28th June 2017, 12:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 28th June 2017, 1:24 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
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.
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.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)