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One thing people seem to love to get their panties (and 'man-ties') in a twist over is the ingredients of their food.
 Browse the Facebook and you'll see a dozen parents pledging to keep certain aspects of their kids' diet clean. From BPA, to GMO, to pasteurized milk, it seems like new-age adults must vilify any ingredient they cannot pronounce (Sooooo, anything over four syllables?) or do not understand. (Have you ever eaten a grapple? They're AMAZING.)
Last week there were two notable examples of how the media reports on ingredients found in everyday items and stores, but then leaves the results inconclusive. Once the general public draws its own assumptions, hysteria sets in.
For reference, please recall the adage that margarine is one molecule away from being plastic. When this rumor was first circulated many people promised to switch to butter and stay away from a food that was clearly a contaminant.
When viewed with a scientific critical lens, this claim is so dubious it can make your head hurt. Individuals on CR4 certainly know that one molecule, and more importantly how those molecules are arranged, have significant impacts on the final product. In fact, the only similarity between margarine and some types of plastic is that they both utilize vegetable oil, and we want plastics which use vegetable oil because the other options include crude oil or natural gas. So, yes please, I'll take extra plastic in my margarine.
 Last week, seats on the food hyperbole train were full once again after Slate Magazine posted an article which claimed that 54% of grocery items sold at Wal-Mart would be banned at Whole Foods. Of course, that was the catchy lead of the article; only when you dig deeper does the foundations for Whole Foods' decisions seem precarious. (And how many objective people truly finished the article?) Whole Foods doesn't ban any particular item because of actual detriments to human health, but only because customers have expressed concern about ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and aspartame, all of which have been proven safe for human consumption. In total, there are 78 ingredients that Whole Foods outright bans, but not a single one has been proven to be harmful.
Some have speculated that Whole Foods and other organic and naturally-themed markets are hotbeds for pseudoscience. It's a place where well-meaning but ignorant grocery shoppers meet, talk about ingredient speculation, and reinforce beliefs not based on facts. It's hard to bring substantial scientific data into the national conversation about food purity when so many media outlets gloss over the unsexy (read: sciency) aspects of a news story, which then gets shared in social media a thousand times a second. Food controversy sells copy, and a biological breakdown of foodstuffs does not.
And it took place over the weekend after a food blogger "announced" that Subway has been using the ingredient azodicarbonamide to bake its bread. Just as with the Whole Foods example, the story spread quickly and unconstrained. The blogger mentioned that the same chemical is used to make yoga mats. Less than 48 hours later, Subway announced they would remove the ingredient from their bread in a move that justified the outrage. But azodicarbonamide is quite safe at the levels found in bread and anything else it's found in. In bread, it's used as an oxidizing and bleaching agent for flour. Its byproduct is biurea, which like urea is easily eliminated as biological waste.
Truthfully, the chemical has been exposed as a respiratory and skin irritant, but at such extreme levels that only front-line workers in an azodicarbonamide manufacturing center could be at risk. Azodicarbonamide is used during foam plastics manufacturing because as it is superheated, it releases nitrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and ammonia gases which become trapped in the polymer and create the foamy texture. As Popular Science writes, "We need to look at the chemistry to determine if the uses are appropriate."
 I realize I'm likely preaching to the choir about making smart decisions on your own in regards to the food you purchase and consume. It's easy to blame our modern dietary deficiencies on companies skimping on nutrition to save some cash, but the reality is that it is only an excuse to cover up the lack of effort from food shoppers who don't want to make the decision themselves. That way when the newest alarming food trend arises they can take no responsibility.
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Re: Latest Food Ingredient: Poor Critical Thinking
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