Via GirlHacker I discover "The Truth About Splenda"- it's made with chlorine!
Wanna hear an even bigger scandal? Table salt is made with chlorine too. That's right. The food industry has been covering up the dark truth - salt is sodium chloride. Worse, unlike the Splenda molecule, the salt molecule ionizes easily, separating into sodium and cloride ions, both viciously reactive. Sodium in its pure form is explosive - we work with it in the lab (industrial uses!) And clorine is deadly.
This reminds me of the dihydrogen monoxide scare. (Everything on that website is true, and yet your government is doing nothing to protect you from DHMO.)
Similar scares about canola oil abound (refuted here) along with soy products, and all kinds of over-the-counter medicines.
And because I haven't linked to them yet, here are snopes and the alt.folklore.urban archive, which are worth a visit whenever something on the internet makes you scared of your food, or anything else that used to seem harmless.
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4 comments:
*giggle*
I'd not actually heard of Splenda before reading this, but.....
Out of curiosity, does anybody know what this "sucralose" actually is? Is it an artificial sugar? If not, then it's kinda misleading, but no more so than the anti-indigestion pill in the UK that is being advertised as "contains Digestivum Maximum" or some such...
I like "Consumers have a right to know exactly what is contained in the food products they buy for themselves and, particularly, for their children."
To pacify those who feel they should know about use of chlorides, I suggest simply labelling all foods:
"May contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, sodium, chlorine, etc." and forget the traditional "ingredients list"
(Man, forgot to close a quotation and a parentheses. I'll fix it next time I upload...)
"Sucralose" is supposed to be a molecule very similar to the sugar molecule, but with an extra chlorine in it.
This changes the shape of the molecule and makes it impossible for the body to break down, supposedly. Thus is passes through undigested -- zero calories. But still tastes (more or less) like sugar.
I like this site too...
Uh... I haven't studied organic chemistry since A-level, but I suspect that if you add Cl to a sugar molecule, it is no longer a sugar. Which does make the reported advertising false advertising. Is there an American equivalent of Trading Standards? That doesn't, of course, mean that the product is dangerous.
The other link... well, http://www.kevdo.com/lipbalm/bodyshop.html is amusing - outrage at using sex to sell a product (is this rare in America or something?), and then overanalysing a packet of kids' lip balm to show that it's really designed to appeal to people interested in child sex or soemthing...!
uh... I've read a little more of the lip balm site now... it *is* a spoof, isn't it? The whole thing? I hadn't though of it before, but now I really hope so...
"We thought it strange that some lip balms... tended to come in containers typically referred to as "pots". We also noticed that one of the pages at Bonne Bell's Web site has the document title Smack "
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