That is, a common ingredient in microwave popcorn has been destroying the lungs of workers in factories leading to $millions in lawsuits.
Evil, I say! But now, I really mean it.
:mad: 
With all of the massive amounts of random chemicals we use in modern life, it’ll be amazing in 50 years how many we’ll eventually find out will cause cancer and various other health problems. Kind of like how lead used to be used in piping and dishes, we’ll find out that (insert common, seemingly harmless chemical) was killing us all along.
I always thought microwave popcorn tasted like poison, so I’m not surprized.
Throwing up your hands about “random chemicals” is the wrong answer.
The right answer is to ban new chemicals from the food chain. We don’t need any more.
It’s nice to know that microwave popcorn is the asbestos of snack foods. I’ll continue making on the stove like Mom used to.
“Might be”?
I love microwave popcorn.
looks at the huge box sitting on top of the pantry
Sigh. Ah, but upon reading the article, I don’t get buttery flavor.
I popped popcorn in a pan on the stove, for the kids of a friend who was over to my house to work on my computer. These young kids were amazed, saying “How did you *do * that?” In their young lives they had never seen other than movie or microwave popcorn.
I always thought it was funny that it was company policy at my work that “absolutely no microwave popcorn is allowed - no exceptions!!!”
Now, though, whoever came up with that policy will be hailed as a hero.
The flavoring made people who work with it get sick. No consumer has gotten sick. I would imagine that all kinds of things are perfectly safe in “regular” amounts but potentially harmful when someone is exposed to it for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (like using a computer mouse, for example). I eat microwave popcorn maybe 1-2 times a month, and I’m not giving up my Pop Secret Homestyle any time soon. 
Misnomer, you can be on my jury. Thank you for a non-reactionary, intelligent response to typical media fear-mongering.
Meh, popcorn is essentially a useless food anyway. The only time you can even eat it is when you’re not hungry. It won’t fill you up if you are and will leave you with a stomach ache. I only eat popcorn at the movies, mainly because that is what should be done…
It’s obviously not doing us that much harm, as we’re eating more processed crap than ever before and yet life expectancy is higher than ever. It may have peaked, but that’s more down to the quantity that people eat, not a few chemicals.
I have to say that butter flavored microwave popcorn makes me sick to smell it. I hate that shit, especially when some dumb ass has to burn it every day. I don’t blame it for any disease though. It’s just plain gross.
People don’t remember that use can just pop it in a paper lunch bag, and flavor it afterwards. It tastes much better.
While I’m not trying to scaremonger or anything, life expectancy doesn’t conclusively prove anything. We could very well be putting harmful stuff into our bodies regularly and still have a much higher life expectancy.
As I understand it, a huge factor in life expectancy is the infant and child mortality rates in your area. An area where people, if they make it to 20, will live on average to 80 but has a high infant/child mortality rate could have a lower life expectancy compared to people who had better care for infants/children but everyone ate big macs every day and dies at 60.
So in modern, first world civilization we’ve got a historically extremely low mortality rate for young people, which by itself significantly raises the life expectancy because more people live to be older. And we have vaccines and treatments for big killers like malaria, and just general better medical treatments in general, which allows more people to die of old age.
Toxins we ingest could also cause damage but not be fatal - perhaps they damage our brain without killing us, for example - in which case life expectancy isn’t lowered.
I’m not a “chemicals” as a vague, dirty word scaremonger type, as if they’re inherently bad. I just mean that we use a whole lot of stuff in modern society that’s not properly understood. There’s a lot of corruption in big corporations and the government that makes protection against putting harmful chemicals in our food lax. There are many, many people in positions of power who would willingly hurt millions of people if it meant making a buck for themselves. And there are a lot of harmful things which take time and data for us to even know they’re harmful - long after people have been exposed to it for a long time.
That’s a common response, but it ignores the data, too. The life expectancy of 20-year olds (who presumably are past the risks of infant mortality) have also been rising for decades (and more sporadically, for millenia).
More telling is that we (and here I mean the US and other industrialized nations) now have both the means and inclination to research and discover small health correlations (both positive and negative, note the folks who now believe that dark chocolate is a health food) that we’d have missed before in random noise. Combine that with the human inability to judge small numbers and their proportional risks, and you get people who panic about things that will never happen to them, and end up taking greater risks to avoid lesser ones.
(This argument applies only to the consumers, here. Given the limited evidence, there appears to be a real health issue here for the workers.)
I hate this too. I never ever cook popcorn at work. It’s just mean and insensitive.
Butter’s revenge. See what happens when you try to replace a perfectly natural and tasty real product like butter with synthetic flavoring chemicals? I’m looking at you Bacon Salt… :dubious:
I remember when microwave popcorn first came out and I didn’t know you could pop it in a paper lunch bag. That sounds great! Do you have instructions? Do you use any oil? How do you seal the bag? How much do you use?
Damn it man! I need answers! 
The aroma of microwaved popcorn can trigger an asthma attack in some people, and the aroma of burnt microaved popcorn is even worse!
Needed:
One paper lunch bag.
About 1/4 cup popcorn.
Butter in a microwaveable cup.
Seasonings
Instructions:
Melt butter in cup.
Set it to the side.
Put popcorn into the bag and fold down the top a couple times in about half inch folds.
Set the microwave to 8 minutes on high.
Microwave the popcorn in the bag.
In about 4 minutes the popping will start going.
The next few minutes it will pop and when it starts petering out turn off the microwave.
Put the popcorn in a bowl trying to keep the few unpopped out,
Pour on butter and season it.
I like chili powder and parmesan cheese
Oh yah, watch while your doing this, because it is possible to start a fire just like with anything you put in a microwave. I have never seen it happen.