+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Ramble City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=44)
+--- Thread: Organic, free-range, BS (/showthread.php?tid=7062)
Organic, free-range, BS - Dark Jaguar - 28th June 2017
I'm glad the tide of public opinion has finally turned against these new age retro hippies and their "cures".
Seriously though, the worst thing to happen to the progressive movement is for the woowoo crowd to glomp onto it and claim it as their own. You've got far too many progressive left-wingers who reject all manner of science like vaccines, which isn't helping anyone. Oh, and by the way, yes, there are plenty of right wingers who have been embracing these claims for years. There is a chiropractic clinic for every two churches where I live.
Organic, free-range, BS - A Black Falcon - 28th June 2017
The sham "health stickers" he is talking about there have absolutely nothing to do with very real and necessary things like (certified) organic and free-range food. Not everything natural is healthy, that is certainly true, but many dangerous chemicals are allowed in food and other products without sufficient testing because a lot of the time the government cares more about companies than it does public health.
Organic, free-range, BS - Dark Jaguar - 28th June 2017
ABF, there is no scientific definition for "natural". Also "certified organic" is a meaningless tag. The only scientific definition of "organic" is "has carbon in it". Don't use those tags to buy healthy stuff.
Literally everything is "chemicals". There is no definition of what a chemical is outside of "consists of baryonic matter".
Free-range matters, for ethical reasons and I fully support buying from farms that treat the livestock ethnically. Heck, most farmers would go that route if the big food companies that they need to work with would let them.
You may have an intuitive sense of what those words kinda sorta mean and if I showed you a bunch of stuff you could probably group them consistent with that intuitive definition, but human intuition fails us completely at the super market and should not be trusted for this.
I know we all would love it if finding out what was healthy or unhealthy was as easy as words like "all natural" or "organic" or "chemical free", but there isn't. Diet, much like the human body, is an extremely complicated matter, and every last substance we might consume is essentially it's own category, affected by the portions of the rest. At the right dosage, everything is poison after all. I'm not supporting all that greasy, sugary, unhealthy stuff out there, but many and more people get caught up in buzz words without knowing a thing about the actual science, and the sad truth is that most of what's out there is garbage information peddled by hucksters. Just 10 years ago, the same could be said of the anti-autism movement, but fortunately the public opinion seems to have moved away from that. Here's one major example of a charlatan: Dr. Oz. He's awful. Don't listen to a thing he says. He recently defended himself in an inquiry by stating he was "sure" the people at home were smart enough to know that his nonsense was nonsense. Take that as you will.
So, for example, "gluten free". Gluten is dangerous, but only to a small percentage of people with a specific gluten allergy. For them, the shelves are lined with a godsend, and in that sense the gluten obsession has been positive. For the rest of us? Gluten is benign and you don't need to bother finding gluten-free food. That's an example of scientific misinformation that's not really hurting anyone, and by sheer chance is helping a small percentage of the population, but misinformation is misinformation, and generally making decisions based on bad data will get you bad results. Before the gluten craze, there was the corn syrup craze. I'm not about to claim guzzling a bottle of corn syrup is good for you. Heck, do that for a few years and you'll probably end up dead. However, there's no evidence that corn syrup or it's high fructose cousin are any worse for you than guzzling sugar, which we've been doing for years thanks to a corrupt study exonerating it as the cause of heart disease. I'm a sugar addict, so cutting back won't be easy, but that's what I have to do. Not find "organic" chicken, not find "all natural" bread, I need to cut more sugar out of my diet and get to a healthy level. The problem with any of these crazes is they focus on something relatively easy for us to cut out of our diet, because dieting is hard. The hard truth is that the stuff that really matters, getting a good balance of various chemicals (vitamins, proteins, all sorts of things, including fat and sugar) is the hardest thing for us simple minded monkies to get right and stick with, since we're genetically programmed to seek out MORE food than we need, so we don't starve in the coming winter, and getting just the right balance makes our brains tell us there's a crisis.
Just to end on a rather dangerous example, salt. Specifically, the legally required iodine added to most salt. "Sea salt", the popular natural alternative to regular salt, doesn't have iodine. The containers will even say, in the smallest possible font "this salt doesn't contain iodine, a necessary nutrient". Iodine is something we only need in very small amounts, but if you don't get it, goiter. There's also a risk if you take too much iodine (and the threshold for "too much" is surprisingly narrow), but if you manage your salt intake that won't be a problem. There's more though. Sea salt is what you might call an "irregular" food. Part of the charm is that it includes various minerals found next to it and grinded up into it. Some of these are healthy, and some of them are just... dirt basically. The concerning thing is it isn't exactly measured or portioned, so it's hard to say just how much of any of those minerals you're getting from one bottle to the next. I like my food like I like my cars, boring and predictable, so I've steared clear of the stuff. If you enjoy sea salt, I'd suggest finding the iodized sea salt. Fortunately, such a thing does exist.
Oh, and yes there's plenty of stuff that just plain shouldn't be in our food and the FDA needs to get sharper teeth to put a stop to it, but those are all very specific substances, not general "bad" categories like "unnatural".
Anyway, let me sum this up by saying I'll come back just as soon as John Oliver does a full deep dive on it. I'm sure it'll come at some point.
Organic, free-range, BS - A Black Falcon - 28th June 2017
"Natural" does not have a real definition on food or product labels -- and yes this is an issue, "natural" is really a term which the FDA should regulate much more strictly -- but "organic" does have a meaning. Certified organic food is made without artificial chemical fertilizers or pesticides and such, and reducing the use of those is important for a whole lot of reasons, for human health yes but also for the planet. Pesticides are doing so much damage to humans, bees, insects, and all other life... Monsanto is horrible. And antibiotics (either given to animals we eat or what have you) are worse; those really should not be used anytime it is not necessary, since all that does is help create more drug-resistant bacteria, which is a growing problem worldwide. Sure, just buying organic does not solve those problems as I'm sure not all organic products are actually great either, but this is why I read all the ingredients on food labels before buying them, I want to know what's in things, and avoid things with questionable ingredients when I can.
As for the other stuff you say, sure, you do need to consider who you listen to, sure. But even if you do just look at science it's it difficult with food, though, because there are constantly studies being released that contradict each other. How should anyone know which ones to believe? This causes a lot of cynicism, like, 'everything causes cancer so just eat whatever', but eating healthier is important despite that because even if studies constantly contradict eachother, some things are known. And on that note, gluten... that's one fad diet I would never, ever get on board with unless I actually had celiac disease, because I love carbs! Bread, crackers, pasta, rice... the carb part is usually the central element of most of my meals, more so than the protein. I have crackers for lunch every day, either with cheese and hummus or peanut butter and honey (I don't like PB on bread, only crackers... and I don't like jelly. As always my lists of foods I like and dislike are long!), for example.
As for sugar itself though, science definitely has been targeting it more and more over recent years, and it seems that there is good reason for that. As the amount of sugar in the American diet has steadily grown over the past decades average weight has increased. The low-fat craze of the '90s was well-intentioned, but it caused lots of foods to add even more sugar in to compensate for the removed fat, and that did more harm than good; fat is hardly good for you, but sugar does seem to be worse. I've never been a real sugar addict, but I have done some things to cut back -- I completely stopped drinking soda several years ago (I never drank a lot of it, not like some people, but I don't drink any anymore), etc. I am still an ice cream addict though, I go through a couple of icecream containers every few weeks. Ah well... otherwise I try to get things with the least added sugar you can, though -- pasta sauces and breads that don't add sugar, etc. On that note, I like that new food label (option? slowly being phased in thing? I'm not clear) that separates sugar and added sugars, and puts a 50-grams-a-day percentage on the added sugars part. That's a great idea which, if put on all food labels, hopefully will cut sugar instakes -- seeing most 20-ounce sodas having more than a days' worth of sugar in them could make people take notice. Of course on the other hand if this just gets more people to drink diet soda that wouldn't be a huge improvement, as those are loaded with unpleasant chemicals and have questionable impacts on the body from what little I remember of seeing some stuff about that, but maybe they're slightly better than sugar? Really though, don't drink either...