71–80 of 329 posts
30–40 years later we might be saying the same thing about social media.
I wonder if people 80-100 years ago were as hysteric about radio and TV as we are today about social media.
The whole phenomenon of sugar and fructose being added to virtually everything is beyond comprehension. There are so many people, fat and slim, saying they don't want to be fat, yet eating foods with added sugar every day. Why not just replace all the added sugar with erythritol, for example? The whole situation with sugar reminds me of the situation with opium in early 19th century China
The reason is that in the 1970s and 80s people started freaking out about fat. Everyone from the FDA to USDA to family doctor was telling people fat was bad. So food producers started making fat-free versions of everything. Only problem is it tasted like shit. So what did they do? They added sugar. So now you have sugar added to everything from salad dressing to pasta sauce to bread and muffins. The latter probably h…
Makes you wonder what we'll find out is being withheld right now, 50 years from now.
I sometimes wonder which materials I directly interact with on a regular basis that people in a few decades wouldn't touch for anything short of large amounts of money. History tells us there are probably a few. Guessing at least a couple are plastics or plastic additives/coatings of some kind. Maybe whatever they replaced BPA with. Possibly gasoline will qualify. Probably one or two things currently on/in our food.
Makes you wonder what we'll find out is being withheld right now, 50 years from now.
I sometimes wonder which materials I directly interact with on a regular basis that people in a few decades wouldn't touch for anything short of large amounts of money. History tells us there are probably a few. Guessing at least a couple are plastics or plastic additives/coatings of some kind. Maybe whatever they replaced BPA with. Possibly gasoline will qualify. Probably one or two things currently on/in our food.
One reason why that VW scandal was so morally objectionable is that diesel emissions are fairly local pollutants. Skimping on filtering them offloads an extreme negative externality to every person who gets near your customer/product; it's like poisoning a well. And of course, VW sure isn't alone in cutting inconvenient corners for cash.
Lead solder will probably also be up there. Yeah, yeah, ROHS and REACH and whatever, but there are plenty of exemptions and the barrel-scrapers just ignore them anyways.
The whole phenomenon of sugar and fructose being added to virtually everything is beyond comprehension. There are so many people, fat and slim, saying they don't want to be fat, yet eating foods with added sugar every day. Why not just replace all the added sugar with erythritol, for example? The whole situation with sugar reminds me of the situation with opium in early 19th century China
Because price per pound: Erythritol: $20 Sugar: $0.44 Source: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mhVolO... [Google cache, the original PDF is 404 Not Found] Edit: looks like one can find erythritol for as little as $15, which is still 34 times more than sugar.
> Doses over 50 grams (1.8 oz) can cause severe diarrhea, plus a significant increase in nausea and stomach rumbling.
I don't know what the weight ratio would be to substitute that for sugar, but a can of soda has ~40g of sugar so I'm guessing you need to be careful with it similar to other sugar alcohols.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Erythritol can cause digestive discomfort for some [1], which is why I suspect it isn't prevalent. It was an eye opener to me how many packaged goods have sugar (HFCS) added, when intuitively it seems there was no good reason for any added sweet flavor to be present. By (mostly) assiduously reading the ingredients (the only source of truth, which is why it is often in the smallest print), I am often able to avoid pur…
The shocking thing is if you completely drop sugar from your diet you still notice plenty of sweet things. The only changes is the threshold before you consider something sweet. IMO, we need to have a big fat "This is Candy!" label on anything that's got more than 1 gram of sugar/hfcs/whatever per serving. Yes, that includes Apple Juice and other 'hidden' sweeteners.
Makes you wonder what we'll find out is being withheld right now, 50 years from now.
The effects of vehicular pollution? If sitting in your garage with a running car kills you, obviously being surrounded by traffic all day in the cities we live in must be absolutely terrible for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if people 80-100 years ago were as hysteric about radio and TV as we are today about social media.
They weren't. Television and especially radio were both cherished sources of reasonably reliable information in the beginning.