Oh, no argument there. But the things people call “fruit salad” (or similar) are not always that simple (though I think the worst stretches of the term are usually a southern U.S. regional thing).
The first link is just basic info, not much to back up my claim but it does establish the classifications used by the following links so I thought it a good starting point.
What the following 2 studies show is that the risk is minimal to negligible in most cases. What I find important about them is that they both state that they were unable to determine definite safety or danger. To me, this is a big red flag. If you cannot show your food additive is safe, it should not be in food IMO. The FDA on the other hand seems to be operating under the “we haven’t proved it’s dangerous yet but we will ban it when we do” model that they’ve been accidentally killing us with for the past 100 odd years. I’m not convinced that’s a good model.
Here is a study point more towards your concerns of food safety. The important part of this study is that the focus in on the chemical as used in foods and the effect thereof. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf201819x
Here we have a confirmed human case of an asthma attack brought on by the chemical confirmed by specific inhalation challenge http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15119006 This is in stark contrast to the studies used by the FDA claiming no such risk exists.
This study relates to the veterinary drug nitrofurazone which was banned due to it metabolizing to semicarbazide or SEM which has known carcinogenic effects and azodicarbonamide (ADC) which produces SEM as a break down product. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19819287 Oral intake produced measurable differences.
And finally, four cases of occupational exposure http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1009725/
These studies lead me to believe the jury is still out on azodicarbonamide and many of these authors seem to agree. Knowing there is a potential for problems, why would we choose to introduce such a chemical in to our food supply? It seems prudent to avoid it and I applaud the Food Babe for trying to educate us about what we eat - hyperbole and all.
It’s not merely hyperbole though. It’s incorrect information used to promote sponsors’ products.
2 Likes
My apologies in advance, but with all the ‘Babes’ floating around in articles and comments, I misread your name as ActionBabe. Frankly, I was disappointed when I realised it was Abe. 
6 Likes
Yeah, but his avatar has a picture of Kurt Vonnegut, so that makes up for it not being “babe”…
3 Likes
Ingredients with chemical names simply aren’t popular enough to have a common name created for them. Sodium bicarbonate (E500 for EUers) is a man-made chemical and used in fire extinguishers, but no one blinks twice about using baking soda.
5 Likes
The problem with that is that a broken clock is right twice a day…but it’s not right for the right reason; it’s broken. Whether her arguments are based on actual problems is meaningless. They’re flat out wrong, they’re broken. As with the clock, her arguments should be fixed or discarded.
3 Likes
Which is a good reminder. I think I’m better off reading a decent book than the output of either of these ‘babes’.
4 Likes
Exactly! Since I use precisely zero pesticides in my organic garden, I’d use negative pesticides for GM vegetables. I could raise them and extract pesticides from them! But honestly I am more interested in cheap fresh veg.
If find Science Babe slightly less repulsive than Food Babe, but only slightly. And having someone suffering from celiac disease telling me they are an authority on what I should or shouldn’t eat seems a bit strange. It’s like people taking sex advice from the Pope, I can’t understand that either.
1 Like
I say “Jiff” when i’m pronouncing it for myself. “Giff” when i’m saying it to other people to avoid the entire argument about which is correct.
2 Likes
Personally I use the valar nasal ‘ŋ’, as in “sing”, for “ŋiff” or Ngiff".
1 Like
Your issue appears to be one with philosophy, and it hampers your understanding of the topic and greater scientific/medical concerns.
1 Like
Grilled foods are not safe.
Ethanol is incredibly unsafe.
Methanol, in every naturally fermented adult beverage… Well it can kill you.
Ocean caught fish can give you mercury poisoning.
It is the hyperbole that is nauseating.
2 Likes
Grapefruit and SSRIs aren’t safe.
Organic spinach isn’t safe (hello ecoli!!)
Canned, low acid veg isn’t safe.
Blowfish isn’t safe.
Life is literally trying to kill us. And I am okay with that.
2 Likes
As long as you purposely extract and concentrate the tiny amounts of methanol, sure. Otherwise you’ll die from ethanol poisoning, or some indirect consequence of extreme drunkenness, long before the methanol gets you.
This message brought to you by NATIONAL BEER DAY! Hoist a pint of tasty toxins to celebrate passage of the Cullen–Harrison Act.
2 Likes
Aren’t those the foreshots and a proportion of the heads?
(Showing my hand, runs away!!)
1 Like
Mmm, two of those things we stick warning labels on in the US and the third we ban outright in high concentrations.
Some additives added to food are bad for you. Some we banned because they were incredibly bad for you. Some we stick warning labels on because they are only bad in high doses. I personally don’t want to return to a world where lead acetate was regularly used as a sweetener.
I feel like this thread has gone anti-Science in the opposite direction. Sure this woman is fear mongering about things because they have chemical sounding names, but that doesn’t mean that everything all of a sudden is just as safe as grapefruit for goodness sakes.
1 Like
I wasn’t implying that.
(Grabs a cold pressed, silicone filtered beer)
I don’t doubt that emulsifiers and other additives affect one’s microorganisms in ways differently than they affect the one’s body directly. Everything else you ingest does, so why not the emulsifiers?
So what I think is going to happen is, as with a lot of other high-tech stuff like nuclear energy, people are going to fool around with it and fool around with it until something really bad happens, and then they’ll get really excited and overreact the other way. And I don’t want to be part of the soap opera, thanks. I have other things to do than worry about whether my carrots contain strange chemicals with commas and numbers in their names, or pig genes. Well, maybe I could use the predicament as the basis for some kind of Kafka parody.
‘One day, after a night of troubled dreams, Gregor Samsa awoke to find out that he had been transformed in his sleep into a giant radioactive semi-intelligent carrot…’
