Healthy Eating, headache or hobby?

[Kate G]

I remember a long time ago...  I would occasionally hear something like, "Did you hear, it just came out, they found out that Coffee is bad for you?  Or, "Did you hear, they just found out, Chocolate is good for you." "Red wine is good for you."  Etc., etc.  And then months later someone would say, "This just out, Coffee is good for you!"

When I think about it now back then it was like I was someone in grade school, trying to understand the ins and outs of high school and I was constantly relying on second hand information for my perception, for my understanding.  But when it came to food and what was good and what was bad for me, what it came down to was that it was just a lot of hype.  It was a distraction much like bad television sitcoms.  It was a lot of noise about nothing and what it taught me was that I couldn't trust the people I was getting my information from.

Did you ever see the movie 'The Matrix'?  It is like there are all these people who are really just hooked up to machines and they are being used as human batteries in order to fuel an alien species that has taken over planet Earth.  They are allowed to dream, virtual lives while they are kept immobile, hooked up to tubes, fed the remains of their brothers and sisters who have died.  But the illusion the virtual life provides can seem so rich or elegant or comfortable that given the chance someone who escaped the Matrix might choose to go back, be made unconscious, used as fuel for an alien society, fed the remains of his dead brothers and sisters and be allowed to exist only in dreamscape, in an illusion where the individual can forget all about what is real and be entertained by what is virtual.

And if you look around you today and if you really relax from your thoughts, from your desires, from the pressure, from the noise... and if you really take a good look around you, you  may find that this world is all about being distracted, but there is something real that we are missing or being distracted away from.  Something real that goes unseen, unheard, unvisited, unknown.  But deep down inside of you, you may realize that something is missing and eventually you may begin to realize that the distractions being pumped into you while you exist... possibly as a slave to a system that has determined at birth how much revenue you can generate for the machine, a machine that seeks to distract you away from what is real...

Anyway... the times they are changing all the time.  Perhaps if you look at the world today you might notice that the world is being junked up with chain stores, fast food and gas stations.  Maybe if you were so rich that money wasn't even a consideration but if you were sent to the best schools and helped along by unseen societies then you might begin to take a more dismal view of the common man and of the common woman and you might determine that the world would be a much better place if it was cleaned up of dead beat dads, druggies, low income families and common folk.  And if you were highly connected to unseen societies which are really just people, ultra rich families who perhaps owned all of the lending institutions and the largest corporations, essentially the people who buy our elected officials and government institutions then you might come up with a solution for cleaning up the planet of the people who you might consider less evolved.

If you care to do the research you can learn about a document called United Nations Agenda 21 which calls for a 90-95% reduction in the human population.  Or check out the Georgia Guide stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones  Anyway...  I really don't want to get into that.  All I really want to do is to cause you to begin to consider the possibility that the good folks who provide you with food may not be interested in your health and that ultimately you are responsible for your own health.

So try something.  Today I was considering having some green olives with my meal so I went to the fridge and grabbed a jar of green olives but having been health conscious for some time I just felt like those green olives weren't really very good for me so I decided to read the label and then I decided to look up Potassium Sorbate and I came up with this...

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-potassium-sorbate-bad-for-you/

The Computer age was a while ago and it is rumored that we are moving in to the Robotic age.  Essentially we already have lots of robots doing all kinds of jobs that people used to do just as we have a lot of computers doing jobs the people used to do.  Well actually most of the robotic jobs are in China right now since for the most part they do production jobs and when was the last time you saw something that was made in America?  But in a world where Corporations and lending institutions and the Military Industrial Complex have bought and paid for our elected officials and government institutions and when there is a public agenda to reduce the Earth's population by 90-95%, do you really believe that because someone tells you that Aspartame is safe that it really is?

We are told all kinds of things, maybe we need to begin taking note of who is telling us what?  What is the motivation?  But even that tends to be complicated, how many of us have the time to do the research necessary?  Most of us are naturally lazy and if you are eating food found in cans and boxes and wrappers you can probably add lethargic to that or maybe brain fog.



Lots of people prefer to throw up their hands in the air and say things like, "Well everything is bad for us so who cares, breathing is bad for you, etc."

But really there is a war on and this war is killing more people than any war ever fought before on this planet.  There is a war on your health.  A silent war, the kind of war that really smart people would engineer, an invisible war with invisible casualties. 

[Kate G]

I have decided that I need to pay more careful attention to ingredients.  Today I read the list of ingredients of my favorite hot sauce and noticed Sodium Benzoate.

Believe me, there is a war on your health and the More I look, the more I find.

Sodium benzoate is a preservative that promotes cancer and kills healthy cells
http://www.naturalnews.com/033726_sodium_benzoate_cancer.html

Coca-Cola to Phase Out Toxic Sodium Benzoate in the U.K.
http://www.naturalnews.com/024197_sodium_benzoate_Coca-Cola.html

If you trust your health to corporations and the FDA you are as good as dead, it may take a while but you will experience it as poor health and eventually disease or obesity.  I can't afford health insurance or to be sick so I can't afford to continue to be ignorant or irresponsible when it comes to my health.

[Danielle Emmalee]

Not really interested in debating it but unless you are drinking half a bottle of hot sauce daily I'm pretty sure you're okay.

[KabitTarah]

Not really interested in debating it but unless you are drinking half a bottle of hot sauce daily I'm pretty sure you're okay.

This is more or less my mantra. Keep everything in perspective.

That said... if there's a healthier alternative (organic, free-range, hot sauce) that doesn't cost 3x the price, go for that.

My philosophy is just to eat healthier than when I was closeted. That closet door is what helped me lose 25.2 lbs in just under 6 weeks. I have a way to go (and the loss has slowed down a lot...). (My 5 step program starts with coming out of the closet, of course - the book comes out in June).

Basically I guess I see a very broad spectrum of eating habits. Having a salad or two daily for my big meals, with Greek yogurt and Kashi cereal for breakfasts, may not be the best plan... but it's healthfulness is above and beyond where I was 2 months ago. For "fun" I had a left-over chicken nugget last night (next up... changing how/what the kids eat). It tasted like a salt lick. Eating habits are what's important.

Healthful eating and nutrition is a game of diminishing returns. If you're already healthy and want to make it even better... watch the ingredients and buy organic... for me, that's nice stuff that costs a lot - where my sometimes-organic romaine and warehouse-store (fresh) chicken isn't going to do much to me given what I've done to myself over the last 35 years.

Edit: I do also make my own healthy salad dressings. You can use a lot more dressing and not add a ton of calories. My favorite recipe: http://www.straightupfood.com/blog/2013/04/26/caesar-y-salad/

[DriftingCrow]

Headache or hobby? What about lifestyle.

Like Alice and Kabit indicated, everything needs to be in perscective. I try to eat fresh, unprocessed foods daily, and to live a little once in awhile I eat something "bad". That "bad" thing isn't going to kill me or make me ill. People say eating healthy is expensive, but its not. Find a discount grocer, get the fliers, make extra food to refrigerate .

There's a new documentary coming out called "GMOs OMG" , it seems like something you would be interested in.

Edit: typo

[Kate G]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/03/joseph-mercola/how-much-toxic-fluoride-is-in-your-food/

Add Fluoride, and Other Chemicals Become More Dangerous...

Interestingly, not to mention importantly, fluoride has the ability to affect other toxins and heavy metals; in some cases making them even more harmful than they would be on their own. For example, when you combine chloramines with the hydrofluorosilicic acid added to the water supply, they become very effective at extracting lead from old plumbing systems – essentially, together; they promote the accumulation of lead in the water supply!

"In fact the two of them have been combined, and I believe patented to be put together so that they could extract lead," Green says. "... In fact, you've seen from reports in Washington D.C. about the lead content [in the local water] that this combination can have tremendous effects."

Studies have also showed that hydrofluorosilicic acid increases lead accumulation in bone, teeth, and other calcium-rich tissues. According to Green, this is because the free fluoride ion acts as a transport of heavy metals, allowing them to enter into areas of your body they normally would not be able to go, such as into your brain.

"Industry prizes what we call fluoride compounds," Green says. "What's amazing is there is so much [information] out there that's never explained to the general public. But [fluoride] is... the most aggressive seeker of another electron. It's the most electromagnetically negatively charged element in the entire world. It basically is the most interactive of all the elements... It will give up whatever it's with to be with something else...

So it's prized by industry because it actually disrupts molecular bonds... Industry also wants it because it creates tighter molecular bonds. So Scotchgard, Stain Master, Gore-Tex, ski gear... These are all fluoride-type compounds as well because they actually make it a tighter molecular bond that is more impervious to penetration.

... By the time you get to the enzyme activity, and knowing what it can do to disrupt enzyme activity, the effects are so widespread, it's just amazing... Once [people] learn the nature of fluoride, they would never want to put it in their water."

What I am proposing is that the accumulated toxins have a more profound effect on health than a single preservative toxin may have and that we typically are not aware of just how many toxins we are ingesting or how those toxins interact with one another.  Opinions are great but what I am really looking for is information and I didn't create this thread for the purpose of debate.  I created this thread to generate awareness and interest in exploring what might otherwise be taken for granted or dismissed out of hand.  I would like to imagine that there may actually be someone out there for whom this information will spark something or begin to generate an awareness or an interest that will beneficially impact someone because I want to do what I can to improve the lives of others.  Feel free to disagree with my opinions or my ideas, in a perfect world all I can really hope for is that someone out there will be begin to take more interest in his or her health and benefit by doing so.

Please try to look at this not as an all-black vs all-white, yes or no, right or wrong argument/debate because really that is all about ego.  Instead I ask for your generosity in looking at it as information, provided for your consideration.  I don't need to be told that I am wrong and I don't need to be told that I am right.  I'm not interested in what other people think I should do, I am interested in what other people know, people who have taken an interest in this topic, people who have invested time and energy in learning more about it. Instead of forming opinions and making judgments I would rather look, listen and learn.  If you want to teach me something I will do my best to be a good student.

We all decide what to do with the information, I don't need to be told what to decide or how to use the information.  I can do that on my own.

[KabitTarah]

What I am proposing is that the accumulated toxins have a more profound effect on health than a single preservative toxin may have and that we typically are not aware of just how many toxins we are ingesting or how those toxins interact with one another.  Opinions are great but what I am really looking for is information and I didn't create this thread for the purpose of debate.  I created this thread to generate awareness and interest in exploring what might otherwise be take for granted or dismissed out of hand.  I would like to imagine that there may actually be someone out there for whom this information will spark something or begin to generate an awareness or an interest that will beneficially impact someone because I want to do what I can to improve the lives of others.  Feel free to disagree with my opinions or my ideas, in a perfect world all I can really hope for is that someone out there will be begin to take more interest in his or her health and benefit by doing so.

Please try to look at this not as an all-black vs all-white, yes or no, right or wrong argument/debate because really that is all about ego.  Instead I ask for your generosity in looking at it as information, provided for your consideration.  I don't need to be told that I am wrong and I don't need to be told that I am right.  I'm not interested in what other people think I should do, I am interested in what other people know, people who have taken an interest in this topic, people who have invested time and energy in learning more about it. Instead of forming opinions and making judgments I would rather look, listen and learn.  If you want to teach me something I will do my best to be a good student.

We all decide what to do with the information, I don't need to be told what to decide or how to use the information.  I can do that on my own.

I hope you don't think any of us were attacking you. The way you phrase this response makes it sound as though we were.

Sorry for misunderstanding. I understand where you're coming from now... but in my opinion there's too much conflicting information out there to make much sense of it. You could spend years perusing these articles on Google Scholar. You could easily get a PhD in nutritional health sciences and not know everything. That doesn't mean this sort of research isn't important!

For us laypeople, the absolute best we can do is to eat all organic, all natural foods as often as possible. I'm currently pursuing a minor (from the unaccredited school in my basement) in gender studies. Add that life complication to my disintegrating family... and the fact that I should be keeping up to date with tech stuff for work (AND I should be working... which I am). I am proud to be a health conscious laywoman.

Good luck with your search for accurate information. It sounds like you're on the right track to finding out your own information on all of this. Formal research may be in order - and maybe you can even publish!

[Kate G]

In the Pipeline

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June 21, 2013
Eight Toxic Foods: A Little Chemical Education
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Posted by Derek

Update: You'll notice in this post that I refer to some sites that the original BuzzFeed article I'm complaining out sends people to, often pointing out that these didn't actually support the wilder claims it's making. Well, the folks at BuzzFeed have dealt with this by taking down the links (!) The article now says: "Some studies linked in the original version of this article were concerning unrelated issues. They have been replaced with information directly from the book Rich Food, Poor Food". But as you'll see below, the studies weren't unrelated at all. So when you read about links to the American Cancer Association or NPR, well, all I can say is that they used to be there, until someone apparently realized how embarrassing they were.

Many people who read this blog are chemists. Those who aren't often come from other branch of the sciences, and if they don't, it's safe to say that they're at least interested in science (or they probably don't hang around very long!) It's difficult, if you live and work in this sort of environment, to keep in mind what people are willing to believe about chemistry.

But that's what we have the internet for. Many science-oriented bloggers have taken on what's been called "chemophobia", and they've done some great work tearing into some some really uninformed stuff out there. But nonsense does not obey any conservation law. It keeps on coming. It's always been in long supply, and it looks like it always will be.

That doesn't mean that we just have to sit back and let it wash over us, though. I've been sent this link in the last few days, a popular item on BuzzFeed with the BuzzFeedy headline of "Eight Foods That We Eat in The US That Are Banned in Other Countries". When I saw that title, I found it unpromising. In a world that eats everything that can't get away fast enough, what possible foods could we have all to ourselves here in the States? A quick glance was enough: we're not talking about foods here - we're talking about (brace yourselves) chemicals.

This piece really is an education. Not about food, or about chemistry - on the contrary, reading it for those purposes will make you noticeably less intelligent than you were before, and consider that a fair warning. The educational part is in the "What a fool believes" category. Make no mistake: on the evidence of this article, its author is indeed a fool, and has apparently never yet met a claim about chemicals or nutrition that was too idiotic to swallow. If BuzzFeed's statistics are to be believed (good question, there), a million views have already accumulated to this crap. Someone who knows some chemistry needs to make a start at pointing out the serial stupidities in it, and this time, I'm going to answer the call. So here goes, in order.

Number One: Artificial Dyes. Here's what the article has to say about 'em:

    Artificial dyes are made from chemicals derived from PETROLEUM, which is also used to make gasoline, diesel fuel, asphalt, and TAR! Artificial dyes have been linked to brain cancer, nerve-cell deterioration, and hyperactivity, just to name a few.

Emphasis is in the original, of course. How could it not lapse into all-caps? In the pre-internet days, this sort of thing was written in green ink all around the margins of crumpled shutoff notices from the power company, but these days we have to make do with HTML. Let's take this one a sentence at a time.

It is true, in fact, that many artificial dyes are made from chemicals derived from petroleum. That, folks, is because everything (edible or not) is made out of chemicals, and an awful lot of man-made chemicals are derived from petroleum. It's one of the major chemical feedstocks of the world. So why stop at artificial dyes? The ink on the flyer from the natural-foods co-op is made from chemicals derived from petroleum. The wax coating the paper wrapped around that really good croissant at that little bakery you know about is derived from petroleum.

Now, it's true that more things you don't eat can be traced back to petroleum feedstocks than can things you do eat. That's because it's almost always cheaper to grow stuff than to synthesize it. Synthesized compounds, when they're used in food, are often things that are effective in small amounts, because they're so expensive. And so it is with artificial dyes - well, outside of red velvet cake, I guess. People see the bright colors in cake icing and sugary cereals and figure that the stuff must be glopped on like paint, but paint doesn't have very much dye or pigment in it, either (watch them mix it up down at the hardware store sometime).

And as for artificial colors causing "brain cancer, nerve-cell deterioration, and hyperactivity", well, these assertions range from "unproven" all the way down to "bull>-bleeped-<". Hyperactivity sensitivities to food dyes are an active area of research, but after decades of work, the situation is still unclear. And brain cancer? This seems to go back to studies in the 1980s with Blue #2, where rats were fed the dye over a long period in much larger concentrations (up to 2% of their total food intake) than even the most dedicated junk-food eater could encounter. Gliomas were seen in the male rats, but with no dose-response, and at levels consistent with historical controls in the particular rat strain. No one has ever been able to find any real-world connection. Note that glioma rates increased in the 1970s and 1980s as diagnostic imaging improved, but have fallen steadily since then. The age-adjusted incidence rates of almost all forms of cancer are falling, by the way, not that you'd know that from most of the coverage on the subject.

Number Two: Olestra

This, of course, is Proctor & Gamble's attempted non-calorific fat substitute. I'm not going to spend much time on this, because little or nothing is actually made with it any more. Olestra was a major flop for P&G; the only things (as far as I can tell) that still contain it are some fat-free potato chips. It does indeed interfere with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, but potato chips are not a very good source of vitamins to start with. And vitamin absorption can be messed with by all kinds of things, including other vitamins (folic acid supplements can interfere with B12 absorption, just to pick one). But I can agree with the plan of not eating the stuff: I think that if you're going to eat potato chips, eat a reasonable amount of the real ones.

Number Three: Brominated Vegetable Oil. Here's the article's take on it:

    Bromine is a chemical used to stop CARPETS FROM CATCHING ON FIRE, so you can see why drinking it may not be the best idea. BVO is linked to major organ system damage, birth defects, growth problems, schizophrenia, and hearing loss.

Again with the caps. Now, if the author had known any chemistry, this would have looked a lot more impressive. Bromine isn't just used to keep carpets from catching on fire - bromine is a hideously toxic substance that will scar you with permanent chemical burns and whose vapors will destroy your lungs. Drinking bromine is not just a bad idea; drinking bromine is guaranteed agonizing death. There, see what a little knowledge will do for you?

But you know something? You can say the same thing for chlorine. After all, it's right next to bromine in the same column of the periodic table. And its use in World War I as a battlefield gas should be testimony enough. (They tried bromine, too, never fear). But chlorine is also the major part, by weight, of table salt. So which is it? Toxic death gas or universal table seasoning?

Knowledge again. It's both. Elemental chlorine (and elemental bromine) are very different things than their ions (chloride and bromide), and both of those are very different things again when either one is bonded to a carbon atom. That's chemistry for you in a nutshell, knowing these differences and understanding why they happen and how to use them.

Now that we've detoured around that mess, on to brominated vegetable oil. It's found in citrus-flavored sodas and sports drinks, at about 8 parts per million. The BuzzFeed article claims that it's linked to "major organ system damage, birth defects, growth problems, schizophrenia, and hearing loss", and sends readers to this WebMD article. But if you go there, you'll find that the only medical problems known from BVO come from two cases of people who had been consuming, over a long period, 4 to 8 liters of BVO-containing soda per day, and did indeed have reactions to all the excess bromine-containing compounds in their system. At 8 ppm, it's not easy to get to that point, but a determined lunatic will overcome such obstacles. Overall, drinking several liters of Mountain Dew per day is probably a bad idea, and not just because of the BVO content.

Number Four: Potassium Bromate. The article helpfully tells us this is "Derived from the same harmful chemical as brominated vegetable oil". But here we are again: bromate is different from bromide is different than bromine, and so on. If we're going to play the "made from the same atoms" game, well, strychnine and heroin are derived from the same harmful chemicals as the essential amino acids and B vitamins. Those harmful chemicals, in case you're wondering, are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And to get into the BuzzFeed spirit of the thing, maybe I should mention that carbon is found in every single poisonous plant on earth, hydrogen is the harmful chemical that blew up the Hindenburg, oxygen is responsible for every death by fire around the world, and nitrogen will asphyxiate you if you try to breathe it (and is a key component of all military explosives). There, that wasn't hard - as Samuel Johnson said, a man might write such stuff forever, if only he would give over his mind to it.

Now, back to potassium bromate. The article says, "Only problem is, it's linked to kidney damage, cancer, and nervous system damage". And you'll probably fall over when I say this, but that statement is largely correct. Sort of. But let's look at "linked to", because that's an important phrase here.

Potassium bromate was found (in a two-year rat study) to have a variety of bad effects. This occurred at the two highest doses, and the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) was 6.1 mg of bromate per kilo body weight per day. It's worth noting that a study in male mice took them up to nearly ten times that amount, though, with little or no effect, which gives you some idea of how hard it is to be a toxicologist. Whether humans are more like mice or more like rats in this situation is unknown.

I'm not going to do the whole allometric scaling thing here, because no matter how you do it, the numbers come out crazy. Bromate is used in some (but not all) bread flour at 15 to 30 parts per million, and if the bread is actually baked properly, there's none left in the finished product. But for illustration, let's have someone eating uncooked bread dough at the highest level, just to get the full bromate experience. A 75-kilo human (and many of us are more than that) would have to take in 457 mg of bromate per day to get to the first adverse level seen in rats, which would be. . .15 kilos (about 33 pounds) of bread dough per day, a level I can safely say is unlikely to be reached. Hell, eating 33 pounds of anything isn't going to work out, much as my fourteen-year-old son tries to prove me wrong. You'd need to keep that up for decades, too, since that two year study represents a significant amount of a rat's lifespan.

Number Five: Azodicarbonamide. This is another bread flour additive. According to the article, "Used to bleach both flour and FOAMED PLASTIC (yoga mats and the soles of sneakers), azodicarbonamide has been known to induce asthma".

Let's clear this one up quickly: azodicarbonamide is indeed used in bread dough, and allowed up the 45 parts per million. It is not stable to heat, though, and it falls apart quickly to another compound, biurea, on baking. It not used to "bleach foamed plastic", though. Actually, in higher concentrations, it's used to foam foamed plastics. I realize that this doesn't sound much better, but the conditions inside hot plastic, you will be glad to hear, are quite different from those inside warm bread dough. In that environment, azodicarbonamide doesn't react to make birurea - it turns into several gaseous products, which are what blow up the bubbles of the foam. This is not its purpose in bread dough - that's carbon dioxide from the yeast (or baking powder) that's doing the inflating there, and 45 parts per million would not inflate much of anything.

How about the asthma, though? If you look at the toxicology of azodicarbonamide, you find that "Azodicarbonamide is of low acute toxicity, but repeated or prolonged contact may cause asthma and skin sensitization." That, one should note, is for the pure chemical, not 45 parts per million in uncooked flour (much less zero parts per million in the final product). If you're handling drums of the stuff at the plastics plant, you should be wearing protective gear. If you're eating a roll, no.

Number Six: BHA and BHT. We're on the home stretch now, and this one is a two-fer. BHA and BHT are butylated hydroxyanisole and butylate hydroxytoluene, and according to the article, they are "known to cause cancer in rats. And we're next!"

Well, of course we are! Whatever you say! But the cancer is taking its time. These compounds have been added to cereals, etc., for decades now, while the incidence rates of cancer have been going down. And what BuzzFeed doesn't mention is that while some studies have shown an increase in cancer in rodent models with these compounds, others have shown a measurable decrease. Both of these compounds are efficient free radical scavengers, and have actually been used in animal studies that attempt to unravel the effects of free radicals on aging and metabolism. Animal studies notwithstanding, attempts to correlate human exposure to these compounds with any types of cancer have always come up negative. Contrary to what the BuzzFeed article says, by the way, BHT is indeed approved by the EU.

Weirdly, you can buy BHT in some health food stores, where anti-aging and anti-viral claims are made for it. How does a health food store sell butylated hydroxytoluene with a straight face? Well, it's also known to be produced by plankton, so you can always refer to it as a natural product, if that makes you feel better. That doesn't do much for me - as an organic chemist, I know that the compounds found in plankton range from essential components of the human diet all the way down to some of the most toxic molecules found in nature.

Number Seven: Synthetic Growth Hormones. These are the ones given to cattle, not the ones athletes give to themselves. The article says that they can "give humans breast, colon, and prostate cancer", which, given what's actually known about these substances, is a wildly irresponsible claim.

The article sends you to a perfectly reasonable site at the American Cancer Society, which is the sort of link that might make a BuzzFeed reader think that it must then be about, well, what kinds of cancer these things give you. But have a look. What you find is (first off) this is not an issue for eating beef. Bovine growth hormone (BGH) is given to dairy cattle to increase milk production. OK, so what about drinking milk?

Here you go: for one, BGH levels in the milk of treated cows are not higher than in untreated ones. Secondly, BGH is not active as a growth hormone in humans - it's selective for the cow receptor, not the human one. The controversy in this area comes from the way that growth hormone treatment in cows tends to increase levels of another hormone, IGF-1, in the milk. That increase still seems to be within the natural range of variability for IGF-1 in regular cows, but there is a slight change.

The links between IGF-1 and cancer have indeed been the subject of a lot of work. Higher levels of circulating IGF-1 in the bloodstream have (in some studies) been linked to increased risk of cancer, but I should add that other studies have failed to find this effect, so it's still unclear what's going on. I can also add, from my own experiences in drug discovery, that all of the multiple attempts to treat cancer by blocking IGF-1 signaling have been complete failures, and that might also cause one to question the overall linkage a bit.

But does drinking milk from BGH-treated cows increase the levels of circulating IGF-1 at all? No head-to-head study has been run, but adults who drink milk in general seem to have slightly higher levels. The same effect, though, was seen in people who drink soymilk, which (needless to say) does not have recombinant cow hormones in it. No one knows to what extent ingested IGF-1 might be absorbed into the bloodstream - you'd expect it to be digested like any other protein, but exceptions are known.

But look at the numbers. According to that ACA web summary, even if the protein were not degraded at all, and if it were completely absorbed (both of which are extremely unrealistic top-of-the-range assumptions), and even if the person drinking it were an infant, and taking in 1.6 quarts a day of BGH-derived cow milk with the maximum elevated levels of IGF-1 that have been seen, the milk would still contribute less than 1% of the IGF-1 in the bloodstream compared to what's being made in the human body naturally.

Number Eight, Arsenic. Arsenic? It seems like an unlikely food additive, but the article says "Used as chicken feed to make meat appear pinker and fresher, arsenic is POISON, which will kill you if you ingest enough."

Ay. I think that first off, we should make clear that arsenic is not "used as chicken feed". That brings to mind someone pitching powdered arsenic out for the hens, and that's not part of any long-term chicken-farming plan. If you go to the very NPR link that the BuzzFeed article offers, you find that a compound called roxarsone is added to chicken feed to keep down Coccidia parasites in the gut. It is not just added for some cosmetic reason, as the silly wording above would have you believe.

In 2011, a study found that chicken meat with detectable levels of roxarsone had 2.3 parts per billion (note the "b") of inorganic arsenic, which is the kind that is truly toxic. Chicken meat with no detectable roxarsone had 0.8 ppb inorganic arsenic, threefold less, and the correlation seems to be real. (Half of the factory-raised chickens sampled had detectable roxarsone, by the way). This led to the compound being (voluntarily) withdrawn from the market, under the assumption that this is an avoidable exposure to arsenic that could be eliminated.

And so it is. There are other (non-arsenic) compounds that can be given to keep parasite infestations down in poultry, although they're not as effective, and they'll probably show up on the next edition of lists like this one. But let's get things on scale: it's worth comparing these arsenic levels to those found in other foods. White rice, for example comes in at about 100 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic (and brown rice at 170 ppb). These, by the way, are all-natural arsenic levels, produced by the plant's own uptake from the soil. But even those amounts are not expected to pose a human health risk (says both the FDA and Canadian authorities), so the fifty-fold lower concentrations in chicken would, one thinks, be even less to worry about. If you're having chicken and rice and you want to worry about arsenic, worry about the rice.

This brings me to the grand wrap-up, and some of the language in that last item is a good starting point for it. I'm talking about the "POISON, which will kill you if you ingest enough" part. This whole article is soaking in several assumptions about food, about chemistry, and about toxicology, and that's one of the big ones. In my experience, people who write things like this have divided the world into two categories: wholesome, natural, healthy stuff and toxic chemical poisons. But this is grievously simple-minded. As I've emphasized in passing above, there are plenty of natural substances, made by healthy creatures in beautiful, unpolluted environments, that will nonetheless kill you in agony. Plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals produce poisons, wide varieties of intricate poisons, and they're not doing it for fun.

And on the other side of the imaginary fence, there are plenty of man-made substances that really won't do much of anything to people at all. You cannot assume anything about the effects of a chemical compound based on whether it came from a lovely rainforest orchid or out of a crusty Erlenmeyer flask. The world is not set up that way. Here's a corollary to this: if I isolate a beneficial chemical compound from some natural source (vitamin C from oranges, for example, although sauerkraut would be a good source, too), that molecule is identical to a copy of it I make in my lab. There is no essence, no vital spirit. A compound is what it is, no matter where it came from.

Another assumption that seems common to this mindset is that when something is poisonous at some concentration, it is therefore poisonous at all concentrations. It has some poisonous character to it that cannot be expunged nor diluted. This, though, is more often false than true. Paracelsus was right: the dose makes the poison. You can illustrate that in both directions: a beneficial substance, taken to excess, can kill you. A poisonous one, taken in very small amounts, can be harmless. And you have cases like selenium, which is simultaneously an essential trace element in the human diet and an inarguable poison. It depends on the dose.

Finally, I want to return to something I was saying way back at the beginning of this piece. The author of the BuzzFeed article knows painfully little about chemistry and biology. But that apparently wasn't a barrier: righteous conviction (and the worldview mentioned in the above three paragraphs) are enough, right? Wrong. Ten minutes of unbiased reading would have served to poke holes all through most of the article's main points. I've spent more than ten minutes (as you can probably tell), and there's hardly one stone left standing on another. As a scientist, I find sloppiness at this level not only stupid, not only time-wasting, but downright offensive. Couldn't anyone be bothered to look anything up? There are facts in this world, you know. Learn a few.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_foods_a_little_chemical_education.php

[Kate G]

Not really interested in debating it but unless you are drinking half a bottle of hot sauce daily I'm pretty sure you're okay.

My experience is this...

I looked at some food product I was consuming, I read the ingredients.  Then I looked up the ingredients.  Then I started looking at other foods I ate and I read the ingredients and looked them up.  What I found was that foods in the United States contain lots of poisonous ingredients that have been banned in other countries.  I also found that there is an entire arsenal of poisonous food additives aimed at American consumers and that when combined these toxins tend to have an even more profound effect.  All you really have to do is read what is in your food, look up the weird ingredients.  Make a list of these ingredients you are eating.  I doubt you will ever look at the food you eat the same way ever again.

After looking at everything that is being put into our food and water I can't help but to conclude that it is part of a concerted effort.  The foods that contain the most poisons are foods that poor and low income families eat.  It looks like there is a concerted effort to rid the United States of poor and low income people. I haven't officially decided that this is the situation, it just seems so obvious when you look at what is in the food and who is eating it that it is difficult to avoid arriving at this conclusion (in my experience).  Also the fact that these food additives are banned in other countries...  Americans used to be known for going on about how the United States was the greatest country in the world O_O .  So what is so great about it besides the fact that we love to go to other countries and kill people, take their oil and poison our own citizens food and water?

Some people seem to think that the proof that these toxins aren't hurting us is how you can eat them without dying right away.  But how about lowered IQ, fertility issues and increased likelihood of disease?  If you look at how obesity and diseases are increasing in the United States...  For all we know being trans is a byproduct of ingesting these poisons.  Really we have no idea what we are doing to ourselves or our children.

[paxi1334]

I agree.  Those of us who live in the U.S. are most likely killing ourselves slowly with toxins and preservatives (etc.) and doing who knows what to our bodies, our children, our society, etc.  Most of it pretty much comes down to the fact that we care more about corporations and the almighty dollar than we do about people - about animals - about nature.  I am not saying this as a way to dump on my own country (there is so much about the U.S. that IS good) - however, my humble opinion about U.S. is that our original sin is the greed of capitalism.  To put it bluntly, we get to live off of crap because doing so benefits corporate profit.  Of course, there ARE alternatives - you can shop at Whole Foods, Trader Joes, go out to Fresh City, shop at all organic places (etc.) but there are two important catches: 1. you have to have the knowledge & be able to put it in motion and 2. you have to be able to afford it. 

So where does that leave people who have to rely on things like food stamps and/or food pantries... or people who are so addicted to high fructose corn syrup that their blood sugar(s) rely on this kind of yo-yo danse macabre?  I guess the main question - if healthy eating is not just a hobby but is a matter of life or death - and if you can't really afford it - are there any cheap(er) ways to thrive? 

(I'll be the first to admit I need to do better & be humble enough to accept practical suggestions)

[Kate G]

I didn't think anyone was actually reading this thread O_O .

But I will say this.  I don't eat poisoned foods and I try to avoid GMOs.

Personally I have found that if I fix all my meals and if I don't waste anything, I can eat cheaper than the folks who are living on food stamps.

One thing I do...

I am not a vegetarian but I don't eat meat as a "staple", I use meat like a flavoring.  Like salt.  People don't fill up on salt.  I don't fill up on meat.  I try to avoid meat altogether but sometimes my burritos get kinda boring.  Though recently I had a fantastic vegetarian burrito while eating out so I may have to reevaluate my ingredients.

Essentially here is my diet.

I buy a huge burlap sack of pinto beans.
I buy eggs.
I buy jalapenos.
I buy a small block of cheese (I am phasing out this ingredient)
Maybe some diced ham chunks for flavoring.

I soak 3 cups of pinto beans in water I distilled myself.
I then cook these in a crock pot and add chili powder, cumin and paprika and salt. If I can find onion flakes cheap I add those also.  I am able to buy a nice sized bottle of dried onion flakes at WalMart for like ninety nine cents.

Then after this cooks I put it in a container and stick it in the fridge.

Then I take about 4 quarts of fresh jalapenos and I cut them up into quartered slices, x down the middle and then slice, slice, slice (etc.)
I cook the jalapenos in the crock pot until they turn color and start to reduce in bulk and then I add the small block of cheese (like eight ounces).  When the cheese is melted I stir it up and add 18 eggs and salt and I stir and break the yolks and then I let it cook and it turns into a sort of jalapeno quiche.

I buy 36 flour tortillas from a local business for about $7.50  These tortillas don't have all the preservatives in them but I could also learn to make them myself.

Then I put a scoop of beans in the tortilla, a scoop of the jalapeno quiche, I roll it up, put a small piece of saran wrap around it and I stick it back in the bag the tortillas came out of (3 bags).  When I have a bag of burritos I put them in the freezer and then I start on the next bag.  You can also add cooked potato to the burritos to make them go farther.

Then I have 36 meals that didn't cost much to make.  Meals that are easy to eat and portable. I was buying large bottles of hot sauce from Walmart for ninety nine cents a bottle but I realized they had some kind of poison in them so I switched to a new kind of hot sauce that is more expensive.

Years ago I made huge batches of rice and added a little tuna for protein, stirred it all up and then put it into zip lock bags and stacked them neatly in the freezer. 

You can eat really cheap and it is easy to do.

I also eat fruit.  I like bananas, Meradol papaya, fuji apples, and whatever is cheap.

I don't drink booze or soda or junk food.

I do buy dark Dove chocolates and ginger cookies and peanut butter and these items last me a long time because they are not a staple, they are an occasional treat.

Peanuts are good too.

Also if I could find organic cheese, organic eggs... then I will use it because it ends up going so far that ultimately paying a little more doesn't bump up the price of my meals.  If I screw up and have flour tortillas left over I make peanut butter and jelly fajitas.

[Terracotta]

From my own dietary health research - I came back with understanding that certain things aren't so bad - but really what to avoid is sugar.

Go with the Mediterannean diet, best advice