No, what’s lazy is taking this person’s word for an alarmist article, when she is known to have spouted unscientific and factually wrong substance behind something that at the top level is factually true. The last instance where she has gained notoriety was when she pointed out that Subway bread contains azodicarbonamide. Yes, it was an additive to the bread. Yes it’s also used in yoga mat production. No, it doesn’t mean that azodicarbonamide is automatically bad because it’s used in the same process; water is used in both as well.
Comparing different nation’s labeling is also very disingenuous without digging into seeing if there’s other requirements for labeling, if, for example, the UK doesn’t need to label what is in the cooking oil. From the ingredient list, it looks like that is the case, as the UK one just says “vegetable oil”, and doesn’t have a breakdown of what vegetation made that oil (like the US list does). They could very well have the anti-foaming agent in there, or a different one as well.
Mark, I’ve had a lot of respect for you; please don’t spread this chemophoibic claptrap. There’s a lot of reasons to hate fast food and McDonald’s in specific. It tastes bland and generic, it is loaded with salt and fat engineered in a way to get our brains to want more, but don’t go being chemophobic and link to stuff like this. It’s not toxic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14555417
That kind of short attention span is part of how Food Babe fools people. She takes things like ingredient lists and misrepresents them, and her followers ignore the details that show the vacuity of her claims, kind of like you are doing.
Well, yes. When a person is a known liar and has lied about everything, they are no longer credible and should therefore not be used to promote anything at all related to the subject in which they have lied about in the past. Because they are not reliable. At all. And there are other sources which are.
Food Babe is DEMONSTRATIVELY anti-science. Why would you even begin to take her seriously?
Man, if you’re concerned about polydimethylsiloxanes, then I’m not sure what this world’s coming to. That shit is the definition of unreactivity. We use that crap as laxatives and nonreactive antifoams for a reason. Hell, that goes into beer fermentation vessels, and leaves having passed through unchanged.
Also, what the hell is with your link to excitotoxins. Better than 3/4 of the links don’t work and the only one that does was written by a second-year student at some science-woo natural nutrition institute. I also took the liberty of looking up the journals some of the other studies appear to have been published in, like Medical Sentinel. From Wikipedia:
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a politically conservative non-profit association founded in 1943 to “fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine.” The group was reported to have approximately 4,000 members in 2005, and 5,000 in 2014. Notable members include Ron Paul and John Cooksey; the executive director is Jane Orient, a member of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
The AAPS motto, “omnia pro aegroto” is Latin for “all for the patient.” AAPS also publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (formerly known as the Medical Sentinel). The Journal is not indexed by mainstream scientific databases such as the Web of Science or MEDLINE. The quality and scientific validity of articles published in the Journal has been widely criticized, and many of the political and scientific viewpoints advocated by AAPS are considered extreme or dubious by mainstream scientists and medical groups.
There’s probably a good reason I’ve never heard of this classification despite dealing with the supposed culprits on several jobs. How about we drop the pretense that this is anything but a bunch of bullshit, and that hydrolyzed wheat is no more dangerous than cornstarch, because that’s basically what it is - just the wheat counterpart to what I use to bread my fish.
What many people are worried about is that the Food Babe is not that her specific facts are wrong, it’s that the facts she quotes are irrelevant to the conclusion she draws. She’s saying “ingredient X is in thing Y you don’t eat. Therefore thing X is bad.” (Note that this ignores the fact that silly putty is given to children; it’s considered safe to accidentally ingest). The argument is the same as “water is in acid rain. Therefore water is bad to ingest.”
The segment you quoted includes “this man-made chemical was never intended to be consumed by humans.” It doesn’t matter if the chemical was originally made for human consumption or not. Chemicals don’t know what they were designed for, or even if they were designed! What matters is if they’re harmful.
So let’s get to that. This chemical, dimethylpolysiloxane, is FDA-approved for use in food. A study on it (yes, from 1975) found that, in rats, amounts 100 times the size the FDA allows have “no toxicological effect” on rats, and estimates the daily acceptable intake as “0-1.5 mg/kg bw” (or 1.5 grams per every 1 kilogram you weigh).
If the Food Babe had an argument along the lines of “this is unhealthy and in our food”, there wouldn’t be an outcry. Or even if it were just a preference, she wouldn’t get such criticism. But instead, she makes irrelevant arguments and priviliges the hypothesis.
You are arguing with me about something I don’t give a fuck about. If this ingredient list had been wrong I would have corrected it and called Food Babe out for it. As far as I can tell the ingredient list is correct. If you want to start a BBS topic about Food Babe’s lies, go right ahead. If you want to continue to talk about how awful Food Babe is here, go ahead. Like I said - the thing that interested me was 14 ingredients in the US vs 4 in the UK.
Can’t you at least attack me for my excitotoxins woo?
Are you kidding me? It’s not lazy. It’s REASONABLE.
I mean, would you listen to ANYTHING Andrew Wakefield had to say about vaccines? I sure as fuck wouldn’t. Why? Because he’s been found to be a liar and a fabricator of facts, more than once. Just like Food Babe.
There are other, actual EXPERTS and sources out there. To rely on a known liar and anti-science nut, you are the one being lazy, particularly when it’s not that damn hard to find actual credible sources.
Or because our capacity for etymological misunderstanding makes us unable to deal with a plant whose name means “turnip” in every romance language, hence the rebranding to canola after low ecrucic acid varieties were developed in North America…
Seriously? Are you kidding me here? You link to someone claiming that something is bad and it is highlighted as bad and you ask why we need this in the first place and all you are saying is “show me that I’m wrong about the lists”. You make a click-baity, reactionist headline for it and everything. And then people tell you the differences and why we shouldn’t take the original post seriously because they are known to involve anti-science scare tactics then you disregard those who are critical of your choice in posting this?
If you really are just curious and not trying spread chemophobia, make the comparisons yourself without linking to a known charlatan, and instead of making a reactionary headline, ask people in the know why this might be the case. Simple answer is: different labeling laws, different requirements for preservation, the UK lacks the regulation for labeling the cooking oil ingredients.
Unlike FoodBabe, was giving you the benefit of the doubt. Sigh…
However, 14 vs 4 is only interesting in context of what it actually means and why, and your source, who’s opinion on that you quoted extensively, is a known unreliable source when it comes to context. If you were really only interested in the number of ingredients then you wouldn’t have posted Food Babe’s “explanation”, just the ingredients lists.
You’re right. There are 14 ingredients in the US, and 4 in the UK. The question is, does it actually matter? Are the extra ingredients in American fries (technically, in the oil used to cook American fries, but found in the fries after cooking so it’s kinda moot I guess) actually dangerous? Or do they offer some benefit (ie, reducing the costs in some way) at zero cost (ie danger) to the consumer? These are the questions we should be asking, instead of saying things like “OMG there’s also a chemical found in silly putty in there!”
The tone of your post (and the linked post) is very much “OMG these chemicals are bad for us” and since it’s from the Food Babe, yes, obviously, we are all going to call you out on that. The ingredient lists appear to be correct (though I don’t know if the UK is required to list all of the ingredients in vegetable oil, so we may be missing some things on the UK side), but the conclusion drawn from these ingredient lists is very far from factual.
Re: Silicone oils, apparently the reason European regulations don’t allow silicone oils is not that they’re unhealthful but apparently because it masks the natural foaming of high-free fatty acid oils when things are fried. In other words, it’s to make regulators’ jobs a little easier when inspecting fryers to ensure that they’re using sufficiently fresh oil, nothing to do with health. http://aocs.files.cms-plus.com/inform/1993/12/1366.pdf
Everything is made of chemicals, therefore all chemicals are good for you, especially excitotoxins. If you don’t believe that, you are obviously a Jenny-McCarthy-fondling antivaxxing food-babe who believes that autism is the result of isinglass in beer. Bow down before your corporatist shill masters, you herbert!
You are not of the body - herbert, herbert, herbert!
At least so far as I’m concerned, whether the ingredients list quoted was correct is less relevant than the ludicrous “OMG chemicals!!” commentary on them, which reads like the classic ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ scare story.
