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Chemicals

As a chemist, this crap bothers me to know end.

Makes me want to eat a foxglove just to prove them wrong.
 
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KingMerv00 said:
As a chemist, this crap bothers me to know end.

Artificial flavorings all the way. They often taste better than natural flavors because they were designed to.
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So do you prefer natural of artificial vinilia? The artificial is made from extracting vinilin from wood, as opposed to extracting vinilia by soaking vinilia beans in alcohol. The latter process leads to more than just vinilin being involved.
 
ponderingturtle said:
So do you prefer natural of artificial vinilia? The artificial is made from extracting vinilin from wood, as opposed to extracting vinilia by soaking vinilia beans in alcohol. The latter process leads to more than just vinilin being involved.
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Never tasted them side by side so I'm not sure.
 
Aepervius said:
Robinson as far as I saw recent study, mercury in amalgam is safe. No so with lead in paint (try google for kids eating it as candy since apparently it has a sweet taste).
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Ummm. Leaded Regular.

I'll agree with the "sweet" taste of lead. I have on occasion had to siphon gasoline out of a car tank (family or friend's car while working on the vehicle) and ended up with a mouthful once or twice. Unleaded is the flavor from hell. Leaded tasted bad, but now where near as vile. Worse than all of them was the beer my buddy handed me when I got the mouthful of unleaded. I came near to washing the beer out with the the gas. Fortunately, I located a bottle of water first.
 
PopeTom said:
No need to fear Organic Sea Salt
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My ex-husband had a heart condition and was on a low-sodium diet. We were at dinner at his sister's and he was explaining the situation to some other guests. One of the women kept saying, "You should use sea salt. I never use anything but sea salt." I tried to tell her that sodium is sodium (and, as I understand it, ALL salt is sea salt - it just depends on when it was deposited by the ocean :)) and all she would do is say, "You should use sea salt."

Another quote: Makes me want to eat a foxglove just to prove them wrong.

A girl at a campground in the Texas Hill Country ate a plant she found because she was a vegetarian and it was "natural," so it couldn't hurt her. Turned out to be hemlock, with predictable results.
 
Brainache said:
I know what you mean, but it is like the way the conspiracy crowd misuse the word "Theory".
To the great unwashed "Chemicals" means pesticides and poisons. It is a question of language, not science IMHO.
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I was thinking a question of ignorance and/or stupidity rather than language.:) :) (It's clearly not science -----DHMO:rolleyes: :jaw-dropp :rolleyes:)
 
Elizabeth I said:
My ex-husband had a heart condition and was on a low-sodium diet. We were at dinner at his sister's and he was explaining the situation to some other guests. One of the women kept saying, "You should use sea salt. I never use anything but sea salt." I tried to tell her that sodium is sodium (and, as I understand it, ALL salt is sea salt - it just depends on when it was deposited by the ocean :)) and all she would do is say, "You should use sea salt."
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That sounds EXACTLY like something my former coworker would have done. Another coworker used to get migraines and the Enlightened One kept giving out useless advice such as that the migraine sufferer was eating too much food with "chemicals" in it, or that she should be taking multivitamins with 5000% (that's five thousand percent) of the RDA for the B vitamins.
 
mumchup said:
That sounds EXACTLY like something my former coworker would have done. Another coworker used to get migraines and the Enlightened One kept giving out useless advice such as that the migraine sufferer was eating too much food with "chemicals" in it, or that she should be taking multivitamins with 5000% (that's five thousand percent) of the RDA for the B vitamins.
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I get excema, which used to be fairly visible. It seemed to mark me as a target for BS advice (inc. from strangers, who for some reason thought I would care about their opinion). Naturally, this included advice to avoid all those nasty chemicals - the idea apparently being that I should both miss out on tasty food AND have a nasty rash, instead of just having a nasty rash :mad:

Clearly, not eating their quota of nasty chemicals makes people deluded, and gives them the need to push all kind of weird diets to anyone who'll listen, and lots of people who won't :D
 
Short list of Chemicals/Substances that are now considered poison, and/or cancer causing.

Lead
Mercury
Acetaldehyde
Asbestos
Asphalt fumes
Benzene
Benzidine
Benzidine-based dyes
Beryllium
Cadmium dust and fume
Carbon tetrachloride
Chlordane
Chloroform
Chloromethyl methyl ether
Coal tar pitch
DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)
Diesel exhaust
Environmental tobacco smoke
Formaldehyde
Gallium arsenide
Gasoline
Methyl iodide
Nickel, metal, soluble, insoluble, and inorganic
Radon
Rosin core solder, pyrolysis products (containing formaldehyde)
Titanium dioxide
Uranium, insoluble compounds Uranium, soluble compounds
Vinyl chloride
Welding fumes, total particulates
Wood dust

Of course there are a LOT more
http://www.ehs.wustl.edu/Bluebook/carcinogenlist.html

I have noticed that often times, when a substance is found to be cancer causing, the people making money on that substance fight like hell to convince everyone it isn't.
 
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I suppose it's been scientifically proven that not eating or drinking any chemicals does put an end to all your little ails and problems. And it only takes about a week or two ... :D
 
Cuddles said:
Chemicals are evil and must be destroyed. Unless they're natural of course, like arsenic.
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The late Petr Beckman writing in "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" tells of his challenge to those in the anti-nuclear crowd who claim that plutonium "...man made and not found in nature..." is the most toxic substance known: "OK, we'll take two spoons and put an equal amount of plutonium in one and arsenic in the other. I'll ingets the plutonium and you can ingest the arsenic and we'll see what happens."

None of 'em ever took him up on his offer.
 
I love these people, when I don't have much else to do it can be entertaining.

WOO: I always try to get organic food.

ME: Why?

WOO: Because it's natural.

ME: Peanuts are natural but I know people who would die if they ate them.

WOO: That's an allergy that's different.

ME: Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good.

WOO: Well organics don't have any chemicals.

ME: Really? Don't you use salt, that's a chemical called sodium chloride.

WOO: That's different, I'm talking about bad chemicals.

ME: Like what?

WOO: Fertilizers.

ME: Oh, cow manure.

WOO: No, chemical fertilizers, cow manure is different.

ME: What kind of chemical?

WOO: Oh, I don't know, I just know they're bad.

At this point I usually give up, but if I really want to have fun, I start talking about Dihydrogen Oxide and what a dangerous chemical it is. That it is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands every year. But it's still found in almost every home in America.

In the end they still don't get it.
 
Organophosphates are organic. It says so on the tin.

Drinking those must be really good for you, because farmers use them.
 
exarch said:
I can't remember who posted this, or where, but it was a long time ago. Anyway, apparently "organic" food is sprayed with pesticides just like ordinary crops, except there's a list of which pesticides you can use to be allowed to label your food "organic". And it seems a number of pesticides and "chemicals" on that list are a lot more harmful than the ones used in "normal" food.
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Organic farming allows for a list of "natural" pesticides (how much pesticides are actually used? I have no idea, I have yet to see a serious study on the issue). As far as "more harmful" than the regular stuff I'm not sure. The list of allowed pesticides has been posted at least twice before on this forum and no one knowledgeable enough on the subject came to discussed how it compared to what is widely used in regular "industrial" agriculture.

But there's a few points I want to add here: I don't think there actually is that much of a difference. According to wikipedia, Bt is one of the most widely used certified organic pesticide. It's natural, and it's the same Bt that is in Bt corn, the decried GM corn that supposedly killed tons of monarch butterflies. Hence it appears to be used in "industrial" agriculture as well. Same thing with manure: you compost it, it's a fertilizer. And if you don't use it as a fertilizer (and all cows and pigs poop, whether they're a few dozens from an organic farm or a few hundreds or thousands in an industrial one), it's a pollutant and becomes a waste management problem. In fact, even if you use it as fertilizer it's a major water pollutant. So stop worrying about the dangers of organic farming. It's just a freaking label to save on the "chemicals" and charge you twice as much. If you want good food, make sure you know where your food came from (no matter the label), so you know the practices of whoever produced it.
 
Hamradioguy said:
The late Petr Beckman writing in "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" tells of his challenge to those in the anti-nuclear crowd who claim that plutonium "...man made and not found in nature..." is the most toxic substance known: "OK, we'll take two spoons and put an equal amount of plutonium in one and arsenic in the other. I'll ingets the plutonium and you can ingest the arsenic and we'll see what happens."

None of 'em ever took him up on his offer.
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Since I have no idea I will ask, what would happen to a person who had a spoon full of plutonium?
 
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