I guess some author at BuzzFeed regurgitated a list from a book by a health food goo-roo and added some scary CAPS; “Eight foods that we eat in the US that are banned in other countries.”
Derek Lowe, a Biochemist, who himself has a blog, notes that…
Many science-oriented bloggers have taken on what’s been called “chemophobia”, and they’ve done some great work tearing into some some really uninformed stuff out there. But nonsense does not obey any conservation law. It keeps on coming. It’s always been in long supply, and it looks like it always will be.
It’s not just food, Derek. It’s not just food.
He continues…
This [Buzz Feed] piece really is an education. Not about food, or about chemistry – on the contrary, reading it for those purposes will make you noticeably less intelligent than you were before, and consider that a fair warning. The educational part is in the “What a fool believes” category. Make no mistake: on the evidence of this article, its author is indeed a fool, and has apparently never yet met a claim about chemicals or nutrition that was too idiotic to swallow.
The article is not monkish at all, though my kids might disagree. I found it educational and illuminating, as well as amusing.
We all run into low information voters, but we also run into low-information everyone else as well, and when it comes to food there is no shortage of things to believe or not because we ingest the stuff. But Derek does a great job of putting some necessary perspective, not just on the junk food science (That’s junk science for food) exhibited at Buzz Feed and many other dispensaries but of food chemistry as it relates to animal and human chemistry.
I recommend you read it. Then read some of his other stuff as well (which is often quite wonkish as it should be).
