UrsaMinor
Member
Just got in a pointless argument on FB about the Evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Funny, they never told me in chemistry class that molecules have a memory of how they were made. The fructose in HFCS is DIFFERENT! Because it's been CHEMICALLY MANIPULATED! They SEPARATE the naturally occurring sugars into FRUCTOSE and GLUCOSE, and THAT AIN't NATURAL!
Yeesh. Why do I bother trying to educate people?
UrsaMinor
Member
To be fair, soft drinks sweetened with HFCS do have high levels of methylglyoxal, which is not produced in the manufacturing process when artificial sweeteners or sucrose are used. This is not a good thing- but as far as I can tell, this particular problem is unique to soft drinks.
Most of the literature links the health problems of HFCS to simple excessive consumption of sugars (particularly fructose).
blotonthelandscape
Member
I was going to say that I was under the impression that excess fructose is a bad thing, irrespective of source. Youtuber C0nc0rdance has a vid on it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JhxXp_P3H0&feature=channel_video_title). But yeah, even with my limited knowledge of chemistry (by limited I mean non-existant) that kind of "artificial=bad" argument stinks of ignorance.
FO
Member
Yes obviously.
HFCS retains full memory of the past chemical processes it underwent.
In fact, it's homeopathic and therefore good for you and natural and without side effects and can cure flue, cold, heart stroke, tumors, bad mood, dirty hair, body fat, atheism and pimples.
UrsaMinor
Member
I don't know why I'm still fighting the fight, but I have just challenged my debater to explain, among other things:
- Why is the speed of absorption of the sugars in HFCS by the body important to your argument?
- Why are these mysterious "buffers" in fruit of which you speak that make fructose and glucose from an orange good?
- How many grams of sugar do you consume from fruit and vegetable sources every day?
Noelle
Member
Ur just arguing to get frustrated, but sometimes the arguing itself is fun. Maybe you'll accidentally teach someone something. People sometimes don't believe me either when I challenge their health and nutrition myths, even when they're paying me to do it.
mmmm, high fructose corn syrup. No worse than regular sugar. Don't need to eat it, but it tastes so good.
UrsaMinor
Member
I don't think I've taught anybody anything today. The consensus on the thread was "Science is just another art, and what it says changes over time. Today Food X is good for you; tomorrow they'll say it will kill you, so every finding of science is going to change eventually and we shouldn't pay too much attention to what science says about anything because it's always wrong."
Aaaauuuuuggghh!
<headdesk>
Noelle, I would disagree that HFCS tastes as good as cane sugar. It's sweet, yes, but it's not precisely the same. I still like soft drinks made with cane sugar- although what I actually drink is the much less palatable diet stuff because I don't need all that sugar in my diet.
blotonthelandscape
Member
Which reminds me; I keep meaning to read up on aspartame, but good systematic reviews are hard to come by. Anyone know a good free source of info? I recently had to go on a diet for the (not so) ol' ticker, and sugars are one of the things I have to cut down on; aspartame is the most common sweetener, and one hears all the fear mongering but none of the research.
UrsaMinor
Member
@blotonthelandscape:
The Wikipedia entry on the aspartame controversy is a good place to start. It contains links back to the literature as well. Speaking as a biologist, I think that aspartame is safe for most people. If you suffer from phenylketonuria, you shouldn't eat it. If it triggers migraines for you, you shouldn't eat it. Other than that, go for it, and don't consume more than three or four grams a day. There is no solid evidence that it causes cancer, seizures, brain tumors, or any other disease. My personal opinion is that it's one of the safest artificial sweeteners on the market; there are strong a priori reasons to expect that it is safe, based on the molecular structure, and then there's the whole lack of evidence to the contrary.
Sucralose (Splenda) is one artificial sweetener that I'm wary of. Insufficient research has been done on the way and the extent to which chlorine atoms from the sweetener exchange into biomolecules in the body and modify them. It could be perfectly safe, or it could be a time bomb with a very long fuse. I'm not super-paranoid about it, but I generally choose products that don't contain Splenda.
I would prefer to drink soda sweetened with sodium cyclamate than aspartame, because it tastes better. Unfortunately, cyclamate sweeteners were banned in the U.S. over forty years ago, as the result of flawed science and bad politics. If you live in a country where cyclamate sweeteners are still legal, you might want to try them.
blotonthelandscape
Member
Thanks for that; I ran into the controversy page on wikipedia a few years ago, but wasn't scientifically literate back then. I'll take another look. And thanks for the opinion. Also, in the UK we have Coke Zero, which uses Aspartame and Sodium Cyclamate, and tastes much more like real Coke.
blotonthelandscape
Member
No, I think it's an attempt to avoid the dire repercussions that they experienced when they altered the flavour of Coke way-back-when. They had to re-introduce the old flavour as Coke Classic and phase out the new flavour. There are people who prefer the flavour Diet Coke to Coke, or at least become used to it, and still more (like myself) who don't actually like the flavour of Diet Coke, but need to cut out sugars.
I was wrong btw, in the UK we use the same as US, but other countries like Spain and Portugal use it.
Mark the Pilgrim
Member
@UrsaMinor: "The consensus on the thread was "Science is just another art, and what it says changes over time."
The other day I was telling someone over FB that newspapers often report poorly on science. Her friend comes into the thread and says "You see this is what I've been saying for ages: science is relative". When I read this I made a mental note to ask you about this sometime. I'm not a science buff, but I thought his statement was wrong because it isn't science that's relative, but rather the effects of it are relative. So whaddya think about the claim?
UrsaMinor
Member
@Mark the Pilgrim:
It's fuzzy. To some extent, it's true that science changes over time. Newton's laws of motion are a classic example- they're an excellent description of motion under common circumstances, but they turn out to be quite wrong, and not at all an adequate description of motion in general.
But it might be more fair to say that knowledge changes over time, not science. Science plods along testing and re-evaluating stuff. It's never completely right, but the match with reality keeps improving.
People who think they are getting science information from the popular media are fooling themselves. Most often what happens is that some know-nothing interviewer will ask a scientist to speculate on the significance of his findings, and the scientist will make a statement to the effect that "this might mean X, and could lead to Y in the future if we're right. Further data are needed." And the interviewer takes that provisional statement and repeats it as the gospel truth. Then X doesn't pan out once it's investigated further, and the blame is laid on science, not poor reporting.
I find the statement "Science is relative" to be pretty meaningless. Relative to what? The next time somebody says that to you, ask them to clarify what they mean by it. Personally I think it's a code phrase for "I'm ignorant and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've heard this phrase so I'm going to repeat it because I don't understand science."
Yoav
Member
Science reporters often have no science background and are often work out of press releases. The kind of moron that write science is just an opinion (in all caps) because of some anecdote they didn't actually understand in which the scientific community changed it's position is the same as creaturds who claim that Piltdown man being fake is proof that all early hominid fossils are fakes.
Science news cycle
Jeremiah
Member
The problem with the whole "science is relative", by which they mean that science is just an 'opinion' and not 'truth' because it changes, thing is this. We wouldn't have accomplished all we have if this is actually true. There would be no such thing as technological progress if science was always getting things wrong. Science is more like binoculars that start out of focus. Initial experiments might give us a vague idea of what is happening and through further scienctific discoveries we start to sharpen the picture and bring things into focus. So it changes, but the change is almost always an increase in accuracy. Very, very rarely does something come along that just turns existing science on it's head. Something that would constitute a true change of opinion.
Len
Member
Science is sometimes used as a term to describe what we know (or think we know). Used in this way, it's "relative" in the sense that it relates to what we know at a particular moment in time. As our knowledge grows (through experience and experimentation), what we know - and therefore the description of what we know (science) - will change.
There's a very big difference between what people in general "know" and what specialists or experts "know" (eg, see some of the detail presented by various people on this blog). The science that Joe Public (me, pretty much) "knows" is way different to the science that the ...ists on this blog know. But both change over time. And what makes it into newspapers and popular media is even dumber than me.
UrsaMinor
Member
Even given correct information, laymen often come to the wrong conclusions for reasons ranging from ignorance to simple sloppy thinking. Yesterday in the FB thread, someone made the leap from "methylglyoxal is used by cancer cells to modify proteins" to asserting "therefore methylglyoxal causes cancer".
blotonthelandscape
Member
@Jeremiah, "We wouldn't have accomplished all we have if this is actually true." The problem I have with these kinds of statements is that a model only needs to make accurate predictions for it to have utility. Aristotelian and Ptolemaic theories out-performed Copernican models of Heliocentricity, and were used to build meteorological models used by farmers to plan harvests, even though we now know them to be false. Likewise with Newton, his theories aren't strictly 'true', but for centuries were the prevailing model, and had actual utility. As a man who builds statistical models for a living, I can attest to the power of false models to fit the data and make good predictions.
I do however think that scientific methodology has improved in the last century or so, and as such modern science is more reliable simply because it is "done" better, and interpretted more accurately.
Revyloution
Member
Fun thread, I only have a bit to offer to the OP.
Why bother? Because rationality isnt like religious revelation. You don't inspire them to have a magic transformation when the accept the scientific method into their hearts. Rationality is like a time bomb. You set these little arguments in their heads, and they tick away until they finally blow.
A perfect case is an argument that Custador and I had over a year ago about guns. He strongly disagreed with me. The time bomb arguments I dropped in his head finally wore him down, and he admitted that he no longer thinks that the presence of guns by themselves is the root of the violence problem in the US. We might still disagree on many issues of gun control, but that rational time bomb I set in his head finally changed his mind.
And on the same issue, other's time bombs have worked in mine. I used to be all for carte blanche gun ownership. I've since modified my position to feel that gun ownership should be available to all, but that it should be licensed and regulated.
That's why you bother. When you place an argument in someones head, whether they agree or disagree, it will stick in their head for decades.
blotonthelandscape
Member
Quote: "Your God is probably too small, if after viewing any of your children being born or watching an African sunset or the sun rising over the ocean or the rugged mountains, you still believe that we descended from primates."
This appeared on my wall today. It cannot be unseen. Why should I bother? I've considered linking Aronra's "Falsifying Phylogeny" series from Youtube. But I would know I would just be inviting scorn and dismissal.
I also considered a post like "Your God is probably too small, if he takes all the glory for surises, sunsets and beautiful babies, but not smallpox, carnivores or Harlequin Icthyosis. Your God is probably too small, if you admire the sun which burns the crops of the poor, and requires you to pretend that birth is anything more than a physical process." Again though, inviting trite responses. In short, I can't be arsed.
You must log in to post.
