/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3388849]

So /sci/, my mother recently started working for a company that sell organic, all natural, etc. foods. Which means she's constantly going on and on about all the bad shit that people are doing to food. I'm coming to you to get the facts. So far, all I can tell about where she's wrong is GMO's. I GMO's are good (not that I'd tell her), but everything else she says is bad really is bad. There are a couple things I'm on the fence about, however.
-High Fructose Corn Syrup (my research says it's no worse than any other sugar).
-GMO's, pesticides, and "chemicals" are causing the increase in food and latex allergies.
So tell me, /sci/, what is actually wrong with our food? Actually, to make things go faster, what's right with out food that people are saying is wrong?

[Trap No.3388887]

High fructose corn syrup isn't a GMO, it was made way before GMO crops started being a viable idea

Food allergies are as far as I'm aware a matter of increased reporting, increased access to a variety of foods (bet there were no recorded soy allergies in 100 A.C.E England right?) and OCD mothers showering their houses with cleansers so that kids aren't exposed to dirt and junk

[Anonymous No.3388886]

There's one I can think straight of, the bastardization of food supplies leads to more sugary/starchy/watery foods but they're less nutritious. This is easily remedied by multivitamins.

As for GMO, the only dangerous ones are the ones with pesticides and shit built in. 95-99% of the effects of pesticides don't effect anyone though. "Maybe" birth defects and developmental disorders, except we have no evidence that nearly any mental disorders we know of can be directly caused by anything except outright drug abuse. For GMO crops, alot of the worry is almost like homeopathy except bad for you.

The worst parts of GMO are from the legal side, but that's another topic.

[Anonymous No.3388895]

Brian Dunning over at Skeptoid does a pretty good job of examining the urban myths and marketing strategies of anti-gmo'ers, you can read or listen.

http://skeptoid.com/episode_guide.php?cat=9

[Anonymous No.3388902]

>>3388887
Yeah, the overcleanliness is a major cause of allergies, and modern research suggest a large number of juvenile diabetes cases are caused by an autoimmune disorder

A neat thing about "GMO" crops, besides corn: We've been selecting breeding plants for millenia, and when they developed inheritance theories they developed hybrids, then developed polyploidy plants as pretty much necessary, as they result in better tasting, larger, and easier to grow food.

Tell her about Luther Burbank, the father of modern plant eugenics, though not in so colorful words.

[OP No.3388905]

>>3388887
Sorry if I implied that I thought HFCS was a GMO. This is meant to be a thread about bad food in general.

[Anonymous No.3388906]

>>3388849
GMO's started good, but it'll end badly.

[Anonymous No.3388919]

>>3388906
Since the global food distribution economy is so severely fucked, GMO is pretty much the only way we're going to avoid destroying all the world's farmland with fertiliser and ruining all the water.

[Anonymous No.3388941]

>>3388919
Two of the nice improvements, though I don't think they were widely implemented:

Citric Acid (or was it ascorbic) in apples. Improves shelf life and bug resistance.

Nitrogen fixation enhancers or nitrogen fertilizer absorption enhancers. Shit could cut nitrogen runoff incredibly well.

[Anonymous No.3388955]

>>3388919
Uh, your GMO is specifically made so that you can spray the shit tone of pesticides on the land and sitll grow your piece of shit cotton in egypt.

Try again, gmo's ain't preserving the soil.

[Anonymous No.3388961]

here's the deal with high fructose corn syrup:

you got your natural cane sugars and whatnot, that are roughly 55% glucose and 45% fructose

then you have high fructose corn syrup, which is roughly 45% glucose and 55% fructose

the exact same two chemicals, just in slightly different ratios. what happened was, back when the factory process for making high fructose corn syrup was invented, the cane sugar industry knew it was about to get boned so hard. they were literally about to get completely removed from the earth. so they started this whole campaign that went a little like this: "high fructose corn syrup is made in a test tube! thats bad! our natural sugar comes plants! like nature intended! so that means its better for you right!"

and it just kind of went from there

[Anonymous No.3388981]

GMO's are fine as food products, it's the bullshit that Monsanto did to small farmers that sickens my stomach.

It's only anecdotal evidence, but HFCS makes me feel terrible. Drinks with only sucrose give me feverish symptoms and a stimulant effect. Fruit and fruit drinks without added sugar never negatively effect me at all.

Pesticides are nasty because they wind up in your food.

Aspartame has been used as a nerve gas and has been associated with brain lesions.

I only eat organic food to get away from preservatives and pesticides. If Monsanto didn't have a patent on their genes, I'd be 100% behind their higher-producing crops.

[Anonymous No.3388998]

I thought that HFCS has a higher ratio of Fructose, which has to be processed in the liver, which causes an increase in triglycerides - then the beetus comes faster.

[sage No.3389004]

>>3388981
Just wait till mosanto gets their terminator seeds. Say good bye to natural plant life.

[OP No.3389015]

>>3388895
Skeptoid did a good job of convincing me that nothing that can be legally done to plants is harmful. What about animals? Anitbiotics, factory farming, grossly inappropriate diets. Whatever "organic" meats don't have done to them, they certainly taste better. And yes, I've done blind taste tests.

[Anonymous No.3389028]

>>3388981
>fruit and fruit drinks without added sugar, congrats, all you said was drinking 50% or less sugar in your drinks doesn't make you sick. Guess what, all sweetened sodas, artificially or naturally, make me sick over 12oz.

Peticides are not proven harmful at the amount they are purported to show up in food, let alone is the food tested for actual pesticide levels.

Aspartame has NEVER been shown to cause ANY bodily alterations except slightly increased insulin tolerance in large-scale studies. Nobody cares the government did over 300 studies on aspartame, they just like the 1 which shows something goes wrong. Guess what, statistically we should have a study that has 100% of the participants dying from brain cancer within days of ingesting aspartame. Why? Because we've conducted so many fucking studies.

Anyway, we can use neotame. Look that shit up. And besides, aspartame isn't GMO.

One of the sad little facts: Regardless of what you think of non-organic crops, they produce 4x the food as organic crops per area. We don't have enough arable farmland on the earth to feed our current eating population with the same diets

[Anonymous No.3389031]

>>3389004

Illinois/Chicago mang here. The big 3, Monsanto, Cargill and ADM will destroy whole towns, whole ways of life without even hesitating if it makes them slightly higher profit margins.

I know this is a bit off topic, but there is an ethical economic factor that other anons have been hinting at in this thread.

By not purchasing, or searching for alternative methods of consumption, you take the dollar out of these companies.

The food market as is, cannot be sustained, and it's harmful for people in a tremendous amount of ways.

If the human population grows by 2% a year, and a business needs to grow exponentially to keep investors happy, the amount of food that needs to be produced and sold - the amount of corn, the amount of waste, the amount of products has to exponentially increase as well.

Kraft foods controls over 50% of the world's processed food.

This shit will kill you. Your mother, while not necessarily being the most rational about why she distrusts these things, is right about not trusting them.

[OP No.3389035]

>>3389028
> isn't GMO.
Don't give a fuck. This thread is about everything wrong with food.

[Anonymous No.3389037]

Shut up and quit trying to fight your mother because
1) she is a woman and does not respond to rationality
2) you sound like a 13 year old who's pissed off

That being said, for all the other people who buy into organic foods, it's a total scam
- they end up using tons more "natural" pesticides because it's not as effective (shit can still harm you even if it's natural)
- the food isn't any higher quality at all. A saccharide is a saccharide and a lipids a lipid. The chemical structure of your food isn't going to change
- the crop output isn't as big, especially with the new fad where people only buy from 30 miles away or whatever the shit. It harms the environment even more because the place just isn't suited to growing certain things and way more water/fertilizer/whatever is used than just shipping food from elsewhere. Also the farmers hate it. But that's what people want to buy nowadays

[Anonymous No.3389038]

>>3389015
>blind taste tastes
So blinded scientists served you and a substantial other population with five-ten say, 1 oz stakes periodically over a period of years/decade, controlling for breed, cooking method, tissue content, etc?

[Anonymous No.3389049]

>>3389031
>Kraft food controls over 50% of processed food
How... is that bad? They made money selling food and bought out companies like CADBURY and used their recipes to make more money. They were the winners. Are you honestly saying their foods are worse simply because they're a bigger company?

[Anonymous No.3389059]

>>3389028
If we were all vegetarians, we'd be able to support our population on the same, or less, amount of farmland. Most people it 1st level Consumers, which take 10% of the energy from the plants. For every pound of beef, you're only getting like 1/10 the caloric value of a pound of feed.

Thus, we have to eat more just to maintain.

Regardless of what you think about vegetarianism, there are only benefits to reducing your red meat intake to once or twice a week.

[Anonymous No.3389058]

General opposition to GMOs is framed in it being 'unnatural', which is just purpose-based reasoning inspired by religious nonsense. Many GMOs such as golden rice can prevent millions of people from suffering needless misery, and NOT creating them would arguably be disgustingly immoral. In general, moving around molecules in a directed way instead of haphazardly is fine.

However, I don't really want spermicides in experimental non-food grade corn outcrossing with wild populations so that people end up eating it. The general public has little to no knowledge of plant genetics (spontaneous reversal of sterility, etc) or how their food is produced. This simply means that we have to be diligent and responsible with the technology, just like any other technology on earth. Proper regulatory bodies are a challenge, but they also are for pharmaceuticals. GMOs do not equal Monsanto, and they can be applied responsibly just like any other advances in genetics.

[Anonymous No.3389065]

>>3389049
>doesn't understand why monopolies are bad

Go take an Econ course

[Anonymous No.3389081]

>>3389059
Except by reducing red meat intake you have to ingest multiple sources of non-meat proteins, as well as the iron, potassium, and other shit like that.

For health things, the only real benefit if you're not a fat fuck is decreased risk of colon cancer.

I'm not against vegetarianism, it's just the shit like you can't get 100% of essential proteins from vegetables. I'm for insects. I'm for ostriches instead of cows. (4:1 feed:meat instead of 6:1 for cows)

I'm still waiting for my artificial meat.

[Anonymous No.3389087]

>>3389037
>a lipids a lipid
>thinks trans isomers and cis isomers work the same way in your body

Have you take an Ochem or Bio course? Like ever?

[Anonymous No.3389096]

>>3389087
>thinks trans isomers and cis isomers don't work the same way in your body
Ever read any research papers?

[Anonymous No.3389093]

>>3389065
>50% without even hard evidence it IS 50%
>doesn't get subsidies
>has no power in government
>monopoly
>mfw EVERY SINGLE WAL-MART HAS CHEAPER GOODS THAT ARE IDENTICAL

[Anonymous No.3389104]

>>3389081
Iron and potassium aren't hard to keep at manageable levels with a diet to compensate. I'm not saying you have to eat spinach every night, but twice a week and red meat once should be more than enough.

I agree though, I was a vegetarian for about a year and I actually didn't like it. I was filling up on grains and while my lifts were all going up in the gym (even though I didn't eat meat), I was putting on fat.

Now I eat meat 2-3 times a week, once red, and honestly it feels a lot better.

[Anonymous No.3389120]

>>3389096
trans fatty acids reduce the permeability of your cellular membranes, while cis fatty acids increase it

that's why trans fats arent very good for you

[Anonymous No.3389124]

>>3389096
>Analysis of 12 randomized trials totaling more than 500 subjects showed that, compared with equal calories from saturated or cis unsaturated fats, consuming trans fatty acids increases low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, lowers levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and increases the ratio of total to HDL cholesterol, blood triglyceride levels, and levels of Lp(a) lipoprotein. There is evidence that trans fats promote inflammation through increases in tumor necrosis factor α, interleukin-6, and C-reactive protein. Trans fats may, in addition, cause endothelial dysfunction.

On a per-calorie basis, trans fats reportedly increase the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) more than any other macronutrient.
>http://journals.lww.com/obgynsurvey/Abstract/2006/08000/Trans_Fatty_Acids_and_Cardiovascular_Dis
ease.20.aspx

Are you even trying?

[Anonymous No.3389125]

>>3389087
Of course I have fag, excuse me for generalizing.
All I'm trying to say is that your cow is going to make the same beef, nutrition-wise, whether it grows up open field or huddled in a shed next to hundreds of other cows.
Also inb4 feeding cows fucked up shit and giving them diseases that they can pass onto humans

[Anonymous No.3389128]

>>3389104
Something that really needs to be done is flat out telling people grains are bad for you. Yeah a potato a week or two won't kill you, but 6-11 cups of grains or whatever they were trying to peddle before would kill you, fast.

I've been considering trying to make a snack/dessert line based on konjac gel/glucomannan and neotame.

[Anonymous No.3389134]

>>3389125
Maybe you should write more clearly then and use less unsubstantiated rhetoric.

[Anonymous No.3389147]

>>3389059
>>3389065
>>3389031
Yes.

[Anonymous No.3389149]

>>3389124
>pointing out shit we already agree is bad, so much so that it's fucking in law already
>thinks that's what we're talking about
We're talking about the shit like that fructose from corn is different from fructose in apples. He was just exaggerating. We can produce oils from tons of shit, and even produce fats from of course, hydrogenating oils. That doesn't make the fat from coconuts different from vegetable based fats, when we filter out the trans and control for chain lengths, which STILL makes it cheaper than organic fats.

[Anonymous No.3389151]

>>3389128
I think it depends on what grains. For instance, oats are ridiculously good for you, while white bread of course isn't.

Also, depending on a person's physical activity level they'll need different amounts of grains. In an endurance athelete, it's not uncommon to see large amounts of grains prior to events for carbo-loading.

[Anonymous No.3389163]

>>3389149
I quoted the lipids, pointed out his fallacious argument, then someone else asked for research papers. So yes, that's what we were talking about at that particular time, research papers on trans fats vs. cis fats.

[Anonymous No.3389167]

>>3389134
Verily

[Anonymous No.3389184]

ITT: I know what is better for me and the world but fuck all dat, meat and potato chips taste GOOD (aka spoiled amerifat syndrome)

/thread