I know I’m responding to a zombie, but you can easily massively reduce the salt in Top Ramen by not using the spice pack or only using part of it. The noodles themselves don’t actually have that much salt in them.
Liquefy it and send it to a de-salination plant by the seashore. It’s right there in the company name.
I don’t know what chelating is (mentioned above)…is that what they do?
Fermented Twinkies!
Could you elaborate on this or do you have examples?
I’m trying to think of a chemical you could add to a sugary drink that turns the sugar into non-sugar, but can’t think of any!
I don’t think the reactions listed on the wiki page are chemicals that you just can add to a glass of soft drink in small quantities (on the order of the sugar itself) to neutralize the sugar. Chloric acid? What would that do?
Fermentation does not quite count as it’s a living organism, not a chemical.
Enzymes (sucrase, invertase, lactase, amylase…) would be exactly what I’m looking for but all of them seem to turn sugar into another sugar!
I googled for “fructase” or “glucase” but those kinds of hypothetical enzymes don’t seem to exist!
Is it that hard to react sugar out of a soft drink with a simple chemical?
I don’t think Carl was implying that many or most of these reagents would be food safe.
Hydrogen peroxide added to a sugary drink will react with the sugar, I think.
Doesn’t have to be food safe, for the purposes of my thought experiment.
What would roughly be the reaction with dissolved sugar and hydrogen peroxide solution?
Also, how about duplicating the reaction that happens in fermentation. Looks a bit difficult. Could you have a solution of “NAD+” and “ADP” and (Phosphorus? Phosphate?) and add a splash of it to a soft drink? Would it decompose the sugar?
Yeast. OK, technically it’s not a chemical…
You’d have to add the necessary enzymes too. But sure, Buchner managed to carry out glycolysis in cell-free solutions by means of yeast extracts back in 1897, so it can be done.
About hydrogen peroxide: I guess the theory is that it would convert those -OH groups to =O (+ H[sub]2[/sub]O), perhaps with some additional carbon chain cleavage. I wouldn’t bet on it to happen in moderate concentrations though. I think potassium permanganate might be a better choice for oxidizer. Actually, I’m testing this theory right now: I prepared a solution of a few permanganate crystals in water, poured it in two flasks, and added a teaspoon of sugar to one of them. If it’s working, the solution in that flask should have a lighter color (and a precipitate of MnO[sub]2[/sub]) by tomorrow!
My experiment from yesterday worked beautifully! I now have a bottle of perfectly clear, colorless solution with a dark precipitate at the bottom! The control sample, of course, remains a dark purple.
So, it’s clear you can oxidize sugar to some degree by KMnO[sub]4[/sub]. The remaining question, of course, is whether the products from the reaction would still be metabolized like sugar (cells are pretty good at carrying out things like =O/-OH conversions).
The manganese solution itself would probably not be all that safe, though.
Permanganate in pomegranate. Mmmm…
There’s no chemical procedure to neutralise sugar or salt… Another example of a dietary restriction is lactose intolerance… You can use lactase to convert lactose into glucose and galactose, if you had accidentally made a food for lactose intolerant person contaminated.
But a trick ?
If you put two batches worth of sugar (for example, the same for salt or other ingredient) into one batch, you might double the size of the batch and then store the left over for tomorrow or next week.