Discussion Main / UnfortunateIngredients

I don't want to stifle it either, but it really doesn't belong on the main page- the point of the trope isn't even whether it's actually bad for you or not. I'm pulling that, along with a couple other diversions. (Oh god, I've become one of those stuffy tropers I used to complain about.)

Pulled:

• High fructose corn syrup, the currently-trendy "evil" of the food industry *
  Actually, not all that different from table
  sugar]], is beginning to be called "corn sugar" to lessen its "evil" connotations.
  • One brand of pancake syrup (Log Cabin, if memory serves) proudly touts itself as being corn-syrup free...and when you read the ingredients, you realize that the main ingredient has been changed to rice syrup. As though that's any better.
    • It's different. Might actually be better. HFCS is basically fructose and glucose, both monosaccarides. Rice Syrup is maltose and maltotriose, more complex sugars that digest more slowly and break down (via enzymes in the gut) entirely into glucose. It's unclear whether this matters to non-diabetics or not.
  • Whatever you think of the difference in flavor (it may or may not exist), some have noted a good reason to hate HFCS: the only reason anyone uses it is that it's artificially cheap, thanks to ridiculously high US subsidies on corn, most of which amounts to corporate welfare. (Sugar, by contrast, is artificially expensive in the U.S. due to high import tariffs on foreign sugar, which shield the domestic sugar market against foreign competition. Pick your political poison.)
    • Fructose is metabolized differently, despite claims to the contrary made by the Corn Refiners Association. It should be noted that this is literally basic biochemistry—you cannot call yourself a biochemist without knowing how wrong is the claim in the (as of 2011) ads that your body cannot tell the difference. It might be worth adding that fructose malabsorption seems to happen in about two out of five people.
      • The 2011 ads don't claim that your body cannot tell the difference between sugar and fructose. They claim that your body cannot tell the difference between sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Post-digestion, sugar consists of a 50%-50% mixture of fructose and glucose, while HFCS consists of a 55%-45% mixture of fructose and glucose.
  • HFCS may "technically" be sugar, with the same amount of calories/carbs/whatever, but here's an example to prove that this does not mean "all sugars are created equal"; if you are lactose intolerant, your body reacts to lactose (milk sugar) negatively. Lactose is technically sugar, but being lactose intolerant won't prevent you from, say, regular table sugar. From there, you can flat-out prove that there is some difference. Like the post above, there's something really creepy about it being everywhere.
    • It's "everywhere" chiefly because A) as the name suggests, it's derived from corn, B) corn is the staple crop of most of the Midwest US, and C) it's correspondingly cheap.
  • In the 1970s and 1980s, health food stores sold fructose (not HFCS, pure fructose) as a "healthier alternative" to regular sugar. When HFCS started becoming a health concern in the late 1990s, health studies started being performed on laboratory rats, and at least some of these experiments involved feeding the rats pure fructose instead of HFCS or table sugar — with the result being a striking correlation between pure fructose intake and obesity. Although "High" Fructose Corn Syrup is not significantly higher in fructose than table sugar, Fructose = obesity became ingrained in the public consciousness as HFCS = obesity.
    • Concerning the terming "corn sugar", and how it's treated not different, this is not only a patent lie ( sugar is a well... a sugar, and gets flushed out of the body somewhat quickly, while HFCS is actually closer to a starch, meaning your body holds it for longer, up to 3 days according to one report^{[citation needed]} , in which time due to its market prevalence you've probably had more), but has a bit of Fridge Horror, since the name could from there be changed to just "sugar" and if you had an objection or allergy to it, you'd be unknowingly ingested it. For that matter, given enough leeway, food companies could put any ingredients, including rat poison, in what appears to be simple and healthy food, and you'd never know...

• Omega-3*
  the - character isn't a hyphen, it's a minus sign, designating the distance from the omega end of the fatty acid chain where the double-bond occurs. If you are a stuffy organic chemist, you want to pronounce it "omega minus three"
  fatty acids. Shortly after they became popular, advertisers started referring to them as 'omega-3 oils', and more recently just 'omega-3s'. I've even seen scientists using that last one. This was all to avoid people getting the idea that the fatty acids might contain fat.
  • The original advice, if memory serves, was that omega-3s are better for you than the more common omega-6s. However, at least one canny company is banking on the fact that people have forgotten about that, as it's now touting its product as "contains omega-3 and omega-6!
    • If this (biochemist) troper has understood the lit correctly, the problem is having too much of one. It apparently doesn't terribly matter which, you need to keep them in balance. A pretty good rule of thumb in is 'all things in moderation'—everything's got an LD50.*
      LD stands for 'lethal dose.' 50 is 50%...as in, about 50% of the time it's the lethal dose.
    • Yes, and the average American has a ~1:30 ω-3:ω-6 ratio, with the ideal being 1:1. Vegetable oils, corn and soy are the major culprits.
    • It isn't so much a matter of moderation as that the same enzymes are used for both Omega-3s and Omega-6s, so if it is unbalanced towards Omega-6 you won't be able to process enough Omega-3s, which have been shown to be important to heart and brain health, though I'm not clear on what their function is.
      • just an FYI: Omega-6 is normal fats like butter, Omega-9 is your 'healthier' monounsaturated fats (olive oil), and omega-3s are the ones in fish oil and flax seed. 6's are Pro-inflammatory, while 3's are Anti-inflammatory (9s are somewhat less inflammatory than 6s), a 1:1 or 2:1 ration favoring 3's will reduce inflammation; high inflammation is associated with diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and etc: thus the health claims, and the promotion of adding it to your diet. Sadly most "fish oil" pills have a 2:1 ration of 6 to 3 within the pill itself, and only between 1-2 grams of omega 3 total, the average american consumes well over the recommended under ~65g of fat per day: making the supplements mostly a scam, you'd need to take a ridiculous amount of them every day to hit a reasonable does of omega 3's, and even then, they have the wrong ratio internally to ever fix your total ratio.

• The science behind gut-flora's influence on your health is quite strong. The science behind probiotic yogurt and supplements was summarily dismissed by the EU as unfounded, and the US FDA "neither confirms nor denies" any health benefit.

edit: whoops, I didn't pull the "full circle" bit

I don't want to stifle it either, but it really doesn't belong on the main page- the point of the trope isn't even whether it's actually bad for you or not. I'm pulling that, along with a couple other diversions. (Oh god, I've become one of those stuffy tropers I used to complain about.)

Pulled:

• High fructose corn syrup, the currently-trendy "evil" of the food industry *
  Actually, not all that different from table
  sugar]], is beginning to be called "corn sugar" to lessen its "evil" connotations.
  • One brand of pancake syrup (Log Cabin, if memory serves) proudly touts itself as being corn-syrup free...and when you read the ingredients, you realize that the main ingredient has been changed to rice syrup. As though that's any better.
    • It's different. Might actually be better. HFCS is basically fructose and glucose, both monosaccarides. Rice Syrup is maltose and maltotriose, more complex sugars that digest more slowly and break down (via enzymes in the gut) entirely into glucose. It's unclear whether this matters to non-diabetics or not.
  • Whatever you think of the difference in flavor (it may or may not exist), some have noted a good reason to hate HFCS: the only reason anyone uses it is that it's artificially cheap, thanks to ridiculously high US subsidies on corn, most of which amounts to corporate welfare. (Sugar, by contrast, is artificially expensive in the U.S. due to high import tariffs on foreign sugar, which shield the domestic sugar market against foreign competition. Pick your political poison.)
    • Fructose is metabolized differently, despite claims to the contrary made by the Corn Refiners Association. It should be noted that this is literally basic biochemistry—you cannot call yourself a biochemist without knowing how wrong is the claim in the (as of 2011) ads that your body cannot tell the difference. It might be worth adding that fructose malabsorption seems to happen in about two out of five people.
      • The 2011 ads don't claim that your body cannot tell the difference between sugar and fructose. They claim that your body cannot tell the difference between sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Post-digestion, sugar consists of a 50%-50% mixture of fructose and glucose, while HFCS consists of a 55%-45% mixture of fructose and glucose.
  • HFCS may "technically" be sugar, with the same amount of calories/carbs/whatever, but here's an example to prove that this does not mean "all sugars are created equal"; if you are lactose intolerant, your body reacts to lactose (milk sugar) negatively. Lactose is technically sugar, but being lactose intolerant won't prevent you from, say, regular table sugar. From there, you can flat-out prove that there is some difference. Like the post above, there's something really creepy about it being everywhere.
    • It's "everywhere" chiefly because A) as the name suggests, it's derived from corn, B) corn is the staple crop of most of the Midwest US, and C) it's correspondingly cheap.
  • In the 1970s and 1980s, health food stores sold fructose (not HFCS, pure fructose) as a "healthier alternative" to regular sugar. When HFCS started becoming a health concern in the late 1990s, health studies started being performed on laboratory rats, and at least some of these experiments involved feeding the rats pure fructose instead of HFCS or table sugar — with the result being a striking correlation between pure fructose intake and obesity. Although "High" Fructose Corn Syrup is not significantly higher in fructose than table sugar, Fructose = obesity became ingrained in the public consciousness as HFCS = obesity.
    • Concerning the terming "corn sugar", and how it's treated not different, this is not only a patent lie ( sugar is a well... a sugar, and gets flushed out of the body somewhat quickly, while HFCS is actually closer to a starch, meaning your body holds it for longer, up to 3 days according to one report^{[citation needed]} , in which time due to its market prevalence you've probably had more), but has a bit of Fridge Horror, since the name could from there be changed to just "sugar" and if you had an objection or allergy to it, you'd be unknowingly ingested it. For that matter, given enough leeway, food companies could put any ingredients, including rat poison, in what appears to be simple and healthy food, and you'd never know...

• Omega-3*
  the - character isn't a hyphen, it's a minus sign, designating the distance from the omega end of the fatty acid chain where the double-bond occurs. If you are a stuffy organic chemist, you want to pronounce it "omega minus three"
  fatty acids. Shortly after they became popular, advertisers started referring to them as 'omega-3 oils', and more recently just 'omega-3s'. I've even seen scientists using that last one. This was all to avoid people getting the idea that the fatty acids might contain fat.
  • The original advice, if memory serves, was that omega-3s are better for you than the more common omega-6s. However, at least one canny company is banking on the fact that people have forgotten about that, as it's now touting its product as "contains omega-3 and omega-6!
    • If this (biochemist) troper has understood the lit correctly, the problem is having too much of one. It apparently doesn't terribly matter which, you need to keep them in balance. A pretty good rule of thumb in is 'all things in moderation'—everything's got an LD50.*
      LD stands for 'lethal dose.' 50 is 50%...as in, about 50% of the time it's the lethal dose.
    • Yes, and the average American has a ~1:30 ω-3:ω-6 ratio, with the ideal being 1:1. Vegetable oils, corn and soy are the major culprits.
    • It isn't so much a matter of moderation as that the same enzymes are used for both Omega-3s and Omega-6s, so if it is unbalanced towards Omega-6 you won't be able to process enough Omega-3s, which have been shown to be important to heart and brain health, though I'm not clear on what their function is.
      • just an FYI: Omega-6 is normal fats like butter, Omega-9 is your 'healthier' monounsaturated fats (olive oil), and omega-3s are the ones in fish oil and flax seed. 6's are Pro-inflammatory, while 3's are Anti-inflammatory (9s are somewhat less inflammatory than 6s), a 1:1 or 2:1 ration favoring 3's will reduce inflammation; high inflammation is associated with diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and etc: thus the health claims, and the promotion of adding it to your diet. Sadly most "fish oil" pills have a 2:1 ration of 6 to 3 within the pill itself, and only between 1-2 grams of omega 3 total, the average american consumes well over the recommended under ~65g of fat per day: making the supplements mostly a scam, you'd need to take a ridiculous amount of them every day to hit a reasonable does of omega 3's, and even then, they have the wrong ratio internally to ever fix your total ratio.

• The science behind gut-flora's influence on your health is quite strong. The science behind probiotic yogurt and supplements was summarily dismissed by the EU as unfounded, and the US FDA "neither confirms nor denies" any health benefit.

edit: whoops, I didn't pull the "full circle" bit