[Must-Read] Public Health Warning to Everyone!!
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
Loading ...I am sooo annoyed that I’m actually.. posting twice in a day. Why? Because on digg, which has become completely rubbish these days, an article claiming to expose the dirty and poisonous ingredients used in fast food.
To read the article (even a bit) first and then we’ll talk.
Read it? You may be thinking, "Wow, that’s wicked. Fast food is evil! Look at the scary ingredients!" If so, you’re probably an arts student or better, an idiot.
If you think "Wow, that’s a load of bullshit written up by some sensationalist dimwit incapable of elementary school science" then you’re OK and good to go.
Such articles never fail to annoy me greatly, just like how Darkmirage gets annoyed by bad fansubs. This is because while his area of expertise is in fansubs (HEHE, lame), I am slightly more proficient in the sciences. Particularly food science of course, which has a shocking amount of junk info online. The number of legitimate food information and nutrition websites to product-peddling/sensationalist lying websites (including many blogs) is probably 1:100, and most google searches for nutrition lead you to websites which make totally false claims to sell their product.
I shall describe a few common situations which infuriate me.
"It’s full of chemicals! So it must be bad for you!"
When the layman thinks of a chemical, he thinks of testtubes or toxic vats full of bubbly slime. That’s a "chemical", he thinks. FUCK THAT SHIT!! If I chop your arm off and hold it up saying, "LOOK! I AM HOLDING CHEMICALS!" I am absolutely correct!! Everything is a chemical! Oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, cyanide, vitamin C, everything, your TV SET. Except ANIME, anime is not a chemical.
When people claim there are chemicals in food, he is being an idiot because food is totally a mixture of different chemicals. Some chemicals are good, some are bad. So when someone lists out the entire ingredient roll of a product and shouts "HEY THERE ARE CHEMICALS!" he is being an idiot of course because chemical is a neutral word.
Example from the shitty website above: Their pasteurized whole eggs have sodium acid pyrophosphate, citric acid, and monosodium phosphate (all added to preserve color), and nisin, a preservative. To top it off, the eggs are prepared with liquid margarine: liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils (trans fats), salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil (trans fat), soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, and beta carotene (color).
So he listed everything? Sure, some are bad, but why did he list water, citric acid, the various phosphates, lecithin and even.. beta carotene?? If he had it his way and removed all the "chemicals" from his food, we can serve him an empty plate. Anyway, most people don’t even know what’s bad for them and what’s good.
"MSG! IT’S POISON!!"
This is so ridiculous it makes me barf everytime someone says it. Do people even know what is MSG, monosodium glutamate? It’s a big word, it must be poisonous!! So dihydrogen oxide is also poisonous! A glutamate ion is just the deprotonated form of glutamic acid, which is one of the twenty amino acids which make up proteins. SHOCKING: You have lots of glutamic acid in your body!! OH NO! Natural-occuring glutamate is everywhere, in meats, in cheddar cheese, seaweed etc.
The worst part about MSG is probably the MS, not the G. Monosodium is a big word, it must be scary! No, it just means ONE SODIUM. In modern diets, there is a high level of sodium, mainly coming from salt (ie NaCl), and resulting in hypertension which is bad. So salt is bad. The bad reputation of MSG came about in the 1960s when Japanese/Asian stuff had a bad reputation in western countries and one professor suffered an itchy rash after eating at a Chinese restaurant, and he wrote a paper about it, wondering if MSG was the cause. One thing about scientific papers is that nothing is really absolute, many papers just wonder if something is the case and attempt to find evidence pointing to it. Which leads to my next point…
"THIS CURES CANCER!"
Lots of health products claim to cure cancer. WTF? If anyone believes that shit, he must be an idiot. I know people who bought 5000 dollar mattresses which cure cancer. My own idiot aunt peddles health products which she says cures cancer. She insists all doctors are liars and her own products are the Jesus of the medicine world. It’s a pack of lies! Most of this products are little more than expensive urine.
A lot of research is carried out on cancer cells in the lab, and many compounds such as ellagic acid are found to have cancer-killing properties in the lab. But as all scientists know, this mostly does not translate to being "anti-cancer" in the body.
"I DON’T KNOW THIS, IT MUST BE DANGEROUS!"
Back to the issue at hand, fast food ingredients. It’s ridiculous to think everything which sounds difficult is dangerous. Look at the comments on digg, only 4-5 out of the 100+ pointed this out, while the rest were like "oh shit we’re dead". Just looking at the paragraph I quoted above:
Pasteurised - I think he added this word to make the egg sound dangerous. Pasteurisation is just a method of increasing shelf-life, by heating a product (mostly milk) at 72 degrees Celsius for 15 seconds. It changes the flavour of the milk slightly, to what we are all familiar with. Most of us won’t like fresh out of cow nipple milk, as the taste is rather raw.
Citric acid - I laughed at this. WTF? Is this bad now? Lemons are TOXIC OH NO! Other than its integral role in respiration for animals, citric acid is also a natural preservative. British eat lemon curd, which requires 0.33 percent at least of citric acid by law.
Beta-carotene - This is a precursor for Vitamin A (Retinal). Beta-carotene is what makes your carrots orange, and the reason why people tell you to eat your carrots!! Just because it is used as a colouring in this case doesn’t magically make the chemical (see how I use this word) bad!
The article makes a lot of assumptions about certain compounds. He reads Wikipedia (note all his references are to Wikipedia LOL) and then says "OH this thing is used in fertiliser! So we are eating fertilisers!" and "OH this CHEMICAL is used in laxatives, so we are eating laxatives!" This makes no fucking sense because if that’s the case, "LOOK I am breathing OXYGEN, it’s a fuel, I AM BREATHING FUEL!!" and "LOOK I AM DRINKING WATER, IT’S A WASHING AGENT, I AM DRINKING DETERGENT!" Don’t get me started on how water is a universal solvent and will hence dissolve us to death. Idiot! Just because something has multiple uses doesn’t mean it takes on the identity of its one most-evil sounding use.
"WAHH I DON’T WANT ANYTHING BAD IN MY FOOD BUT I WANT IT FRESH!"
Then go live on a farm. Or catch fish in the now-polluted seas. ALL of the ingredients added to foods are functional, they serve a purpose. Why would food companies waste their money adding CHEMICALS which do nothing or harm consumers only? Surely if I were a food manufacturer, I would just put in the cheapest ingredients (water) and sell it as some miracle juice? Oh wait, people are already doing that in large amounts. Don’t buy bottled water! It’s not from the Alps!!
Anyway, each ingredient serves a purpose. Some such as lecithin, derived from soy, are emusifiers. This means they have polar and nonpolar regions and thus helps polar substances like water mix with non-polar ones like oil. See how oil and water naturally don’t mix? Emulsifiers help them to form emulsions, so the product looks like a product, rather than two layers of fat and water. Preservatives are the SATAN of food these days, but I would much rather have them than to die from food poisoning caused by oxidation or bacteria activity.
"Trans-fat!! OH NO! THESE ARE BAD BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE!! BUT I"LL JUST SCREAM LOUDLY ANYWAY"
Everyone knows trans-fats are bad but nobody knows what are transfats!! They just list any shit and call it transfats. Let me explain.
Why are trans-fats used? It is rather modern, because back in the past, it hadn’t been invented. Transfats are basically unsaturated fats (read, they have alkene bonds, more simply, double bonds ie C=C) which are the trans-isomer. Confused? Read Wikipedia then. That section is rather good. Simply put, saturated fatty acids are straight and linear, which line up easily and pack well, thus is a solid at room temperature. But saturated fats are bad right? So people want to use unsaturated fats, but these are liquid at room temperature, meaning its harder to keep and store, which increases cost. Solution? Trans-fat, which are linear due to the trans-configuration and thus pack as well as a saturated fatty acid. This increases shelf-life of a product (slower rate of rancidity as the more easily oxidised oleic acid is not present) and is cheaper than alternative oils.
The best way to stay healthy obviously is to eat fresh food home-cooked (provided you do it right and not in ways which would facilitate harmful bacteria growth), and that’s a good alternative. But how many of us can cook home meals or even have time to shop for groceries when we’re watching anime and playing Team Fortress 2? I would like to write more but some other day I guess, it’s time for a rewatch of FMP despite my exams being in a couple of weeks.
My point of writing this is to tell you anime fans, DO NOT BE TRICKED BY JUNK ARTICLES ON THE NET (this may be junk too). Always believe in yourself, and believe in the me who believes in the you!
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33 Responses to “[Must-Read] Public Health Warning to Everyone!!”
- 1 Trackback on Feb 2nd, 2008 at 11:42 am
Do not use any < and > for your own sake. It will end the comment there and then. Also, there is an automatic IQ filter which weeds out comments made by those who accidentally got transported from the stone age.
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Wow Livejournal.
This needs to be related to Moyashimon to make it relevant to anime, but nice post anyway. I laughed quite hard at some parts.
A simple summary, don’t believe blindly in what you read.
Yet hey this article is written by tj_han, so I have to read it all!
Seriously, I found the beta-carotene being listed out and seen as dangerous as pretty funny, imagine what colour it would be, without it.
It’s easy to digress into the internet and how credible is it as a news source but I think in this case, some sound scientific knowledge and a pinch of common sense would suffice for this.
Speaking of Dihydrogen Oxide, it really ought to be banned!
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
Lol, I read the article. I had a bit of doubt as to whether it was trustworthy. Anyway, thanks for clarifying stuff in your blog.
On an almost unrelated note, I worked part-time at McDonalds for more than a year. And lunch for part-timers is on Father Mcdonalds himself.
Which was the same year I got Gold for NAPFA.
As a former bio major who’s taken all important chemistries and stuff, and a current medical student, I salute you.
I subscribe to the theory, Eat Healthy, Stay Healthy, Stay Smoke Free and die anyway.
Part of it because of articles like the very misleading one that you pointed it out.
They make me fume, because they are lame.
i hate chemicals. ie, everything. except anime, because anime is not a chemical.
Aha! That’s where you are wrong! Anime IS a chemical!
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Anime
Direct from Uncyclopedia, surely one of the most trustworthy reference sites on the internet.
Okay, you observed that everything has chemicals. Good job.
Now tell me what each chemical does, and how it impacts our body.
Thank you.
That “idiot” who posted graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.
Well……
Law of Internetdynamics
The junkiness of articles consisting of opinions and no facts and references can be transfered into other junk articles with opinions and zero credibility but can never be destroyed.
the I DIDN’T KNOW THIS, IT MUST BE DANGEROUS applies to most singaporean aunties
Kokanaden: EE sucks. Besides, there’s no evidence of his graduation, and what do engineers know about science anyway.
As you’ve said, all these big words are to scare the peasants who don’t know any better, so you’re aunt can flog more of those “health products”. I’ve seen claims that they can do everything from “curing” a stroke to riding the world of hunger.
Maybe its because I’m a bit of a sadist, but I love to have these people come up to me, flog their snake oil/herbal stuff, and look at them wish there was a hold to sink in when I ask them the simplest of questions like “Give me some of research material done for this snake oil/herbal stuff.”
As I’ve said, its impossible to educate some people.
Actually, you’d be very surprised at the lack of people who don’t know what MSG is. Some of my friends thought the following:
- MeSsaGing
- Another name for salt
Others thought MSG was said as:
- GST
- SMS
- MSN
WTF Much? But what you say is true. All foods have some sort of chemicals. If people dun want chemically ENHANCED food, go organic. …Which will rob your pockets.
R: I don’t think you got my argument… it’s not about organic (which is mostly just a gimmick to get people to pay more for the same product anyway), but the fact that food consists of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and water mainly, all of which can be classified as chemicals. Food is chemicals, not contains chemicals.
Well my mum believes that computers give out poisonous fumes and great magnetic fields that will kill you…. hardly surprising…
Anyway, if u serve him with a plate of nothing, you are still serving him chemicals, chemicals used to make tat plate…. u shld serve him a vacuum… best keep him in a vacuum seal so he wun be able to spread his malicious words
Now my roomate cant tell me off for reading animeblogs instead of revising chemistry.
tj you rock, this is damn pure genuis writing. XD
Good points. I always laughed when someone says “that food contains lots of chemical ingredients!”
I’m hungry.
I laughed pretty hard at parts, and I learned a bit about trans-fats too.
That, and I only realized what Dihydrogen monoxide really was after I re-read the entry lol
True. The Dihydrogen Monoxide joke never fails to crack me up, especially when I hear it from people who believe in what they are saying. Tell them what it really it would be like dumping them in cold water [excuse the pun], so I just nod and try not to laugh.
LOL~~~ And it reminds me of the bread argument…
bread causes death because everyone who died ate bread at least at one point in their life….
I also join TheBigN as a current med student who gives props on this post.
Ah, I get your point NOW. (Slow, aren’t I?) Oddly enough, this works out with the second half of my bio and chem unit (why the teacher split them into two halfs, I do NOT know…) where we’re talking about food and what chemicals they’re made of.
My classmates freaked out and vowed never to eat again. Sorry to response wrongly. And yes, organic food is a very big conspiracy to rob people of their money. Out of interest: an egg is a singular cell or whatever its called People eat eggs and call it food. I see it as a cell, not a chemical. As for you?
R, an egg may be a singular cell but it is still composed of many chemicals such as calcium phosphate, albumin, phospholipids and many others. Obviously, I think you still do not comprehend what we mean by “everything is a chemical”. Water is a chemical, egg has water. Or rather, water other chemicals = egg.
Very nice post, we can easily be fooled by articles like the one you showed.
The only real thing i really fear is actually GMO because we don’t know at all what will be -if there are- the consequences on human beings…
Oooh! GMO! Now thats another topic in it self.
People have been doing GMO since time immemorial. Or when they realised that some strains are better than others. Just because a guy in a white coat does something with your grain with some test tubes doesn’t make it dangerous. Its the same “everything is a chemical” arguement.
I can’t believe this, people actually believe in an article that references Wikipedia (how much it references Wikipedia doesn’t matter; reference Wiki = fail)?
And I laugh at people who think that organic automatically equals good. Hey here’s some organic tomato leaves and vines! That shit is good for you! Seriously!
You raise many valid points. Of course all elements and compounds can be defined as “chemicals.” However, I think we need to be sensitive to a different definition of “chemical” that has entered the vernacular, namely something that “has been purified or prepared, esp. artificially.” This too is a valid definition of “chemical.”
Also, repeatedly callling people who are not as knowledgeable as you in your area of expertise “idiots” is not conducive to fruitful dialogue and mutual understanding.
MSG is not poison? It is poison because it is so good! Good, so that people are prone to overeating.
Anyway, even if the article’s details are off, their message is kind of in the right direction: fast food sucks. It’s unnecessary to assume your readers are all idiots, and your take appears as one-sided as the article you criticize.