> The scientists injected the nanoparticles in chicken eggs. After the chickens hatched, the scientists detected changes in the functional, morphological and microbial biomarkers in the blood, the duodenum (upper intestine) and the cecum (a pouch connected to the intestine).
This looks like those nice studies where they injected MSG into the brain of mice to show they are bad. I don't think these findings can be extrapolated to humans who encounter those nano particles through food
Gut health will be the big biotech thing in the 2030s, we still don't know how our gut biome works and why.
There's a lot of anecdata, but my theory is that the biome is unique to everyone so there is no one size fits all theory. (See the fecal replacement studies where thin people fecal bacteria was inserted into non-thin folks and they lost weight).
I, for example, get the worst gas from Aspartame and Asesulfame K (and maybe Sucralose, the jury is still out on that). Both proven to be 100% safe sugar alternatives with no side effects in studies.
If you have any kind of serious gut issues (or salt wasting conditions or other reason you need more salt than average), it's worth avoiding table salt which contains anti-caking additives. Get sea salt, kosher salt or canning and pickling salt instead.
Salt is a major component of mucus and the gut is lined with mucus. (For that matter, so is the respiratory tract.)
If one does this, be careful that you are getting enough iodine in your diet. They do sell some iodized sea salt. However, those generally contain anti-caking additives too.
Red 40 will give me migraines. I only found out it was the culprit because I had a blood test that showed my body reacting to it. At this point, I filter out artificial colors altogether (or at least as much as feasible).
There's enough people sensitive or allergic to Yellow 5 (tartrazine) that you can search on it. It seems that tartrazine develops when you make caramel color.
The titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide mentioned at the link are white and yellow/cream white.
I get migraines from something in food. I've done elimination diets and I'm pretty sure it's none of the obvious candidates like histamine, phosphates etc.
But there's only so much you can learn from elimination diets, they're a blunt chisel as an instrument of discovery. I'm at a loss for how to dig deeper. Where did you find someone to test your blood for something as specific as red 40? Is it an allergy test or something?
I thought I had some problem w/ my shoulder and/or headaches, I never thought it was my jaw until my dentist told me I was grinding my teeth. I tried a bite guard and found the pain became highly localized in my jaw and realized my jaw was clicking. TMJ!
After two years w/ the bite guard I feel a lot better, it's been a long time since my jaw clicked or popped although an emotional event last December caused the pain to flare up again for a few weeks.
How did you decide to test that? Did you have to do many other blood tests along the way? Last time I got a handful of blood tests it felt like I lost a whole bucket of blood, hard to imagine doing anything like that by choice again
When I was seven or eight years old, red Koolaid was banned in my household because my mom maintained that the red dye made us kids act crazy/wild. One might think it was the sugar content, but my scout troop never made red "bug juice" (flavor powder packets only, in big containers of water, no sugar) either. I think there was some study done in the 70s about this, which is probably what people latched onto to explain kids' oddities, but my mom used to claim it was observable.
They have newer studies showing a possible link between multiple synthetic dyes and child behavioral issues, with red dye being the worst. It supposedly also affects males more than females. I believe the EU has found it credible enough to mandate warning labels on foods containing synthetic dyes.
This part is just my speculation, but I imagine many boys in school could have been medicated due to their behavioral/learning issues, which might have been the product of their diet (dyes and sugar).
I've discovered that anti-caking additives make certain kinds of cheese really crappy too. For the worst offenders it turns into a gelatin-like substance if you melt into something like chili.
Not sure exactly which additive does this, but there are definitely brands that don't exhibit this effect or not as badly.
It's just cornstarch. Same reason you should never use pre-shredded cheese on a pizza, the cornstarch burns faster than the cheese does.
Because it's soluble in water, you can (and I have) washed pre-shredded cheese in a colander and dried it on a kitchen towel when it was all I had on hand, and it turned out fine.
I've noticed grated or powered cheese tasting less and less like cheese, presumably because of cellulose, anticaking, and anything else that they put in that costs less than cheese.
I've switched to grating cheese myself, even for a single person meal, doesn't take long and tastes SO much better.
1 - it's the easiest and fastest grating device for cheese
2 - it's safe. Microplanes are great but it often happened that my cheese got a little bit of finger with it
3 - the texture and taste of the cheese is amazing. I can't explain it but it seems that the strands of cheese are thinner and longer . Whether it's on Parmigiano Reggiano or on old Comté it's just beautiful.
More on topic : never buy pre grated cheese. Or any thing pre-something.
My biggest issue is cleaning the grater - for a single meal, it's nice to just be able to pour a bit from a bag and be done. If I use a grater, I have to get the cheese out, grate it, and clean the grater.
That said, I do prefer the result of the grated cheese.
I made a joke about not milling my own flour (after which I did some research and found that some very reasonable-sized mills can be had for an exhorbitant fee). I actually grate my own cheese.
But! Do you make dishes with over a pound of cheese in them?
IKEA sells a container set with grater lids and then a sealing lid. We get our kids to grate the cheese (and they fight over the opportunity) and excess cheese is stored in the fridge for the next meal. Or as you probably do, just grate straight onto the food.
You can also get mason jar grater lids, which work with mason jars and lids you may already have in your kitchen. Bonus, they are made in the USA. https://www.microplane.com/mason-jar-lid-grater
Such an improvement over the dull graters I grew up with.
Apparently their patent on the chemically etched blade process expired so there should be more direct competition, but I haven’t explored alternatives.
Microplanes = very small holes, right? My experience was that cheese shredded that small dissolved/melted and lost it's flavor too fast when mixed with other foods and it was a lot of effort to grate any decent amount.
Yeah they're only good for very hard cheeses like parmesan and friends. Useful for a lot of other non-cheese things too, good tool. Just not a replacement for a cheese grater really.
Colby Jack is the least Frankensteinian of the melted cheese options. Curds of two cheeses pressed and aged together. Colby is the same microbe as cheddar (cheddar turns out to be a verb, not a flavor, and Colby skips the processing).
I go through a lot of bricks of Tillamook's Colby Jack.
Tillamook makes great cheese. They're also one of the only mass-produced ice creams I can find these days that doesn't have any gums or carageenan added to it
edit: they might have begun adding gums. I have to buy Jeni's or Van Leeuwen. Ought to just make my own with how little I eat anyway.
Well thank you for the suggestion and I am pleasantly surprised. I had written that brand off for a long time knowing that it was a made-up word and made by Nestle... the ingredients appear very clean and quality though
I bought a food processor specifically to grate mozzarella for pizzas. I still pretty much only use it for that reason. Hah. Used to take me like 5 min to grate a lb of cheese. Now I blast through a block of cheese with the fury of 1200 watts in 30 seconds. Amazing
Looked at the incredients in some walmart Great Value brand hot chocolate... found silicone dioxide listed as ingredient for anti-caking. Really?? Sand?? Basically getting scammed. Wouldn't be surprised to see saw dust as an ingredient from Dollar Tree coco.
Fair! But a whole generation was told that sugar consumption was safe. And low-fat was a balanced diet against obesity, diabetes, heart ailments (metabolic syndrome)
Sugar consumption is safe. The problem is that people over consume the wrong types of sugar in highly palatable foods. The same way in which an extremely high fat diet is bad for you, especially if you eat the wrong sorts of fats.
A whole generation was also taught everything in moderation, but we've not been very good at it.
I think that video is more helpful for you than it is me.
"He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough)".
Too much sugar is bad for you, too much fat is bad for you. If you eat too many foods that are high in processed sugars, you're going to increase your risk of diabetes. If you eat a balanced diet that includes fruits and other complex carbs with fibre to reduce the GI of the food, you're going to be fine.
All of this needs to be combined with some exercise.
This isn't ground breaking science, this is a Youtube video for people who have a poor diet.
I don't believe that titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide are used in food colouring are they? And they didn't imply a behavioural link in the article - it's possible, but I think we're making quite a few (off topic) jumps.
Edit: I stand corrected, titanium dioxide was, maybe still is, but not considered safe.
As mentioned, TiO2 is perhaps the most common white pigment and is used in all kinds of things from candy to toothpaste to cosmetics. We eat a lot of it, and it's generally recognized as safe in the US (but not the EU!).
Si02 is just silica/quartz, and is the most common type of sand. It's usually an anti-caking agent but... it's sand. You are almost certainly getting some SiO2 any time you eat a vegetable. It is also generally recognized as safe.
The sickness is due to how the particles interact with the lining of your lungs, and breathing in enough to get ill effects will be much more than you consume through food over a short period.
There may be longer term effects, but I'd imagine we would have identified more of them by now, considering how severely dangerous silicosis is.
My property is built on the silt plume of a river that now empties out a few miles away. It does become a dust bowl when grass is removed and everything's dry. It otherwise stays in its place.
I think almost everyone who works with children (teachers, day care, people who chaperone ski trips) believes that ingredients of junk food (sugar, food colorings, etc.) despite their being little evidence.
I was under the impression there was lots of evidence - not that the junk food causes bad behaviour, but that adults treat children who have just eaten junk food differently causing them to misbehave.
I'm allergic to tartrazine. It doesn't seem to affect me much as an adult but as a child I'd go into drastic coughing/wheezing fits from consuming orange-flavored drinks in which it's used as a food coloring. I have a solid ADHD diagnosis but not looked into any kind of larger overlap with other allergies, due to the cost of screening/testing.
Reading this made me think about how Twizzler Pull and Peel make me cough. Went and looked it up. Yellow 5 is in them. Have been diagnosed ADD for the last 22 years. Huh.
I’m tired of the constant “no evidence” bs. I have children and their behavior changes dramatically when they eat food with artificial coloring. I’m honestly tired of being told I’m crazy. You can take my kids and try it yourself.
If you're going to feed kids candy that is colored with agent A you need to make identical candy colored with agent B so the kids can't tell them apart. You can test A vs B but not A vs no color. (Though maybe you can have the kids eat the candy while blindfolded)
If you're going to test the influence of sugar you could use sugar for candy A and some combination of Sucralose, Ace-K, aspartame and some strange carbohydrate like mannitol or xylitol in candy B and get pretty close in terms of taste and mouthfeel but in A/B tests people will notice the difference.
Then people will wonder if those other substances cause problems and none of these address the possibility that the sensory pleasure of junk food makes kids squee and lose self control.
I knew it from 'Strawberry Milk' which made me sneeze and feel strange long ago.
Since then I'm avoiding E122&E123. But haven't seen it that much in the last years. Still wouldn't want to have it. It's cheap stuff to upsell cheap products. Mix/blend some real strawberries into your milk/yoghurt, or use organic syrup, marmalade.
I totally fucked myself at a job a few years back because some asshole put green candies in the meeting room and apparently Yellow #5 makes me agitated and irritable. By the time I figured that out the initial impression was already set. Now I'll split a bag of Peanut M&Ms with you but only if you give me the brown, blue, and red ones and take the rest for yourself.
Unfortunately true. Pretty much all of the named ingredient food colorings are that way because someone somewhere reacts to them. Red M&Ms are a new thing. They went away in the 80's because that color turned out to be carcinogenic, so we had no red M&Ms for a decade or two, and then if memory serves they introduced blue first, which I think was probably a way to clear everyone's memories a bit more.
I had a friend who had avoided M&Ms for all of grade school because she was allergic to the old Red. I think it was a year or two after they phased it out before she learned they were safe for her to eat again. She was not pleased nobody told her.
The yellow #5 thing is apparently somewhat common for ADHD people, I'm not sure about people on the spectrum. It does give some credence to the old wives' tale about candy making children spaz out, beyond the generally accepted theory today about correlation with overstimulation. Some kids, and some candies, just enough to cause anecdotes to circulate.
I’m sorry you were downvoted. I agree completely as a parent of a child who goes entirely off the rails with even the smallest amount of food containing red 40.
This looks like those nice studies where they injected MSG into the brain of mice to show they are bad. I don't think these findings can be extrapolated to humans who encounter those nano particles through food