What do you think? Food nazi’s killing my buzz? Or am I going to die a low painful death?
Damn, I love chips.
http://www.realfarmacy.com/cancer-in-a-can-the-shocking-true-story-of-how-pringles-are-made/
This seems like typical paint-by-numbers alarmism.
While acrylamide it has been shown to cause cancer in rats, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it acts the same way in humans.
Here’s a good, fairly objective article about it.
IIRC, we get more acrylamide from our daily coffee intake than baked/fried potatoes or bread.
The article seems to be a puff piece promoting the raw food movement.
If eating baked bread is causing cancer, it’s not causing a lot of it.
Pringles aren’t potato chips tho
After looking at that article, I figure we’ve all been dead from cancer for eight or ten years already.
There’s precious little context or sense of proportion to the info they spew.
No, but the article only starts with Pringles (undoubtedly using them as a scary example of manufactured food), and then goes on to state that Pringles, as well as regular old potato chips, French fries, baked bread, coffee, etc., all contain this scary thing that’ll give you cancer.
While the “good, fairly objective” article linked above is 11 years old, I still think this is bunk.
The main reason is this: most people eat something with this chemical in it every day: it’s in your morning toast or doughnut, it’s in your fries, it’s in your chips – even baked chips where the levels of acrylamide are higher. It’s in your cold cereal. It’s in basically everything that is either baked or fried. And people have been eating this stuff for years. Generations. Hundreds of years even – baking and frying are not new.
So if that’s the case, then why aren’t people dropping dead of potato chip cancer left and right?
And the old article above sort of asks that question, in a roundabout sort of way.
I suggest the alarm is spread by people who have a poor understanding of basic chemistry. We aren’t ingesting acrylamide all by itself in its purest form. And it doesn’t stay in that form as soon as we ingest it. Basic chemistry tells me that the minute acrylamide is mixed with other things (all substances basically being chemicals if you define chemistry as “a collection of molecules that make up something else”), then it ceases to be just acrylamide.
What happens to acrylamide plus H2O when both hit the stomach acid? What about the saliva, surely that changes the chemical composition of whatever food you just ate. Your body has chemical processes throughout your digestive (and others) system that break down food molecules into their chemical components, some of which are used by your body and some of which are excreted as waste.
So, just because a certain chemical compound is found in a food item after baking or frying, that doesn’t mean that same chemical compound is exactly the same all the way through your digestive system. If it were really that toxic, we wouldn’t have been eating baked goods for the last few hundred years.
I have the exact same opinion about the Henny Pennys who cry about phosphoric acid in soda. Yes, acid is bad for your teeth. But phosphoric acid is not the sum total of your drink – there are other things in there. And those other things get mixed with your body chemistry. And when more than chemical compound is mixed together, it ceases to be that thing and becomes some other chemical compound. As my chemistry teacher used to say, “Nothing is lost, nothing is gained, it’s only rearranged.”
I get that is a very very basic understanding of chemistry, but apparently people who run around in a panic because our food is poisoned and the sky is falling didn’t even take basic high school chemistry.
So give up french fries and soda if you want, but not for those reasons. How 'bout because the fries are deep-fried and the soda is full of sugar or fake sugar and we KNOW those things cause heart disease and will eventually kill you. I say some foods are worth dying for and I’m having french fries, some sort of deep-fried thing, and a diet soda for lunch. 
If cooked food = death, working as a cook is just like being a hit man.
I should have been getting paid more…
That article is absurd; the author goes on a tirade about how cooked potatoes are the devil, and how he eats his food raw.
Personally, I subscribe to the theory that something’s going to get me eventually, so I’m not going to sweat acrylamide in potato chips.
Did you notice right below the headline of the article, it said “By Dr. Mercola”?
That’s how you know it’s BS. Anytime you see an article on health, if it’s written by Joseph Mercola or Mike Adams, you know it’s BS.
Why are people even clicking on the article? Just the URL should tell you everything you need to know.
“7+ Shocking Pringles Secrets: Cancer in a Can?”
But…but…it’s shocking! We must know what will shock us! :rolleyes:
So, potato chips aren’t particularly healthy. Pringles, being a highly processed “chip-like” food, are even less healthy than actual potato chips. And, it seems that french fries, sodas, and doughnuts are not particularly good for you either.
It’s lucky for all of us that we have people like the good Dr. Mercola to point out these things for us. Otherwise, we never would have known that “junk food” might not be terribly good for us. Who woulda known?
Also, as previously pointed out, “pharmacy” isn’t spelled with an ‘f’.
Just the URL doesn’t describe the type, quality, texture, or substance of the misinformation.
I wanted to know just where they were going: anti-Pringle, pro-Lays? Anti-potato, pro-corn chip?
The actual answer was far more interesting.
These people oppose the use of fire to prepare food.
“Rrarr! Fire bad!”
Also, don’t take any advice on phlebotomy from Dr. Acula.
Don’t even get them started on DHMO!
Pringles aren’t even food.
*Don’t work hard
Don’t play hard
Don’t plan for the graveyard
Remember -
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There’s no cure, there’s no answer
Everything gives you cancer *
- Joe Jackson
I make a serious, concerted effort to keep Pringles away from my rats, so we’re safe.
I think that the “Big Hippy” industry is a giant conspiracy. Where are the studies showing that yoga is safe? It originated in India which still has polio. How do we know that wearing low-heel shoes like Birkenstocks are safe? We were wearing shoes with heels for hundreds of years before the Birkenstock corporation decided that they’d invent a new feature to make all of our old shoes obsolete. Agave and honey are just expensive sugar, and we all know how bad sugar is.