12y ago
        Only if they have done a TED talk about it.
- pbreit 12y ago
  He's saying the fact that it is used in a yoga mat is not compelling. There's probably some water in there as well.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  You say "it's banned in Europe and Oz as a food additive" as if that was material or interesting. GMOs are banned in Europe too, but no one takes that as a serious indictment of GMOs. It is, rather, a demonstration of the anti-scientific stance of European law-makers. If you have some data that increases the posterior plausibility of the proposition "Azodicarbonamide is toxic at the levels found in Subway bread", give it to us! Note that that statement is quite different from "azodicarbonamide is toxic at some level", because that statement is true of virtually everything and is therefore completely irrelevant to the question about it's use in Subway's bread.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
"You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" is an ignorant claim deserving of ridicule. Depends how you take it. The other way round it is saying that if you are eating something you should probably learn what it is, and as an extension, that things with common names have a longer history to establish bio-compatibility. Sure, you can poison yourself with well known things, but if something is so new nobody has bothered working out a common name, it is worth at least questioning if you really want to eat it. edit - taken as dogma, I would agree it is obviously nuts.
awongh 12y ago
I thought this was another pseudo-science overreaction too, until I read about what azodicarbonamide actually is.... I understand that it probably is safe at low concentrations, but I also feel like it's a logical fallacy to say that because it's probably not poisonous in low levels that I want to eat it. Rather, it seems to me the question should be- do I want to have this ingredient in my bread. And I although I suppose that in some ways it makes the food cheaper, because it lasts longer, mostly the answer would be no. We clearly understand the reasons why this ingredient is in the bread, but to me qualitative differences in the product don't seem sufficient to warrant it's being there. (Contrast this with some other synthesized additives like carrageenan or something that has a bigger effect on the qualities of the food)
- yew 12y ago
  My problem with the "you can't pronounce it" argument is that it seems to have more to do with ignorance of chemistry [0] than with health. The idea that having industrial applications makes a chemical compound less likely to be healthy, or that chemical nomenclature has any impact on health at all, is just wrong - and while I'm not opposed to people making their own choices as to what to eat, I'm equally not going to ignore the effects of those choices (and of activism) on the wider food industry [1] (and by extension, on other people). It probably doesn't help that I keep some of these ingredients in my pantry. What qualifies as an easily recognizable substance is very much a matter of background. [0] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_foods_a_little_chemical_education.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_... [1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food_or_not.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food... (I can't match Dr Lowe for eloquence, so I really do recommend reading him for yourself. The same holds for the rest of his blog, too!)
  - awongh 12y ago
    I agree that it is fear mongering to say that you'll get cancer or schizophrenia (!?) from a certain additive... but on the other hand I think to simply dismiss any warnings is to throw the baby out with the bath water.... Maybe the argument is too subtle and people feel like they need to ratchet up the intensity of their argument to make a point, but I think the basic premise holds true: why are these things in our food? The real reason is almost always either marketing (it needs to look as it does on the box, i.e. dyes, stabilizers and such) or supply chain issues (shelf life, total outputs, i.e. preservatives/growth hormones) all dressed up with it's own pseudo-science of GRAS (generally regarded as safe)... which does not mean some multi-year double-blind longitudinal study, it simply means lack of evidence that something is harmful. In the parent's link [1] #6 he goes as far as to say that overall cancer rates dropped during the introduction of bha/bht- how is that scientific to say that an ingredient must be safe because everyone in the US has less cancer than before this ingredient was put in food? I don't object to the use of additives per se, but most of these chemical additives are in there to either make the food a couple of cents cheaper or to make them one percentage point more profitable. And in fact perhaps these supply chain issues may be solved in the near future if people order/buy their food online/get it delivered, eliminating the need for a product to last 6 weeks on a shelf; You could say that the use of preservatives is just an inefficiency of the market.
wtracy 12y ago
"You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" She drinks almond milk. Quote from Wikipedia: "Almonds contain polyphenols in their skins consisting of flavonols, flavan-3-ols, hydroxybenzoic acids and flavanones analogous to those of certain fruits and vegetables." Can she pronounce all of those names? Also, in case anyone still thinks that anything "natural" must be safe, here's another Wikipedia quote: "Bitter almonds may yield from 4-9 mg of hydrogen cyanide per almond." Yum!
- kordless 12y ago
  Don't forget that heating almond based saturated fats can create a significant amount of free radicals...at least in almond flour.
  - willtheperson 12y ago
    Can you substantiate that claim?
    - kordless 12y ago
      Almonds are full of polyunsaturated fats. These types of fats are known for their heat instability, causing breakdown. This often leaves free radical sites on the molecules that can damage cells. Google a bit for it and you'll find the science behind it. Because of this, it's a standard warning on almond flour stuff nowadays.
pbreit 12y ago
Lactose intolerance is relatively non-controversial. And it's the red ingredients she is mostly concerned about.
veidr 12y ago
> "You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" is an ignorant claim deserving of ridicule. Wrong. It's a pithy rule of thumb that -- while obviously imperfect and not to be taken literally -- makes it easier for busy people, people with kids, and people uninterested in researching every single thing they eat to protect themselves in a society where the industrial food industry puts all kinds of horrible shit in mainstream 'food'. Personally, I prefer Michael Pollan's "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." But what both of these sayings actually mean is: Don't blindly eat the garbage that the industrial food complex tries to sell you. Eat stuff that you are pretty sure is a healthy thing to eat. Natural broccoli? Sure. Genetically engineered insect-resistant broccoli? Might want to default to no on that one, until you have time to look into it. Locally-produced cornflour-and-water tortillas? Sure. Sandwich bread made out of yoga mats? Hmm, might be okay, but why not avoid it until your buddy wcummings does a bunch of internet research and persuades you that it's safe.

aaronbrethorst 12y ago

This actually highlights lactose as a "toxic" ingredient in chocolate. Where?

wcummings 12y ago
>Just look at the ingredients in popular chocolate candy out there; they are despicable and it’s why I don’t buy these brands any longer, even for an occasional “treat”: Below it is the following image (mirrored to avoid hotlinking): http://i.imgur.com/FpnP87r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/FpnP87r.jpg Notice "lactose" highlighted in an alarming orange color next to Almond Joy
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- fleitz 12y ago
  You're reading it wrong, I think she just highlighted the words she needs to look up later in the dictionary. Clearly she understand the word milk, but is confused by lactose, so she needs to look it up later so she can figure out that lactose is in milk. Then when she highlight the bad ingredients she can highlight milk AND lactose. I'm interested to know her opinions on breastfeeding and whether lactose, HGH, and IGF-1 are bad for babies.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Her basic point -- as should have been obvious from reading the article -- is that chocolate should have: cacao beans, cane sugar, and vanilla. And milk for milk chocolate. Everything else may not be in your interest to eat. Including sugars extracted from milk with who-knows-what processing done to it. Not eating ingredients you can't pronounce or recognize is a great rule of thumb, particularly in the incredibly permissive US food regulation regime.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Quickly checking Wikipedia sort of favors the lactose for having a cleaner process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Refining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Refining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose#Isolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose#Isolation
  - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
    > Not eating ingredients you can't pronounce or recognize is a great rule of thumb Bullshit. So because we call cacao beans cacao beans, they're okay to eat, but because we call whatever whatever, it's not? Do you really base your decisions for what's okay and not based upon whether you've heard the English word for a substance? How do you cope when you travel to a place wherein you do not speak the language? Do you engage in a panic when someone tells you about residual radioactivity in almost every living thing on the planet? So you have vanilla in your chocolate. Should I explain to you the chemical composition of vanilla? What you call "vanilla" is actually a compound of unpronounceable things; would you be concerned if I told you a number of them have MSDS sheets? The primary component of vanilla is vanillin. You know what vanillin is really called, its IUPAC name? 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde. Your comment represents everything wrong with the Internet era of pseudoscience. Absolutely everything. You're really in the same bucket as Jenny McCarthy with a comment like that. I realize this is a mean reply (I'm honestly just passionate about willful and flagrant misinformation on the Internet), but come on. You are actively harming the public if you proselytize stuff like this, especially considering that most people just parrot what they hear without comprehension; one need look no further than Jimmy Kimmel's "which is better, the ACA or Obamacare?" segment for evidence of that.

saryant 12y ago

Beware of dihydrogen monoxide. http://www.dhmo.org/ http://www.dhmo.org/

tim333 12y ago

>Ban salt! I'm guessing you're parodying the Subway yoga mat ingredient azodicarbonamide. It's banned in Europe and Oz as a food additive but if you'd like it in your sandwiches feel free.

Crito 12y ago
Do all your chips/crisps come unsalted or something?
SirWart 12y ago
I loled at the yoga mat comparison because unless I'm mistaken no one is eating their yoga mats
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Someone is probably eating one right now. People are weird.
  - DrStalker 12y ago
    Our pet foxes ate one once, does that count?
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Only if they have done a TED talk about it.
pbreit 12y ago
He's saying the fact that it is used in a yoga mat is not compelling. There's probably some water in there as well.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
You say "it's banned in Europe and Oz as a food additive" as if that was material or interesting. GMOs are banned in Europe too, but no one takes that as a serious indictment of GMOs. It is, rather, a demonstration of the anti-scientific stance of European law-makers. If you have some data that increases the posterior plausibility of the proposition "Azodicarbonamide is toxic at the levels found in Subway bread", give it to us! Note that that statement is quite different from "azodicarbonamide is toxic at some level", because that statement is true of virtually everything and is therefore completely irrelevant to the question about it's use in Subway's bread.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

"You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" is an ignorant claim deserving of ridicule. Depends how you take it. The other way round it is saying that if you are eating something you should probably learn what it is, and as an extension, that things with common names have a longer history to establish bio-compatibility. Sure, you can poison yourself with well known things, but if something is so new nobody has bothered working out a common name, it is worth at least questioning if you really want to eat it. edit - taken as dogma, I would agree it is obviously nuts.

awongh 12y ago

I thought this was another pseudo-science overreaction too, until I read about what azodicarbonamide actually is.... I understand that it probably is safe at low concentrations, but I also feel like it's a logical fallacy to say that because it's probably not poisonous in low levels that I want to eat it. Rather, it seems to me the question should be- do I want to have this ingredient in my bread. And I although I suppose that in some ways it makes the food cheaper, because it lasts longer, mostly the answer would be no. We clearly understand the reasons why this ingredient is in the bread, but to me qualitative differences in the product don't seem sufficient to warrant it's being there. (Contrast this with some other synthesized additives like carrageenan or something that has a bigger effect on the qualities of the food)

yew 12y ago
My problem with the "you can't pronounce it" argument is that it seems to have more to do with ignorance of chemistry [0] than with health. The idea that having industrial applications makes a chemical compound less likely to be healthy, or that chemical nomenclature has any impact on health at all, is just wrong - and while I'm not opposed to people making their own choices as to what to eat, I'm equally not going to ignore the effects of those choices (and of activism) on the wider food industry [1] (and by extension, on other people). It probably doesn't help that I keep some of these ingredients in my pantry. What qualifies as an easily recognizable substance is very much a matter of background. [0] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_foods_a_little_chemical_education.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_... [1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food_or_not.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food... (I can't match Dr Lowe for eloquence, so I really do recommend reading him for yourself. The same holds for the rest of his blog, too!)
- awongh 12y ago
  I agree that it is fear mongering to say that you'll get cancer or schizophrenia (!?) from a certain additive... but on the other hand I think to simply dismiss any warnings is to throw the baby out with the bath water.... Maybe the argument is too subtle and people feel like they need to ratchet up the intensity of their argument to make a point, but I think the basic premise holds true: why are these things in our food? The real reason is almost always either marketing (it needs to look as it does on the box, i.e. dyes, stabilizers and such) or supply chain issues (shelf life, total outputs, i.e. preservatives/growth hormones) all dressed up with it's own pseudo-science of GRAS (generally regarded as safe)... which does not mean some multi-year double-blind longitudinal study, it simply means lack of evidence that something is harmful. In the parent's link [1] #6 he goes as far as to say that overall cancer rates dropped during the introduction of bha/bht- how is that scientific to say that an ingredient must be safe because everyone in the US has less cancer than before this ingredient was put in food? I don't object to the use of additives per se, but most of these chemical additives are in there to either make the food a couple of cents cheaper or to make them one percentage point more profitable. And in fact perhaps these supply chain issues may be solved in the near future if people order/buy their food online/get it delivered, eliminating the need for a product to last 6 weeks on a shelf; You could say that the use of preservatives is just an inefficiency of the market.

wtracy 12y ago

"You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" She drinks almond milk. Quote from Wikipedia: "Almonds contain polyphenols in their skins consisting of flavonols, flavan-3-ols, hydroxybenzoic acids and flavanones analogous to those of certain fruits and vegetables." Can she pronounce all of those names? Also, in case anyone still thinks that anything "natural" must be safe, here's another Wikipedia quote: "Bitter almonds may yield from 4-9 mg of hydrogen cyanide per almond." Yum!

kordless 12y ago
Don't forget that heating almond based saturated fats can create a significant amount of free radicals...at least in almond flour.
- willtheperson 12y ago
  Can you substantiate that claim?
  - kordless 12y ago
    Almonds are full of polyunsaturated fats. These types of fats are known for their heat instability, causing breakdown. This often leaves free radical sites on the molecules that can damage cells. Google a bit for it and you'll find the science behind it. Because of this, it's a standard warning on almond flour stuff nowadays.

pbreit 12y ago

Lactose intolerance is relatively non-controversial. And it's the red ingredients she is mostly concerned about.

veidr 12y ago

> "You shouldn't eat anything you can't pronounce" is an ignorant claim deserving of ridicule. Wrong. It's a pithy rule of thumb that -- while obviously imperfect and not to be taken literally -- makes it easier for busy people, people with kids, and people uninterested in researching every single thing they eat to protect themselves in a society where the industrial food industry puts all kinds of horrible shit in mainstream 'food'. Personally, I prefer Michael Pollan's "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." But what both of these sayings actually mean is: Don't blindly eat the garbage that the industrial food complex tries to sell you. Eat stuff that you are pretty sure is a healthy thing to eat. Natural broccoli? Sure. Genetically engineered insect-resistant broccoli? Might want to default to no on that one, until you have time to look into it. Locally-produced cornflour-and-water tortillas? Sure. Sandwich bread made out of yoga mats? Hmm, might be okay, but why not avoid it until your buddy wcummings does a bunch of internet research and persuades you that it's safe.