I don’t get a penny for my bullshit and ignorance. They are free for all to enjoy.
However, I do resent it when people whose dominant or only motivation in life is to make money use me as a guinea pig or lab rat. Ignorant as I am, I still don’t like it. And I think it’s weird that I can’t go to a normal store to get food that isn’t laced with various substances that are native to a laboratory or a chemical factory rather than to farms and pastures. The other day I was reading about emulsifiers. Lots of prepared foods contain emulsifiers, because when something contains both water and oil, and you park it on a shelf for months, it’s going to separate unless the water and oil are emulsified. But it turns out that emulsifiers disturb your resident microorganisms and thus interfere with your digestion. The emulsifiers are harmless, only they’re not. But the people making money off the food aren’t going to care about harm unless you drop dead before you reach their cash register.
She may be motivated by health concerns but it’s neither her sole nor even primary motivation:
“I love competition. I love competition of ideas. There’s something really gratifying about convincing someone of something. […] it’s competition, and being the underdog, and convincing people that they need to think about healthier eating, drop the processed food, this food is killing you.” [The Atlantic]
It sounds like she enjoys being received as the champion of the people, whether or not her arguments or their premises are valid. Statements that are not only false but also written in ignorance of the truth and without concern for truth are not lies— lying would require knowing the truth —they are, by Frankfurt’s excellent definition of the word, bullshit.
I agree that Ms Hari is a symptom of a cultural illness, but I don’t think she deserves your cautiously optimistic assumption of her as a merely mis-guided but well-intentioned layperson. She is fully aware of her sphere of influence and yet almost invariably rejects the informed feedback of her detractors, whom she labels as insiders, shills, racists, or sexists, depending on which description she feels will resonate most with her readers.
Tactics like that cannot be adjusted in any productive sense of the word.
Since you didn’t actually provide a citation, I got off my metaphorical butt and did a little research myself.
Here is one blog that supports what you said
And a linked article to an actual published, peer-reviewed article (i.e. a citation)
Note: I am aware that some random stranger on the internet, requesting (no matter how politely or respectfully) a citation, places no actual obligation on you to provide one.
Sanders said the research team’s conclusion that overeating in humans may be driven by food additives is ‘headline grabbing and unwarranted’, adding that "the fat, sugar and calories provided by ice-cream are far more likely to contribute to weight gain that trivial amounts of these additives.”
Indeed, the nutrition and diet expert added that the very high intake values used in the mouse study mean that it bears no impact for humans, as we only consume tiny amounts of any emulsifier ingredients in the foods we eat.
“This paper reports the effects in mice of very high intakes of two carbohydrate-based food additives (carboxymethyl cellulose E466 and polysorbate-80 E433)… Acceptable daily intakes (ADI) are expressed in mg/kg body weight and for E433 it is 10mg/kg body weight," noted Sanders. "A mouse weighs about 20g and drinks about 5 ml water a day, so an intake of 1% of these additives corresponds to an intake of 50mg/d or 2500 mg/kg."
"This is comparable to an intake 150,000 mg in a 60 kg adult which is 250 times greater than the ADI."
So yes, if you eat 150 grams a day of carboxymethyl cellulose E466 and polysorbate-80 E433, they’re bad for you.
Appearance aside (and this is the English language, remember), it’s pronounced “yiff”. The act of posting these images is called “yiffing.” Now, post a couple, and tell all your co-workers what you’ve been doing on the weekends!
First off: Nothing was intended to be hostile. It’s really not. I’ve often said that I can come across as arguing or being an asshole, not because I’m actively doing either of these things, but mostly because I tend to use people’s statements as springboards and tend to forget to equivocate. I’m getting better, but I still stuck at it.
Even when I was frustrated in the second reply, it wasn’t intended to be a damning indictment of everything you ever said or stood for. My first reply was very much intended to be a broad point that was using your remark as a jumping-off point for a discussion about relative-risk as a concept that is never (to my mind) presented in a manner that satisfactorily encapsulates the utter inanity of human tendencies to make bad choices. Not just you. Me. Everyone. We are literally hardwired to make bad statistical choices. I even do it when it comes to food, but it comes down to eating sugar instead of using artificial sweeteners, for piss-poor reasons. It was never an attack. It was an appeal to bring everyone to the same conversation: One about relative risk, as it regards our priorities both as individuals and as a society. I do believe we have a disagreement, but it’s the kind of fine-grained discrimination about priorities that may be fun to talk about and debate, but in a navel-gazey way.
Finally with regards to your credentials… I’ve stopped caring about those, in a way. As I get older I’ve learned that experience is a truer guide, and I don’t have any when it comes to epidemiology. I try to keep the logic sound, and go from there.
Finally, I don’t claim to be immune from this impulse:
well the first link seems to say the opposite of your claim, the EU report says what I said it would say, that there’s no evidence of any harm, and the third one only relates to breathing the compound in at the factory they use/make the stuff in, so not really applicable to foodstuffs (where the concentrations would be significantly lower). I only quickly scanned these, so please point out if I’ve missed anything.
