Silly Food Ideas
I first studied food chemistry in detail when I was a third-year undergraduate. This created a foundation from which I developed a certain perspective on food claims, based on chemical analysis.
I'm just going to take a quick look at some food decisions people are passionate about:
Essentially, honey is about 80% sugar — mostly fructose (fruit sugar, about 40%), glucose (30%), maltose and sucrose. The rest is mostly water. If you ate 100 grams of sugar, you'd receive perhaps 1-3% of your daily requirement of some vitamins (e.g., for vitamin B2, you'd have to eat 3 kg to meet your daily requirement). As a sweetener, honey is approximately as sweet as table sugar. I must admit however that honey tastes a lot nicer. It is the one area in which I'd say honey is genuinely 'better'. It's good for baking too; being already a sugar syrup, it's easier to use than refined sugar or even castor sugar.
But honey can be worse. Since honey production is carried out by the random acts of insects, honey is never of a uniform composition. Sometimes, it contains allergens from pollen that some people are allergic to; sometimes, it can even contain the spores of nasty pathogens. It is basically impure sugar, and it has been marketed as if that impurity is a beneficial thing. Consider this: if pure water was analogous to pure sugar, would you drink water that was the colour of honey?
The same situation is true for sea salt. Sea salt is tastier than industrial salt or pure salt, sodium chloride. That's because it contains impurities, especially potassium salts. Potassium ions are the main reason why sea salt tastes different. For example, potassium bromide can taste sweet, salty or bitter at different concentrations; sodium chloride and bromide just taste salty at all concentrations.
However, potassium ions are what we call 'antagonistic' to sodium ions. This can be good or bad. Athletes consume potassium to relax muscles and prevent cramps; the bananas that tennis players snack on between sets are high in potassium — but the levels present in sea salt are much higher than those in bananas. Potassium salts have such a well-known relaxing effect that large doses of potassium bromide have long been used to make humans sleepy and susceptible to control. It's a good thing to read more about it.
'Organic' food is an interesting term. I don't like that term, since all the food I eat is organic (carbon-based) except perhaps mineral salts and water. People who eat 'organic' food normally mean that it's food grown with natural animal faeces instead of pure salts such as ammonium nitrate. Of course, the good part is that some 'organic' foods eschew the use of artificial insecticides in their making, which is certainly a healthy thing. I have nothing much else against 'organic' food except that I'd prefer they called it 'food grown without whatever chemicals it was grown without, and using natural faeces only'. Sometimes, 'normal' food is normal.
Which brings me to this odd idea about 'processed' food. I think humans process their food a lot, compared to other animals. We are the only species that regularly subjects food to thermal shock, charring, denaturing and tool-based mechanical alteration. Why should that be? Shouldn't food fit for all the other species on this planet be fit for us too? Maybe the raw food advocates have a point.
But can you imagine not eating processed food? No cereals, no bread, no baked goods. No cooked eggs, no steamed fish, no grilled meat. No blanched vegetables, no jams, no butter. No milk unless you get it straight from an 'organic' cow. No wine, no beer, no salted dishes. No ground pepper, no cheese, no olive oil. Haha, no thanks.
And yet, some people like to add processed flavours to their food; things like cinnamon, vanilla and umami. All these require processing (often heating and/or extraction with alcohol) to bring out the taste. Which brings me to that contentious last item.
Why are people against MSG? Some people claim to be sensitive to it with resultant bad symptoms of all kinds, but we haven't actually been able to reproduce this effect. Natural MSG occurs whenever salt encounters proteins; glutamic acid is a common amino acid present in most protein sources. Let's be clear about this: without glutamate, the brain CANNOT WORK. It is the most abundant triggering (excitatory) neurotransmitter chemical in your nervous system. And MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid.
At that point, some people come up to me and say, "Yeah, but sodium is bad." Sodium is bad?? No, sodium is essential. You can't think or move without sodium ions. And your body contains a bit less than 1000 mg for every kilogram of your body weight; if you weigh 60 kg, you probably have 55,000 mg of sodium in there. You need to maintain this with about 1500 mg of sodium intake a day.
So what's bad about MSG? Is it the glutamate? Is it the sodium? Can't be either. The only thing bad is consuming too much of it, just as it would be bad to drink too much water or eat too much salt or beef. It would be fatal to eat nothing but lettuce, for example. The key is moderation. I'll be honest with you. If you eat large tennis-ball sized lumps of MSG every day, you might get very sick. Then again, I can think of many other food substances of which this might be true too.
I can only believe that bad PR skills have led us to this point. The reason why MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is called that in hospitals but called 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance' (NMR) in chemistry labs is that nobody wants to imagine being 'nuked' even though the 'nuclear' in NMR has nothing to do with radioactivity. MSG just sounds too much like a 'chemical', by which humans mean something awful and artificial, like plastic.
If we had stuck to calling MSG 'umami' from the beginning, everyone would have lauded it as an exotic oriental ingredient. But it was not to be.
All food is made of chemicals, and all cooking is chemistry. It is good for students to study food chemistry, so that all the nonsense that they read in advertisements and on boxes and labels can be purged, filtered, eliminated. Then there'll be fewer silly food ideas to go around.
I'm just going to take a quick look at some food decisions people are passionate about:
- honey vs refined sugar
- sea salt vs industrial salt
- 'organic' food vs normal food
- 'processed' food vs raw food
- monosodium glutamate vs 'natural' flavours
Essentially, honey is about 80% sugar — mostly fructose (fruit sugar, about 40%), glucose (30%), maltose and sucrose. The rest is mostly water. If you ate 100 grams of sugar, you'd receive perhaps 1-3% of your daily requirement of some vitamins (e.g., for vitamin B2, you'd have to eat 3 kg to meet your daily requirement). As a sweetener, honey is approximately as sweet as table sugar. I must admit however that honey tastes a lot nicer. It is the one area in which I'd say honey is genuinely 'better'. It's good for baking too; being already a sugar syrup, it's easier to use than refined sugar or even castor sugar.
But honey can be worse. Since honey production is carried out by the random acts of insects, honey is never of a uniform composition. Sometimes, it contains allergens from pollen that some people are allergic to; sometimes, it can even contain the spores of nasty pathogens. It is basically impure sugar, and it has been marketed as if that impurity is a beneficial thing. Consider this: if pure water was analogous to pure sugar, would you drink water that was the colour of honey?
The same situation is true for sea salt. Sea salt is tastier than industrial salt or pure salt, sodium chloride. That's because it contains impurities, especially potassium salts. Potassium ions are the main reason why sea salt tastes different. For example, potassium bromide can taste sweet, salty or bitter at different concentrations; sodium chloride and bromide just taste salty at all concentrations.
However, potassium ions are what we call 'antagonistic' to sodium ions. This can be good or bad. Athletes consume potassium to relax muscles and prevent cramps; the bananas that tennis players snack on between sets are high in potassium — but the levels present in sea salt are much higher than those in bananas. Potassium salts have such a well-known relaxing effect that large doses of potassium bromide have long been used to make humans sleepy and susceptible to control. It's a good thing to read more about it.
'Organic' food is an interesting term. I don't like that term, since all the food I eat is organic (carbon-based) except perhaps mineral salts and water. People who eat 'organic' food normally mean that it's food grown with natural animal faeces instead of pure salts such as ammonium nitrate. Of course, the good part is that some 'organic' foods eschew the use of artificial insecticides in their making, which is certainly a healthy thing. I have nothing much else against 'organic' food except that I'd prefer they called it 'food grown without whatever chemicals it was grown without, and using natural faeces only'. Sometimes, 'normal' food is normal.
Which brings me to this odd idea about 'processed' food. I think humans process their food a lot, compared to other animals. We are the only species that regularly subjects food to thermal shock, charring, denaturing and tool-based mechanical alteration. Why should that be? Shouldn't food fit for all the other species on this planet be fit for us too? Maybe the raw food advocates have a point.
But can you imagine not eating processed food? No cereals, no bread, no baked goods. No cooked eggs, no steamed fish, no grilled meat. No blanched vegetables, no jams, no butter. No milk unless you get it straight from an 'organic' cow. No wine, no beer, no salted dishes. No ground pepper, no cheese, no olive oil. Haha, no thanks.
And yet, some people like to add processed flavours to their food; things like cinnamon, vanilla and umami. All these require processing (often heating and/or extraction with alcohol) to bring out the taste. Which brings me to that contentious last item.
Why are people against MSG? Some people claim to be sensitive to it with resultant bad symptoms of all kinds, but we haven't actually been able to reproduce this effect. Natural MSG occurs whenever salt encounters proteins; glutamic acid is a common amino acid present in most protein sources. Let's be clear about this: without glutamate, the brain CANNOT WORK. It is the most abundant triggering (excitatory) neurotransmitter chemical in your nervous system. And MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid.
At that point, some people come up to me and say, "Yeah, but sodium is bad." Sodium is bad?? No, sodium is essential. You can't think or move without sodium ions. And your body contains a bit less than 1000 mg for every kilogram of your body weight; if you weigh 60 kg, you probably have 55,000 mg of sodium in there. You need to maintain this with about 1500 mg of sodium intake a day.
So what's bad about MSG? Is it the glutamate? Is it the sodium? Can't be either. The only thing bad is consuming too much of it, just as it would be bad to drink too much water or eat too much salt or beef. It would be fatal to eat nothing but lettuce, for example. The key is moderation. I'll be honest with you. If you eat large tennis-ball sized lumps of MSG every day, you might get very sick. Then again, I can think of many other food substances of which this might be true too.
I can only believe that bad PR skills have led us to this point. The reason why MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is called that in hospitals but called 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance' (NMR) in chemistry labs is that nobody wants to imagine being 'nuked' even though the 'nuclear' in NMR has nothing to do with radioactivity. MSG just sounds too much like a 'chemical', by which humans mean something awful and artificial, like plastic.
If we had stuck to calling MSG 'umami' from the beginning, everyone would have lauded it as an exotic oriental ingredient. But it was not to be.
All food is made of chemicals, and all cooking is chemistry. It is good for students to study food chemistry, so that all the nonsense that they read in advertisements and on boxes and labels can be purged, filtered, eliminated. Then there'll be fewer silly food ideas to go around.
Labels: Biochemistry, Chemistry, Food, Health
etched with acid at 1:02:00 am
10 Comments:
I have a question. Hypertensive patients are usually on low sodium diet. When I checked the low sodium salt, however, I found that half is just KCl. Wouldn't potassium be as bad when it comes to tipping off blood osmotic balance?
This is what happens when people think a) sodium is bad, b) potassium chloride is a good substitute flavour-wise. They should try ammonium chloride at least; Scandinavian food uses that. It's ok in the gut. Haha.
Urgh. Just hope that nothing germinates in your gut :)
It might still be wise to avoid cetain artificial additives though, there are the azo dyes which are linked to hyperactivity.
sibrwd: And what is this 'hyperactivity'? Might it perchance be of the same order as that induced by 1,3,5-trimethylxanthine? But yes, I don't advocate artificial additives anywhere in my post.
It's a sort of processing... After all manufacturers do want food that's been harvested miles away to look good, so I think it's reasonable to consider these.
Anyway with regards to the hyperactivity I refer to [http://adc.bmj.com/content/89/6/506.abstract] as well as [http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713680861&db=all]. They don't seem to define it or discuss its mode of action, so I'm not sure. Probably still isn't a good idea to feed such things to children though :/
sibrwd: I know what azo dyes are, but I am wary of diagnoses such as 'hyperactivity'. I mean, would we have problems with 'hypercreativity'? (Yes, there is such a term.)
Haha, I understand what you're getting at. I suppose (sorry generalising here) that many people aren't comfortable with not-easily-quantifiable characters? Thus diagnosis or hyperactivity instead of hypercreativity.
Actually, do you have a reference for hypercreativity? Can't seem to find any good explanations.
Well, creativity is harder to define than activity; so hypercreativity is harder to define than hyperactivity. Which is not to say that hyper-anything is easy to define. I sometimes think that 'hyperactivity' or 'hypercreativity' are terms invented by people whose ideas of the human race are pegged at a level that is far too low. It is the curse of the 'normal' distribution, a statistical construct of no proven usefulness.
ha ha! this entry comes in timely. i've been trying to experiment with eating MSG (from instant noodles) before examinations.. since glutamate is the neurotransmitter most associated memory in the brain.. logically more of it would only mean more frequent synaptic transmission and better memory!
the sodium is good too, since sodium channels are what trigger action potentials.
what is your take, as a chemist, on my homebrewn theory =P
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