I’ve heard various people saying things like “I don’t like chemicals in this or that” and things of that nature. A while ago I heard about some news feature about the superiority of butter over margarine, the gist of it being “Margarine consists of [bunch of complicated-sounding chemicals] while butter is just cream. Butter is obviously better.” Or on a call-in talk show about chemical pesticides they had a guest who was a “scientist from the university”. Someone called in asking how they were supposed to know what was safe for your lawn. The scientist’s response was basically, the longer the word, the more afraid you should be.
My problem with this is this - isn’t everything made up of stuff from the periodic table (including elements not yet discovered)? Theoretically, could you not break down cream until you have a bunch of atoms, or could you not be able to name cream by its chemical composition? And for the so-called scientist - what about deoxyribonucleic acid? That’s a rather long word.
Margarine is generally regarded as evil because it is hydrogenated oils, i.e. trans fats.
It’s just a case where the common use of a term differs from the scientific use. Usually when someone says something has “chemicals” they mean it has something artificial in it (although artificial = bad and natural = good isn’t true either).
The same goes for “organic” foods. Copper(II) sulfate (an inorganic compound to a chemist) can be used as a pesticide on “organic” crops, but glyphosate (an organic compound to a chemist) cannot.
In many cases I agree with you, that people are needlessly afraid of something “chemical” and dangerously complacent about “natural” things. I liked this blog post about a “natural” herbicide making the rounds on facebook vs. glyphosate.
It depends on the context. Outside of a science class (or anywhere else precise language is used), “chemicals” usually refers to artificial / man-made ones. It could also refer to unnatural concentrations of natural chemicals. (e.g. oxygen, caffeine, etc.).
Perhaps the most useful sentiment in what is said about chemicals is that creating food additives from chemical stock exposes humans to compounds and combinations that we’ve never been exposed to before, and one can imagine that doing so occasionally causes trouble. Plants and animals that occur in the environment around us are less likely to be unknown hazards to us because we have long experience with so many of them, and because we evolved eating some of them or at least species related to them.
Yeah, the key word to look for is partially hydrogenated oils.
Or at least, it would be the key word to look for, if the whole trans fat thing were relevant any more. Saturated fats and unsaturated fats have different physical properties, with saturated fats being generally more solid. This is desirable for some foods, like margarine (you want to spread it with a knife, not pour it). When people started worrying about saturated fats being bad for you, food scientists invented trans fats, which are unsaturated but still solid, to replace them. Now that we’ve discovered that trans fats are even worse than saturated fats, everyone has just gone back to using saturated fats like they used to: Nobody uses trans fats for anything any more, because there’s no reason to.
Whatever, it’s the catalyst in the hydrogenation process that isomerizes the cis-substituted double bonds that almost all unsaturated fats in nature have into the trans-substituted double bonds that are so bad for you. I suppose it’s true that if you fully hydrogenated the fat, you’d just turn it into saturated fat, but in practice it’s just hydrogenated enough to make solid at room temperature, with plenty of double bonds left unsaturated, but still isomerized.
As I heard it explained by a friend once, who is a retired bio-chemist who I think would know:
The process of creating saturated (even partially) fat by hydrogenation is done by subjecting the fat to very high pressure in large vats (at least, when manufacturing at industrial quantities). This is very different than the process by which animals create their saturated fats, which is done with enzymes.
The natural process, as done by animals with enzymes, produces cis-fats exclusively (with only the occasional aberrant trans molecule). But the artificial high-pressure giant-test-tube process creates cis and trans molecules randomly, and in roughly equal proportions.
Everything is a chemical, but it’s ridiculous to use this semantic argument to pretend that there is no difference between some specific chemical, and water.
Neither are subatomic particles. But both light and subatomic particles (most notably electrons and protons*) can be part of chemical reactions. Senegoid, saturated fats can be neither trans nor cis. It’s UNsaturated ones that can be trans or cis, you need a double bond in a linear chain. Saturated fats are chemically identical whether they came from a cow, a pig or a vat, so long as they happen to be the same compound. Adipic acid, for example, will be the same - oleic acid, being unsaturated, can be trans or cis, with the natural form being cis (in the picture, the two lines coming out of the double bond are on the same side).
The hydrogen ion is a proton, for the most common isotope.
Butter is superior to margarine for all purposes because it tastes wonderful and is no worse for you than margarine. That is the most important thing you can learn in this thread.
That’s right. Dihydrogen monoxide is a dangerous chemical that should be avoided at all costs. Water is, of course, necessary for life. Vast difference.
I know you’re only joking, but that’s actually the example that comes up so depressingly often - someone will say “I don’t eat brand X pies, they’re full of chemicals!” - and it should be obvious to anyone who is actually trying to understand, that they probably mean things like artificial flavourings, preservatives, etc - but the folks on the SDMB seem to need to say “Hah! Water is a chemical!!! OMG! DHMO!”
Like that actually addresses the point.
Like words only have one singular context and possible meaning.
It does, actually. It points out that it’s begging the question to say that artificial flavourings and preservatives are bad for you (and you know that the subtext behind every statement like that is the unsaid words “because chemicals are bad for you”.
If you want to say that artificial flavourings and preservatives are bad for you, then say that - but to say that they are “chemicals” and therefore bad for you, needs to be proved.
And with many people, it works; IME, mostly with those who tend to parrot slogan-like-phrases without thinking about them (“the wok is superhealthy because it uses less oil”; “this yoghurt is much healthier because it has bifidus” - this one coming from a biologist). The “water kills a lot of people every year” thing gets them thinking. With some of my relatives, “what’s the most dangerous chemical?” has become shorthand for “think about what you just said.”