[MD] Science: Medicine?

[Krimel]

Arlo,
If you are saying that we are often not very bright in the choices we make
with respect to diet, I agree. But that is not what this discussion is about
or at least what it was about. I was talking specifically about farming
practices that created the green revolution and has forestalled the
Malthusian crisis. I said that the speaker I listened to caused me to
question the received wisdom that these practices cause adverse health
effects.  You speculate that chemical additives cause an increase in
cancers. Where is the evidence for this? According to the Washington Post,
"U.S. death rates from the disease have declined by 18.4 percent among men
and by 10.5 percent among women since mortality rates first started going
down in the early 1990s."

People eating the products of the Green Revolution live longer than ever
before. Most of the real killers are the result of sedentary lifestyle and
yes poor diet. But it is not the artificial chemicals that are the killers
it is the quantity and quality of the foods people choose to eat. It's the
sugar in the soda and the salt in the snacks that create as much harm as
unpronounceable chemical compounds. Those compounds are readily identifiable
and testable and if they are found to actually be harmful can be removed.
DDT, red dye number 2 and that nasty stuff the Chinese use come to mind. 

It isn't the dyes that make Fruit Loops more noxious than Cheerios, it is
the sugar. But the issue I was pointing to was the legal sanction we give to
lying in advertising. You do touch on this as well. Fruit juice should be
fruit juice and it pisses me off to see syrup labeled juice as well. But
once again this is not an issue of science or agriculture. It is an issue of
politics and marketing. If you want to make the case that politics and
marketing are toxic influences, you will have to look elsewhere for
disagreement.

Krimel

--------------------------------------------
[Krimel]
And really what does "natural" mean as it related to food packaging?

[Arlo]
For me it means no artifical colors, dyes, or flavors. If the 
producer wants the food to have a banana flavor, it should get that 
from bananas, not from Lythoriumxa Sulfnate #7 (made that one up). If 
a juice turns out off-red from the fruit juices it contains, so be 
it, I don't need Yellow Dye #32 (good chance that one is real) to 
give it a "brighter" color. Personally, I don't buy any packaged food 
that contains preservatives. I'll have enough of that in me after I die.

I think this also raises another issue, and that is the junk that 
passes for "food" in the first place. Its one thing to discuss the 
relative health merits of organic bananas versus non-organic bananas, 
or the merits between non-gmo bananas and bananas spliced with squid 
genes, and maybe this makes me a curmudgeony fellow at heart, but 
daggum it, when I buy something called "juice" it had better be 
"juice". Not 95% water, 4.9% high fructose corn syrup, and a .1% 
split between some colored dye and an artificial apple flavoring. 
Therein I think lies our biggest health-related problem. That 
doctor-dude from CNN, I saw him asked once what the biggest 
health-risk food was in the typical American diet. He said "soda". 
Reason being it has no nutritional value, it nothing but high 
fructose syrups, chemicals and dyes. And yet we drink it by the 
GALLONS. We consume it in huge Big Gulp cups that contain something 
like 32 individual servings. Put down those Cheeze-Its and read the 
ingredients. There is no actual food in there at all. And it is these 
foods we consume in huge quantities. You say there is no evidence of 
a health-risk, and yet I look around at the high-rates of intestinal 
cancers and adult-onset diabetes and I can't help but think there is 
a relation there. And even if there wasn't, even if the risk was so 
low to my health from drinking dyed-blue high fructose corn syrup, I 
would think the fact that drinking real juice is actually good for 
you would make me choose the latter over the former every time. If I 
want "cheese crackers", I'll open up some natural crackers (made with 
only wheat, yeast, etc.) and cut a block of natural cheddar (aged 
milk, no fake colors or flavors).

Ask yourself this. If you had all those individual ingredients, dyes, 
chemicals, additives, corn syrups, etc separate and infront of you, 
would you put them onto a spoon and give them to your kid? Would eat 
them? Why do we accept it when some factory combines them and boxes 
them, but individually you'd never dream of dumping "Yellow Dye #32" 
into your breakfast cereal just to make it prettier? Or would you?