Slashdot Mirror
FDA Considers Redefining Chocolate
shewfig writes "The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining 'chocolate' to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk. There are already standard terms to differentiate these products from chocolate, such as 'chocolatey' and 'chocolate-flavored.' The change was requested by the industry group Chocolate Manufacturers of America. Leading the resistance to this change is high-end chocolate maker Guittard, with significant grass-roots support from the Candyblog. The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25. Here is the FDA page on the proposed change, which oddly enough does not say what the proposed change is."
As if American chocolate wasn't bad enough as it is...
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I guess you guys better start buying chocolate from europe. Yours sucked anyway so it's all for the best.
Once ethanol production drives up the cost of corn, perhaps we will start to see real sugar used instead of high-fructose corn syrup.
Life is not for the lazy.
My name is Harmonious Botch and I'm a chocoholic. A fucking serious chocoholic. I figure I spend about 200 per month on it. Were I this hooked on booze or heroin, I'd be dead by now.
There is already crud in the chocolate. Any serious consumer of chocolate already knows to read the ingredients.
To write this post, I went to the trash can, pulled out a package of inferior quality candy that my wonderful but misguided wife had bought. I had thrown it away because of the crud in it. Under "ingredients", it says: "palm, shea, sunflower, and/or safflower oil". There is already whey protein in it also.
A little vegetable oil is not going to make a big difference. Over the last decade or two they have snuck palm oil in, and sometimes even wax, and most consumers didn't notice. Most of you won't notice the vegtable oil either, and those of us who do already read the labels.
Did you ever know a "chocoholic"? One of those folks who just can't get enough chocolate? I bet there's at least one in your home or workplace. At my house, it's my wife Emily. She's got to have her little bowl of Hershey's Kisses in the living room. She can't go shopping without bringing home some chocolate ice cream or a chocolate-cake mix. She's even got a funny little sweatshirt that says, "My Name Is Emily, And I'm A Chocoholic."
To be honest, I'm a bit of a chocoholic myself. Except for one small detail. You see, instead of being addicted to chocolate, I'm addicted to booze. Yep, from dawn to dusk, there's one thing on my mind: booze! Beer, liquor, wine, all that stuff!
When my wife gets one of her cravings, she reaches for a Baby Ruth or Mars bar. With me, it's Icehouse beer. My refrigerator is always stocked with plenty of it. I also have a little flask of whiskey in my desk drawer at work. In fact, if you can keep a secret, I even keep some booze in my car in case of traffic jams. I just can't stand to be without booze for too long!
I'm a lot like that Cookie Monster on Sesame Street. Only it's more like the Booze Monster. When I walk into a party and see that they have booze of any kind, it's like, "Whoa-hoa! All bets are off! Lemme at that booze!"
I remember this one time, there was no chocolate in the house. Emily was going out of her mind, trying to scrape up some sort of chocolate fix. In the end, she resorted to drinking a cup of hot cocoa. It was so cute! Sort of like the time I drank all her hairspray because there was no booze in the house. Or that other time with the rubbing alcohol. Or the Nyquil. Or the Aqua-Velva.
Another time, I was completely out of booze, and all the stores and bars were closed, so I drove 45 minutes to find a place that would sell me some beer or something. I was kind of embarrassed, because here it was late Monday night, and I had to work the next day, and I'm driving around looking for booze. But, hey, that's just how things are when you're a "booze-oholic" like me! I finally found a huge all-night liquor store. You should have seen how I loaded up! Cases of this, fifths of that. It was 5 a.m. when I finally got home, so I just said, "To heck with work!" and had my own little improvised holiday. I called it Booze Day! I'd been working hard, getting to work on time almost every day for two weeks, so I figured I'd earned what wound up being the rest of the week off.
Sometimes Emily and I think we should cut down a little-you know, health concerns and all. But there's always some special occasion that gives us an excuse to go off our "diets." Halloween was Emily's last big bender. We only got three trick-or-treaters the entire night, so the whole big bowl of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups went straight to her. (Or straight to her thighs, as she said!)
My most recent bender was today. There was a good movie on TV, and I figured, hey, I'll need steady hands to change the volume. Of course, it all went straight to my liver, but what are you gonna do?
For my birthday, Emily gave me the funniest coffee mug, perfect for Irish coffee. It has a little teddy bear on it with a "don't mess with me" look on his face, and it says, "Hand Over The Booze And Nobody Gets Hurt." I laughed so hard! That bear was just like me when I robbed the party store earlier this year! Also, the mug is really big, so it can hold a lot of booze... another plus!
Yes, those chocoholics are a funny sort. But they won't hurt you-as long as they have their chocolate, that is. Or, in my case, booze!
- lifted from The Onion
At least the weekly ration was increased to twenty grammes this week.
For chocolate thayt is true. Chocolatey only needs to somehow resemble chocolate. Add a few more -ey and you probably have something is vaguely brown. Perhaps recycled Zunes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25.
After which time they will toss them out and make a re$pon$ible deci$ion.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It figures. Since this is /. an article on the FDA trying to regulate something healthy doesn't show up, but chocolate does. (This is a joke for the humor-impaired.)
Seriously, the FDA is Attempting to Regulate Supplements, Herbs and Juices as "Drugs". This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone. Medical costs are already skyrocketing here in the US - we should have the freedom to choose whatever kind of treatment we want, not be forced into one choice: corporate drugs.
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us. It absolutely upsets me that the FDA, another alphabet-soup agency, doesn't work for "we the people" but instead for the very top elite executives of Big Pharma.
The surplus sugar will go into making that well known vegetable called ketchup.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So this means the Feds found Osama Bin Ladin? And our food supply is safe from terrorists? Fuck the contents of a chocolate bar. Our national priorities are seriously out of order.
... and I have been exposed, for many years in France, to some of the best chocolate on the planet. For example, try Recchiuti in San Francisco, but there are others. As for Hershey's, well... no offense but I would not call that chocolate.
Dont follow this path I dont care what the US does, M&Ms were about the only edible chocolate there anyway.
Damn you Slashdot and your chocolate stories, I now have a huge craving for a big box of Leonidas.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.
Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Lets bring it back. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists.
God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Well the last president redefined sex, I guess the FDA can do whatever it wants too also.
As someone pointed out most US chocolate is inferior.
However there are exceptions....
Dove's dark chocolate bars are good.
Also recently encountered this: Cowgirl Chocolate made with of all things cayenne pepper. Not bad chocolate but the pepper actually overloads the taste buds and after a certain point the good chocolate taste is not detectable.
The people that benefit is not the consumer, it is the businesses that want to call their product 'chocolate' so once again, the US government is helping businesses, not the consumer
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This is the same FDA that in spring 2006 bowed to industry pressure to change labeling requirements for carmine coloring. Look at a bottle of Listerine Citrus Burst. It has an ingredient called cochineal extract. Sounds kinda exotic like vanilla extract. FDA proposed labeling standard requiring manufacturers to say "cochineal extract (insect derived)" but food manufacturers argued that would turn off consumers so they deleted the insect derived portion. Cochineal extract is a red food coloring derived from crushing pregnant cochineal beetles. They also use it in Wonka (Nestle) Pixy Stix. This isn't for health reasons or flavor enhancement. Cochineal extract (insect derived) is used purely for aesthetic purposes. Just remember the next time you rinse with Listerine Citrus Burst that you're swishing crushed dead pregnant beetles in your mouth.
signature pending slashdot approval
I absolutely stay away from the Big Corporate chocolate: Hershey's, Cadbery's, etc. It's all shit. High Fructose Corn Syrup and other crap in there. Ever had fine, European chocolate? The taste and texture is so much better.
There is a healthy and damn tasteful alternative to "corporate chocolate": Scharffen Berger Bittersweet Fine Artisan Dark Chocolate. I buy the 70% and 100% Cacao bars. You can really taste the cacao beans in the 70% but it's not completely bitter. The 100% takes a bit getting used to but once you've enjoyed these high quality chocolates, the "corporate chocolate" tastes like the shit that it is. I buy these bars at Whole Foods Market.
This is exactly what Dave Barry wrote about in the book Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked on Our Nation's Most Cherished Political Institutions. Don't people listen to satirists anymore?
For those who haven't read the book, the message is: WHO FUCKING CARES? IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU IMAGINE YOUR TAX MONEY SHOULD BE PAYING FOR? DO YOU STILL WONDER WHY THE GOVERNMENT IS SO FUCKING HUGE??
OK I slit my wrists and you were spot on, the headache went away almost immediately. However I have been unable to stem the bloodflow and now I feel quite weak and dizzy. Can you suggest something for this? Also if you have any tips for removing blood stains from carpets and keyboards I would very much appreciate it...
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yeah, really! We need to send every single damn lazy chemist and nutritionist down at the FDA out to Afghanistan... that'll be sure to nab Osama! And don't forget the jerks down at the DMV, too! Maybe they could manage to get him run over during a driving test or something. *sighs, shakes head*
This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone.
You can mix dandelions and dog spit in a jar and sell it as a cure for baldness and impotence as long as you put a tiny thing on the bottom of the screen that says it's not intended to treat or diagnose anything. 95% of the herbal medicine market is an obvious scam. Thank God they're finally trying to do something about it. It drives me crazy watching those damn commercials. If I want a placebo for my erectile dysfunction, I'll eat a bull penis like anyone sensible would.
'Wienrich and Boettcher were, naturally, foreigners, and according to Ankh-Morpork's Guild of Confectioners, they did not understand the peculiarities of the city's taste buds. Ankh-Morpork people, said the guild, were hearty, no-nonsense folk who did not _want_ chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact, they actually _preferred_ chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders, and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that, according to the food standards of the great chocolate centers in Borogravia and Quirm, Anka-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as "cheese" and only escaped, through being the wrong color, being defined as "tile grout."'
--Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
It's really a bad quality product change if it is allowed. People that want to make/buy a chocolate substitute, can do that /now/ without calling it chocolate; They can market a chocolate flavored snack without calling it chocolate... People who really want the good stuff, shouldn't end up with 'chocolate flavored' items...
--
+1 for low user id
There is a reason the FDA's summary is so vague---the proposal isn't about chocolate. Well, not just about chocolate. The proposal is supported by a substantial range of food manufacturer's and distributors, touching on chocolate, meat, poultry, frozen food, and more.
The proposed changes affect divergences from standard labeling guidelines for a lot of reasons, including things like "improvements in nutritional properties", "use of safe suitable flavors and flavor enhancers", "alternate manufacturing processes", etc.
You can read the whole thing yourself (pdf warning) here. See especially the last 4 pages or so.
Is the change in guidelines a good thing for consumers? I don't know. I don't know enough about food manufacturing to judge.
REVOLUTION!!!!!!
First they came for my fats, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carbs, and I said nothing. Then they came for my sugars, and I said nothing.
But NOT MY FUCKING CHOCOLATE!
(insert Star Spangled Banner here)
One nation. One struggle. One destiny.
I had a dream! A chocolatey dream!
Cocoa, like diamonds and coffee are made using exploited labour in poverty riven areas of the world.
This seems like a possible solution, or free trade chocolate.
Nestle in particular is a nasty piece of work. They have a program that gives 2 months of baby formula to new mothers in Africa (long enough for their mamaries to stop producing milk) and then charge them exorbidant rates for the next 9-10 months of formula they will need, and their formula has serious health risks.
I know it sucks, I love chocolate too but ignoring it won't make it go away.
I suppose you will be surprised to find out that Scharffen Berger is a division of Hershey's "Big Corporate" empire.
yeah, anyone who tells you Hershey's is good chocolate is clearly an uncultured idiot who could be fed brown wax and told it was "super chocolate" and would probably eat it right up. gah, terrible stuff. as others have said, Ghiradelli makes some pretty good chocolate for Americans. nice, dark high % coacco chocolate.
Can you suggest something for this?
Go for the jugular. If that fails, you're doomed to die.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Besides, it's already been shown that Big Pharma's drugs cause heart attacks: VIOXX was pulled, then later added back (with a stronger warning) after Merck complained it was losing to much $$$. The Chinese, and others, have been using herbs since recorded history. Their track record is substantially better than today's drugs. Look at all of the commerials: Warning! Do not take if you suffer from high blood pressure, constipation, irritation, etc., etc., etc. May cause: nausea, drowsiness, upset stomach, etc., etc. Severe side-effects may include: liver damage, kidney damage, stroke, and in some cases death. What are the warnings on herbs and vitamins? None! If you take too much the most you'll get is a tummyache. Evolution did not happen overnight. Man (and animals) evolved with the environment which included herbs. These genetically-engineered drugs completely take evolution out of the picture. It's no surprise there are all of these negative side-effects. We're f'ing with Mother Nature.
Any revolution happening on April 25th? ;P
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
Why? Because a geek must have his chocolate!
Not according to their website's Our History page. "Copyright© 2006 Artisan Confections Company" I can't find a reference of Hershey.
If I had mod points, they would be yours.
The reason herbal drugs aren't classified as true "drugs" is because nobody's done double-blind studies to prove their efficacy. If they did, then you'd KNOW these herbal treatments were crap, instead of just suspecting it.
I went ahead and spent a couple of minutes putting in my two cents with the FDA. I surfed using Firefox 2.0.0.3 on a Mac. The FDA's server told me I "must" use Safari. I decided to test their rationale, and continued with Firefox. I was asked for my name, zip, under what category I was commenting (a consumer). I was asked to enter up to 3000 characters in a comment box, where I entered the following:
As it stands, lower quality "real chocolate" products contain a low percentage of cocoa butter and whole milk powder. If you allow manufacturers of chocolate products to completely dispense with cocoa butter and whole milk powder in the interest of economy, this will tend to drag most chocolate products down that path (the "Walmart" effect). If manufacturers don't want to use any cocoa butter or whole milk power in a product, that's fine, but I don't feel they should be allowed to call it "chocolate" any more than oleo products are called "butter".
I clicked the 'continue' box, and was offered the chance to add an attachment. Hopefully, this is where high end chocolate vendors offer a more nuanced take on the proposal. One more 'continue' box, then exit, which dumped me to the FDA's home page.
Luke, help me take this mask off
The same can be said of Big Pharma's drug push. Again, look at VIOXX. Nowhere in the marketing did it say there's a chance you can get a heart attack.
I do not support false advertising. However, as long as there is a prominently displayed message saying, "The FDA / USDA has not verified these claims" or something to that effect, then it's fine. Again, my complaint is that we should have the freedom to choose. Hey, maybe those herbs are just all placebos, but if something thinks it helps them then more power to him. It is not the government's role to select our choices (or in this case limit our choice to a single one: Big Pharma). And if you don't like what you see on TV, then change the channel.
"Why is this posted to Slashdot? Talk about off-topic"
Chocolate contains caffeine. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Hershey owns both Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt chocolates, but has thankfully let them continue their good work.
? releaseID=743393
http://www.thehersheycompany.com/news/release.asp
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Chocolate is Vegetable Oil.
The point I'm making is that we Americans should have the freedom to choose what kind of health care we want.
No one forces you to use drugs. Having alternative cures fall under the same regulations as drugs wouldn't deter the use of them.
By the way, you're not really making that point. If you were, you'd have shut up there, but you didn't. You droned on about the wonders of alternative cures, which means I must rebutte that too.
The Chinese, and others, have been using herbs since recorded history.
That doesn't mean they work.
What are the warnings on herbs and vitamins? None!
Um, yeah, because, ya know, the FDA isn't regulating it.
We're f'ing with Mother Nature.
Our ability to fuck with mother nature is what separates us from the animals. It's why we are Earth's supreme overlords. Earth is our bitch.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
In fact, acquired by Hershey.
? releaseID=743393
http://www.thehersheycompany.com/news/release.asp
wholly owned subsidiary says otherwise.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The Chocolate Manufacturers Association (misnamed in the story) has on their website a December 2006 press release entitled "CHOOSING A CHOCOLATE THAT'S RIGHT FOR YOU: Definitions from the Chocolate Manufacturers Association Help Consumers Understand the Growing Language of Chocolate". It offers this definition of cocoa butter:
Cocoa Butter - The fat naturally present in cacao beans that melts at body temperature and gives chocolate its unique mouth feel. The amount of cocoa butter in cacao beans typically ranges from 50 to 60%.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The thing is that "herbs" can also have a huge narcotic effect, especially when grown in such a way that they absorb a lovely cocktail of chemicals from the hydro setup in the subtly concealed back yard greenhouse.
The fact is that when it comes to things you put in your body if it is potentially harmful it needs to be regulated so that you KNOW that what you are consuming contains what it says it does.
Worse yet, some are producing 'diet' chocolate with sugars like maltitol, which does not get absorbed in the stomach like most sugars. But the bacteria in the large intestine can metabolize maltitol, and they produce lots of gas...
We could raise the chocolate ration to 20 grammes, and/or enable more resources to be devoted to the war against Eurasia.
Or was it Eastasia? I keep forgetting which it was.
Chocolate contains caffeine, therefore very much on-topic.
China was a bit ahead of renasaunce europe in the area of herbal medicine and practical cures.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
As a dentist who is trained in pharmacology and who doesn't stand to benefit from pharma money, I would fully support the FDA regulating the wild wild west that is herbal medicine. FWIW I'm Asian and I grew up in an herbal culture.
And then just take a look at the environmental damage we are doing to Earth. We are just like every other animal on Earth. As we overshoot our planet's carrying-capacity, Mother Nature will "cull the herd."
exactly! ... and caffeine ... oh yeh ... and sugar... but apart from that.. I'm strictly a Hardcore "Straightedge Geek"
If you were in England I would recommend a tasting at the L'Artisan du Chocolat factory in Ashford Kent. http://www.artisanduchocolat.com/ArtisanduChocola
Fine chocolate does not age well, does not travel well, and is wasted on an untutored pallet- just like fine wines, cheeses and scotch. There are many chocolatiers in New York, google for a factory-shop that does tastings.
Locally made, fresh, quality chocolate is something else. Hersey's is to Godvia as Godvia is to Michel Cluizel. There is a Michel Cluizel in NYC: http://www.chocolatmichelcluizel-na.com/about_us.
Eugene Debs: "Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization"
I remember the good old days when FDA labeling rules gave me some minimal confidence about the contents of a product.
No more; it's time to change the acronym's meaning. "fraudulent descriptions administration" comes to mind.
If you actually read through the FDA docket, you will see that it's about reducing the amount of regulation currently in place. They admit to not being able to keep up with advancements in food technology and essentially acting as a barrier to innovation. It loosens standards across the board and says nothing specific about chocolate.
What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet - W. Shakespeare.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. - A. Lincoln.
At the end of the day, the cheap stuff will be cheap, and sold at Target, and the good stuff will, um, cost more...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If people should have the freedom to choose what kind of health care they want, then why do we have the FDA at all? Why do we test the claims of drug manufacturers? Clearly, we are limiting freedom by delaying those drugs for several years of testing. I mean, shouldn't people have the freedom to find out for themselves if a drug actually does what it says it does?
"Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Lets bring it back. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists."
In my medical history class, we learned about an experiment that tested the benefits of bleeding. Bleeding was often prescribed for fevers, because they thought that you had too much blood in your system. It turns out that bleeding does reduce fevers. Remember, if are running to high a fever, it can easily kill you or cause permanent brain damage. It might be an acceptable response to a dramatic situation. In the olden days, people could be in fever for days or even weeks. They didn't have anti-biotics. All they had was a cool compress to put on your forehead, to keep your brain from being cooked alive.
"God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist."
Some natural cures are bogus, some are smashing successes. I don't think you'll find many serious 'natural medicine' types who advocate abandoning the scientific method. Andrew Weil says that if you get in a car accident and your arm is dangling by a thread, the last person you want to see is an herbalist.
Note that many of our pharmaceutical drugs were based on plant medicines. The Indians of the Amazon used Chincona bark to cure all kinds of fevers, including malarial fevers. It turns out that the quinine in the bark reduces fevers, and also kills the malaria plasmodium. So it's good for any kind of fever, and especially good for malaria fevers. For some 400 years, until quinine was synthesized in 1944, cinchona bark was the source for all quinine treaments in Europe, from bark teas to pill form. Wikipedia claims that cinchona bark is still the most economical source of quinine, above synthesized quinine.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist.
I'd rather be called a "medicine freak" than a "druggie."
Misa no botha with yousa.
Does that include white chocolate?
What crazy ass world do you live in?!
The world before modern medicine was a pretty shitty place if you got sick. Sure, there are local herbs etc that have been used--with HIGHLY varying success--in every part of the world, forever. This is as true of America and Europe than it is of China, though I take your obsession with China means you're "one of those" who think we can look east for all our answers, and believe this with near religious fervor. Do you HONESTLY believe that "Chinese herbs" have a better track record than Western medicine... REALLY?!
Vitamins--PURE NATURAL VITAMNS (that means they're good, right?)--can at most cause a "tummyache" you claim. Let's see... this is all from a VERY quick google.
Overdoses of...
Vitamin A -- "can lead to liver damage, hair loss, blurred vision and headaches."
Vitamin B3 (niacin) -- "Niacin can have life-threatening acute toxic reactions" (wikipedia)
Vitamin D -- "can cause the buildup of calcium deposits that can interfere with the functioning of muscles, including heart tissue"
Ok, so you admitted diarrhea, nausea, upset stomach etc as vitamin sideeffects, from the list above we can add liver damage, and in some cases death. Well dang, what a SHOCK, those are almost the exact possible side effects you listed as coming from BIG SCARY PHARMA!!!
How ludicrous can you get. Really, I would think slashdotters should be able to be a little more questioning of things...
Incidentally... tobacco.. natural, bad DRUG. Marijuana? Natural drug. Alcohol? Natural drug. I think it's safe to say that natural things can have bad side effects, and can be called "drugs," friend..
If you believe that, you are likely to have a short and miserable life. If you get a chance, ask your friendly neighborhood pharmacist about all the ways you can damage your body or kill yourself with 100% organic, all-natural herbs and vitamins. Pharmacists know more about drugs, and their effects, than physicians. They certainly know more than the "experts" at your local vitamin or health food store.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And here I thought chocolate was a candy, an indulgence, a culinary luxury to be enjoyed for it's own smooth deliciousness. Who knew that I should be conditioning myself to tolerate only pure "Cacau" bars, just as I might do with fish oil, so I can rest smugly in my chocolate snobishness.
But wait, processing the bean discards much of the natural taste and benefit. Better to eat the beans whole, directly from the tree, than to pollute them by the touch of man or machine. This is truly the way of the chocolate elite.
And I hear that chewing the leaves is enjoyable, too. I especially like the leaves!
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Damn, wasted mod points now, but i gotta reply to this with the first hit off google for "scharffen berger hershey":2 005/07/26/BUGM6DTAOM1.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
The skinny: Hershey bought them in 2005.
put the what in the where?
The same can be said of Big Pharma's drug push. Again, look at VIOXX. Nowhere in the marketing did it say there's a chance you can get a heart attack.
And they got the crap sued out of them for it. What's your point?
The crazy sad thing is that I agree with you about choice--that's my dislike of the government speaking though, and not my drinking your anti-corporate koolaid though.
Just because something is natural, does not mean it isn't dangerous.
Hey, in my libertarian-utopia we can all agree to disagree on particulars. :-) Just as long as we have the freedom to do what we damn well want to with our lives and property so long as we do not infringe on others.
Is definitely incorrect. Chinese medicine taken irresponsibly certainly can cause things like death. Of course, to do it properly you would need to get it prescribed by a doctor (trained in this stuff rather than the western stuff, of course), who will typically do things like ask about your condition, and take your pulse. (The pulse part involves more than just frequency, by the way.)
The stuff that can get you up to a tummyache? Some of it might just be... random herbs. Will they cure you? Probably not.
I'm allergic to chocolate. If it says chocolate anywhere in the ingredients I can't have it. However oddly enough I'm not allergic to cocoa.
I wonder if they redefine chocolate if I'll still be allergic too all forms of chocolate.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I have not found anything made by Hersheys to taste good, even their special dark (or whatever it is called)
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Okay, I feel a little bit stupid posting my original post "FDA Attempt to Regulate Vitamins, Herbs as "Drugs"" when on that very page is an update saying that "after painstaking review of the FDA guidance document we have determined that the document does not call for any NEW regulatory or enforcement action, but merely clarifies existing ways that the FDA classifies (or "thinks") about different types of products used in alternative and complementary medicine."
/Waiting to get modded down into -1: Troll :-(
However, in my defense, I've been sending that link out since before April 16th and didn't know the OCA posted an update. I did RTFA, but not after April 16th. Sorry about that.
"Vegetable oil" is a synonym for "heavily processed, hydrogenated oil which will kill you but makes good financial sense to the corporatised US food production industry"
t ml
3 471-trans-fat-interesterified-fat-cvd
e goil.htmle ption.htmld rogenatedoil.htm
It is poisonous bloody stuff. If you want to know why America (in particular) and western nations (in general) are all suffering out of control obesity and diabetes epidemics you need to look no further than the replacement of natural oils (peanut, coconut and butter), with so-called "healthy" polyunsaturates. Countries like India uses huge amounts of butter (ghee) and coconut oil and you don't see them with rampaging blood sugar levels, heart disease and all of the other side effects of eating crap like "Crisco" and margarines.
Ask yourself why these types of oils never spoil? If you leave margarine out of the refridgerator for a week, does it go off? Why? It doesn't go off because it is not bio-degradeable. If it is not biodegradable, then how is your body meant to metabolise it? Of course it can't, so what it does is "put it aside" and get on with the job of digesting everything else. After sufficient time of course your body will have put enough fat aside that you become fat. Fat builds up around the pancreas and voila, you've got diabetes.
So why do we eat this crap? Because US food interests want you to. The problem for US business interests is that most natural oils such as peanut, olive and coconut/palm oil are not produced in the US. The US does produce gobs of corn and soy however, not to mention that canola rubbish. The problem is that these crops do not produce much edible oil naturally, it has to be processed out of them. Another problem is that the resulting oils are quite unstable, meaning they react to oxygen (oxidize) quickly and spoil. This is a problem for the manufacturing, distribution and retail industries however, who really like long shelf lives and cheap storage (non-refrigerated). So what the industry does is to hydrogenate their oils, which means superheating the oil and passing it through hydrogen to fuse hydrogen molecules to the receptors that would normally fuse with the oxygen. This makes for an oil that is extremely stable but an unfortunate side effect is that it also becomes virtually undigestable. Sure you can eat it and you won't turn blue and die in a week, but then the same can be said for smoking too. Remember how corporate interests insisted that smoking couldn't hurt you until only a few years ago? Well the edible oil industry is no better than those criminals. They too use bogus science and massive amounts of money to produce a steady stream of lies and bullshit regarding the health benefits of eating processed vegetable oils. This began during the thirties and over time it has worked so well that the US is now the most overweight and unhealthy nation on earth, with other western nations scrambling to follow suit.
Now they want to stick that crap in chocolate. It's getting to the point that you wont be able to buy anything that isn't filled with this rubbish.
Essential reading:
The Oiling of America
http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.h
Other good sites;
http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=7
http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/v
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/DiabetesDec
http://www.jctonic.com/include/healingcrisis/12Hy
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
What are the warnings on herbs and vitamins? None!
Looky here.
A few of my favorites:
Only difference is - they don't have to tell you any of these things! The manufacturers of these supplements are raking in $dough hand over fist, yet can't be troubled to warn about little things like profuse hemorrhaging or coughing up a kidney or two.
DATABASE WOW WOW
See's Candy makes some of the most wonderful chocolate in the world!
Now that I can give a solid "hear, hear!" :-)
Okay, I know you were being sarcastic, but I couldn't help laughing the whole time. Yes, I am a smug chocolate-lover! :-)
Besides, don't we do that with beer? After all, we could all be drinking the sweet pear-cider beer, but noooo, we need to indulge in dark (read: bitter) lagers.
They aren't idiots, they just don't know any better. When you grow up eating processed and canned food, it warps your sense of taste. If the only chocolate you've had is from Hershey, you'll think that is how it's supposed to taste.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Also the PDF is protected by a password against copy/paste, and printing. I suppose that's breakable, but I found easier to post this comment: I'll tell you if I get an answer
We're f'ing with Mother Nature. We've been fucking with mother nature since the day we were born. For some reason some people just don't get this. We got where we are by constantly expanding the borders of our technology, and we're going to continue to do that, with or without you, until we conquer the universe, get stomped, or destroy ourselves. There is little room in the future for a fringe group who fears technology. We will continue to evolve technologically. One day we will have picorobots patrolling our blood for invaders and building drugs to strengthen us and cure our illnesses. Have fun banging rocks together.
You're right, the testing process for drugs is not perfect. Sometimes unknown side-effects slip through. But don't fool yourself that your all-natural drugs are perfectly safe either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephedra For an example.
The multi-billion dollar "Big Pharmaceutical corporations" are evil, lying and care for nothing but profit, whereas the multi-billion dollar "alternative medicines" industry is love, truth and fluffy bunnies?
How about Matthias Rath? He has convinced many in the South African government that AIDS is not caused by HIV, AIDS should be treated by vitamin supplements (which he just happens to sell) and antiretroviral medicines are a worse than useless, and advocating their use is genocide.
AIDS is killing 900 people per day in South Africa. A sizable fraction of those deaths can be laid directly at the door of "alternative medicine" in general, and the South African government and Rath in particular.
Big Pharma need someone to stand over them with a big stick to try to keep them honest. So do alternative medicine peddlers. The difference is that, occasionally, the big stick gets used on Big Pharma, but the snake-oil salesmen opperate with impunity in Alternative Medicine, playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives for their own profit.
Don't ban the 'remedies' - but do ban the lies and unsupported wishful-thinking published about them.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
... go pay extra for the guy who writes "This is a premium, European-style, luxuriously decadent chocolate" on his packages. Food snobbery (or connoisseurship, take your pick) doesn't need government imprimatur to work. Just like there are people who pay for fine wines (but you can still call the $5 a bottle, where the bottle is actually a paper box, wines) there are people who will pay for fine chocolate. And if there are people who will pay for it there are companies who will make it. If Hershey's isn't one of them, great, take your business elsewhere. I'll be quaffing down my Hershey's as I reserve my food snobbery for cocoa (the drink) and pizza, not chocolate.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Does this ever end, are we doing anything right in the USA these days? So some questions:
l ede.t.html
1) Does this make chocolate more unhealthy?
2) Where in the USA can you buy the cheapest highest quality chocolate?
On a similiar note, you will find this article interesting about the US crops:
You Are What You Grow: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwln
There is already a name for the almost-chocolate they're trying to redefine: compound chocolate.
References 1, 2, 3
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Where I am I have organic fair trade chocolate. ITS REAL CHOCOLATE; not American FAKE modified foods. NO wonder Americans are 1) stupid, 2) fat and 3) stupid.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Wow! cool! That easy, eh? Are they going reclassify it as a vegetable, too?
What?
Whereas Hershey's, Cadberry's etc. are familiar brands to Americans and so can get away with using different ingredients, the fancy chocolates/European chocolates are packaged as gourmet foods and so they get away with charging high prices. There are even a few brands of 'fancy chocolates' that are actually no different ingredient wise than a Hershey. When you get down to it even the best premium chocolate has just as much saturated fat (sometimes more) as the run of the mill stuff. This is what I don't understand, people go crazy about the 'pure chocolate ingredients' when it is all still bad to eat in significant quantities. I can find (great tasting) yogurt and hot cocoa mix that has 0g sat fat and no cholesterol made using non-fat milk. Why can't I find chocolate bars or chocolate candies like that?
Soooo many problems with your post. 1. Those "natural remedies" did not evolve with us or for us -- they evolved for their own survival. They just happen to have chemicals in them which affect human physiology in some way. 2. Side effects? St. John's Wort + certain cheese + certain red wines = death. All 3 at usual dosing. Enjoy. 3. This freedom you want requires accurate information about efficacy and side effects, but your post advocates sticking our head in the sand and assuming "nature" always has OUR interests in mind. All natural remedies are chemicals, just like drugs. They are drugs, they just have been discovered in nature rather than synthesized. If you believe in science and not voodoo, you'd want them to be tested for efficacy. Herbal remedy producers (corporations, just not as big as Big Pharma) don't want testing because then the vast majority of them will be shown to be ineffective. All drugs, and remedies, have benefits and risk. Some are quite obvious, but most benefit/risk calculations really require a certain level of expertise, which the American public simply does not have. Thus, the snake oil people can sell you unregulated dreck and you feel you're in control. Meanwhile, you waste money.
The FDA has already done such a bang up job on identifying melamine in wheat, rice, and/or corn gluten. If they had such success with pet food, why not chocolate? Or should we turn to the USDA to help with our organic chocolate. After all they want to help improve the quality of our organic coffee.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
To have that freedom mean something requires that we have enough information to make informed choices. Unregulated producers of "natural remedies" do not want you to have that information, because then you won't choose their product. They live in fear of double-blind randomized controlled trials. They prefer worthless anecdotal evidence and testimonials.
As a type-1 diabetic, I get sick and tired of hearing people talk about how eating this that and the other thing gives people diabetes. NO! YOU'RE WRONG!!! It can give some people type-2 diabetes. Type-1 diabetes is unpreventable. I get so tired of people acting as if it's my fault I have type-1 diabetes. It's not! When talking about diabetes, you should always make the distinction between type-1 and type-2. Type-2 can be caused by eating crappy chocolate too much, but type-1 can't. GET IT STRAIGHT! If you're still confused, see this: this. They do an OK job at clarifying. Or go and google type-1 vs type-2 diabetes. See what you get. But please don't go telling people that such-and-such causes diabetes. Because chances are you're WRONG.
For imagining a woman on slashdot.
http://www.halloren.de/marke/schokol adenzimmer.html
i was there in june, it is pretty remarkable. i believe i remember almost everything in that room (ja, nicht das ganzes Zimmer... es tut mir leid) is made of chocolate, but the chocolate used is pretty much the same recipe that is sold in a variety of the items they sell.
Really? I was under the impression that today's life spans are remarkably longer and medicine substantially more effective than not only anything in recorded history, but definitely more than so-called "natural" medicine you see nowadays.
That's because the FDA doesn't regulate herbs and vitamins, which is where the requirement for listing adverse side effects comes from. If all of a sudden the FDA stopped regulating pharmaceutical drugs, would you somehow think they were better because of a lack of warnings? Of course not.
Even though you're throwing evolution around in your argument, you obviously don't understand a goddamn thing about science. We are not "f'ing" with mother nature. We are fixing the system. Our evolution is not perfect. There is no such thing as "Mother Nature". You are a complete fucking idiot. Herbal healing is just another long line of ideas that claim that science is going too far and we need to resort to the traditional ways of thinking, be it Christian Science, acupuncture, or any number of other bullshit ideologies.
The only way to know the truth of how drugs affect our bodies is through science. I know that there is scientific evidence for specific herbs' uses in medicine, and that's fine. Herbs certainly have valid uses. But to claim (as you seem to be doing) that traditional herbal medicine is superior to modern medicine simply because of some adverse side effects and lobbying power by pharmaceutical companies is to ignore nearly the entire body of scientific study on medicine! You can't cherry-pick which scientific ideas you want to accept, simply because some conflict with your pre-conceived view of the world.
If you're going to try and be conservative at least extend the effort to remove any and all references to scientific ideas from your post. That's what the "smart" conservatives do. I wish I could find language to explain the contempt I feel for your ideas. No matter how venomous my words may seem they will not project the absolute hatred I have for whoever has convinced you that this bullshit is anything remotely resembling the truth.
OK, liar , if the FDA isn't regulating herbs and vitamins, why do I keep reading stories about editors of health journals being jailed and vitamin shops being shut down by the FDA? Why do Sandy Shaw and Durk Pearson have to sue the FDA so that health claims can be made for supplements?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The Codex Alimentarius, the international standards body for food, has a standard for chocolate. They require >35% cocoa solids for "chocolate". And they limit other fats:
"The addition of vegetable fats other than cocoa butter shall not exceed 5% of the finished product, after deduction of the total weight of any other added edible foodstuffs, without reducing the minimum contents of cocoa materials. Where required by the authorities having jurisdiction, the nature of the vegetable fats permitted for this purpose may be prescribed in applicable legislation.
What are the numbers in the FDA proposal?
I hate to drag this back to the ballpark of the original post... but isn't the entire point of progress that "real" chocolate is supposed to get cheaper so we can all enjoy it and not that sort-of chocolate gets canonized and us poor bastards never realize the difference?
Sugar isn't used because of the HUGE subsidy our Democratic Congress put on sugar in the 1970's to save a few hundred farming jobs in Lousiana. This caused the loss of over 50000 manufactureing jobs in the Candy industry, as well as the "New Coke" fiasco. The US pays about 5x the world market price for sugar. Its so bad that it is cheeper to import sweetened drinks from Mexico and distill the sugar out of them than buy the sugar(and this has been done even though it is illegal smuggling.) So our current congress has furthered the subsidy by giving money to sugar beet "farmers"(think corporations) in California in the last budget bill to fund our soldiers. When the corn grower industry(more big corporations) figured out they could make a sweetener they lobbied to continue the price subsidy for sugar. Of course the widespred usage of corn syrup happens to co-inside with the large increses in type II diabetese and obesity in this country. This price subsidy is also killing our efforts for ethanol fueled cars. Ahhh the joys of unintended consequenses. When will liberals learn that there will always be unintended consequences to government solutions to problems?
Thanks for your example. As a result, I was also inspired to submit my two cents.
Let the candy producers sell whatever formulation of candy they wish (provided it is safe). But do not dilute widely established definitions to satisfying the marketing desires of large-scale mass producers. The less strigent the legal definition, the less useful the term is to the consumer, who will ultimately know less about what they're getting. The only reason for this proposed change is to allow manufacturers to pass off a inferior quality product while claiming it's the same quality as it has ever been. There's nothing stopping them from selling these products now, under different names and different terms. I don't see why the law should be changed.
I think the point was that you wouldn't be able to get your glorious bull penis if they had their way.. why should they be able to regulate your recommended daily allowance of bull penis? =)
There's a lot of comments on this story about the superiority of European chocolate over US varieties, but it should be remembered that many EU countries already allow up to 5% vegetable fats to be used in chocolate (including Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom according to wikipedia). This was the origin of a scare story in the UK more than 10 years ago (I'm too lazy to look up the exact date) when it was reported that the EU would require that UK chocolate be renamed 'vegelate'. This was never an official EU proposal, though maybe it should have been. I should say that the above list of countries are not those I would put at the top of a list of good chocolate producers... Simon
And henceforth, cheap fatty oil is "freedom".
Good grief. I'm whole-heartedly with Guitard on this. Having recently been turned on to some of the less sweet chocolates (the kind that list their cocoa percentage), the last thing I would want to see is someone using this cheap grease and trying to pass it off as good chocolate.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's like fruit juice. Nearly every brand and variety of fruit juice tastes pretty close. From Mango tropical blend to orange to grape to pommagranate juice. The only real standouts in apple juice because it is what they use to water down everything else so you can't water it down with anything cheaper and cranberry juice because it is so blantly over powering. Most juices only vaguely taste liek the fruit on the label. It's likely because they all debase their product with apple or orange juice to reduce cost. But it's silly how little variety there actually is out there for flavor.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"95%"
I'm not going to bother to ask for a cite as that number is clearly made up. Next time make it, like, 97.2% or something.
The number is way off though. Before 1900 nearly all remedies were herbal; they've been in mankinds pharmacopia for about 7000 years according to recoded history and even chimps have been shown to know what roots and twigs to eat if they're sick.
Got a sore throat of a cough? Eat a teaspoon of tobasco or any hot hot thing. The heat numbs the throat instantly and expectorates the crap in your lungs. Or you can get guffenesin in a white pill. Same thing. Guess where it came from?
A Chinese remedy for "bad heart" is earthworm tea. Western medecine picked up on this a decade or so ago and calls it "Lumbrecin". It's still worms.
Of course there are bullshit herbal remedies, but there's lots and lots that actually do something. So I'm calling bullshit on the "95%" number. I too can pull numbers out of my ass.
You can't patent herbal remedies. Cogitate on that for a bit and understand big pharma pushes new drugs on doctors on a near daily basis. In fact if you look at the development of modern pharmocology you'll see that at the beginning of the 20th century we had mostly natural elixers and by the end these were gone in favour of "patent medecine" that now defines the western pharmocopia. To say most herbal cures won't work shows a remarkable lack of understanding of medecine. Many more work than do not. I don't know what the number is - but neither do you.
The placebo effect is quite reproducable - a friend did his thesis on this and the cure rate for it is 2-5% for all diseases across the board including cancer. (red ones work the best, green the least) In my mind this explains obvious bullshit lie Bach flower remedies and homeopathy.
But don't diss da 'erb, mon.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Wow. Why all the anger and hatred at my opinion? I recommend Chamomile herbal tea to calm you down. Then you can take Ginkgo Biloba to strengthen your mind and form coherent sentences. And finally to get back into a good mood, a small bit of Peppermint should do the trick.
Actually, I bought some cocoa nibs (crushed roasted cocoa beans) to see what I could do with them (with the help of a good chocolate cookbook). Boil some cream with them, then drain the cream and whip it - oh my goodness, the best whipped cream you've ever tasted. And the nibs themselves aren't bad sauteed in oil or butter and tossed over vegetables. All alone they're not exactly something you'd eat by the handful, though. And for the record, anyone who eats 100% bars of chocolate is a bit mental, or maybe has no taste buds.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I absolutely stay away from the Big Corporate chocolate: Hershey's, Cadbery's, etc. It's all shit.
I agree, but the Cadbury's that you get in the US is far far worse than the Cadbury's elsewhere. Take a look at the label and you'll see why - it's actually not made by Cadbury's, but by Hershey's under license. Get a bar somewhere else and it's almost tolerable. (As milk chocolate goes, anyway).
What would Lemmy do?
To Whom It May Concern:
We represent Grandma Daisy's Old Fashion Baldness and Manliness Cure. It has come to our attention that you have posted certain ingredients that are protected as a Trade Secret and by certain provisions of the DMCA. We believe you have willfully infringed our client's rights under 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq. and could be liable for statutory damages as high as $150,000 as set forth in Section 504(c)(2) therein.
We demand that you immediately cease the use and distribution of all infringing works derived from the Work, and all copies, including electronic copies, of same, that you deliver to us, if applicable, all unused, undistributed copies of same, or destroy such copies immediately and that you desist from this or any other infringement of our client's rights in the future.
Very truly yours,
Howe, Dewey, Cheatem and Wynn
The reason herbal drugs aren't classified as true "drugs" is because nobody's done double-blind studies to prove their efficacy. If they did, then you'd KNOW these herbal treatments were crap, instead of just suspecting it. Wait a minute, herbal treatments are well known and used by traditional medicine, maybe they're just not popular in the us, but very popular in the rest of the world. If you think about it, there's nothing strange about it. The strongest poisons are produced by plants and animals, every plant has some kind of medical effect that can be exploited in the form of infusion, application or oil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbalism Don't confuse true herbalism with the new age crap or homeopathic treatments, those are really worth nothing.
Well, you do know that a lot of these supplements, herbs, and juices contain the same active chemicals as prescription drugs, but since they're not regulated like prescription drugs, people are killing themselves with them, right?
Oh yeah, 2000 year old medicine can't be wrong. (Here's a hint: it's just as wrong as 2000 year old religion)
Like what I said? You might like my music
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Being a smug chocolate lover doesn't endear you to me, but I offer this explanation of how I came to like darker beers, which perhaps you could offer in the future as a more sympathetic and less-assholey-sounding reason that you started trying bitterer and bitterer chocolates.
When I first had beer, I tried both Guinness stout and some crappy American mainstream beers, neither of which did anything for me. Then I found beers I liked, like Kirin, and in the course of events, tried out some other beers. I noticed that as I expanded my palate, my tastes changed. I got more accustomed to the bitter flavor, and came to like it. Thus, naturally, I began to avoid the lighter beers in favor of bitterer ones, until I finally realized that I liked Guinness. Tastes change naturally, people don't necessarily just drink dark, bitter beers as a means of expressing their elitism (as you may have meant to imply).
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
The reason they aren't regulated as drugs is historical and political. Many were "grandfathered" in as GRAS when early laws such as the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed. When the FDA attempts to regulate them, the manufacturers can point to the law and scream to their congressmen that the FDA is breaking the law -- which it is.
Of course, not all herbals work as claimed. There is no shortage of crooks pushing bogus cures or impure formulae, and they're going to congregate where legal oversight is the weakest.
Some examples of herbs that work are too obvious to be successfully denied. Willow bark contains salicylates, providing the same mechanism for pain relief that the chemically related aspirin provides. Peppermint relieves indigestion. Foxglove provides digitalis, a heart medicine.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Well, somewhat true, and also totally wrong.... I love my ethnobotany. I love finding alkaloids that do new and interesting things, and not just to someones brain. I have a lot of things wrong with me, and the pain management pills cause some nasty side effects. Namely ED. Now I'm 20, so my doctor quite plainly said he canot give my anything for my condition, because the FDA would be on his ass. So I now purify Icariin from Epimedium, which doesn't work as well as cialis but still bloody hell works...
And ginger tea works very well on my nausia and my virtigo when I travel.
I also take an asprin for my headachs, I get morphine when I get surgery done, and...
you get the point. Now, I love big pharm for doing the gruntwork in finding something safe. I dislike how the FDA don't make more things over the counter. Sure, some moron could die, but I could wash a bottle of asprin down with a bottle of Vodka. Or drink draincleaner. Or the like. I want the walmart effect on my meds damn-it... Hell, I remember being able to by codeine over the counter for my migranes...
But the question is, what constitutes an overdose. I know for a fact that you can take up to 10 grams of vitamin C and nothing goes wrong. That's like, 20 "normal" pills (normal vit C pill seems to be 500mg in my experience).
But an overdose of perscription drugs? Hmmm.
Or, let's say this. You can take 3 grams of vitamin C, every day, for the rest of your life. Ever tried taking morphine for the rest of your life? Might not be a good idea. Most doctors won't let you do that.
more and more chemicals... hope you got a great health plan. but hey sit and bitch here, yet your gonna buy some of that pepsi/cocke whatever, taht fake juice and female-hormone meat (how do you like your man tits :) you think not? how can every single nationality in US having these health problems, weird allergies...
i thought i was not a health nut, but turns out MY health is worth more than few extra bux for real milk, real juice or at least you get to see the fruit itself...
economically its is better to feed the working bees garbage so the food is just enough to get them through the /workign age/ after that count how many illenees u'll have. wish i knew more aboutt he real contents of everything.
Dont Judge The situation by the Misfortunate. Goga.
People are responding strongly to this because your attitude is the sort of thing that allows people to scam money out of people with all sorts of bogus "natural remedies". Herbs and other various natural remedies are drugs, plain and simple. The only difference is that herbs and other supplements aren't given in a controlled dosage and aren't safety tested even remotely as carefully as drugs that require FDA approval.
You've made a good case against business interests on this issue, but let's not ignore the role of various "public interest" advocates. One specific example: back in the early-mid '90s (IIRC), some rich guy had a heart attack, and after he recovered decided to devote some effort to getting companies to remove coconut oil, one of the good natural oils on your list, from all products. This ticked me off when they reformulated a favorite guilty pleasure of mine: Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies. Since then, they've never tasted the same. And now you're telling me they're even less healthy for me than they were?? The bastards!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Hello, I couldn't help but spot this argument and decided to throw my two cents in.
a d-this-instant, Google it if you actually care) state of well being. This is where the more 'traditional' medicines are making a strong comeback along with new ideas of how to live healthy.
Cheers,
Socguy.
Firstly you are correct when you say that the world before modern medicine was a pretty shi**y place. Almost anything could kill you, like, say a broken leg which could leads to loss of blood or infection. Brain trauma, giving birth was a particularly dangerous undertaking, and a chariot accident was no picnic either. Anything like that happens to me and or someone I care about and you'll see me taking them to the hospital without delay. Western Medicine simply has no equal at this kind of thing.
On the other side of the coin, we are living FAR longer than we ever did in the past (due mainly to proper nutrition and sanitation!) and Western Medicine has a far poorer track-record dealing with the new diseases of the affluent world; Cancers, arthritis, diabetes, joint deterioration and so on (you're getting old!). So our society is re-examining what it means to be healthy. Back in the day, the absence of disease or obvious injury was enough, now health is something that can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree. This means that no matter how healthy you are now, you can always strive to better your condition. (Stop eating all those fatty foods!) The UN now defines health something like this: The complete physical, mental, social, spiritual and (something-else-I-can't-pull-off-the-top-of-my-he
I use dog saliva with dandelions, and my erection lasts for DAYS.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Did anyone else notice that Guittard, while being the leading opponent of this, is also a member of the chocolate makers organization that is promoting it? I wonder how this affects their relationship with the organization.
Well, IMO, that is exactly what they are.
That used to be my opinion, but they've since started actually making cars, well, different, with different engines and not just different trim, and stuff.
I still scowl at Lexus drivers, though, bunch of jerk-asses that group.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
If you keep changing the definition of 'Chocolate', then why bother defining it at all? You need to stop letting trade groups bastardize food label types (e.g. 'chocolate' vs. 'chocolate flavored' just so they can save a few bucks. If they want to change the formula, then they should call it something else. Period
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Shut the fuck up.
But the question is, what constitutes an overdose
The simple answer, I think, would be the level at which something starts having negative+unintended consequences. Thus as you say with Vitamin C, our bodies can deal with it perfectly fine, so we can't overdose on Vitamin C (well, I assume we CAN at some huge level, but that's being somewhat pedantic). As I posted early, you might not want to do that with Vitamin A...
but really, I'm not sure about your greater premise--morphine is "natural" too--e.g., it's found in opium. So it's not like it's some synthetic drug from corporations..
Likewise, Peter's Chocolate is an excellent chocolate. It too is owned by a conglomerate. But the chocolate is still excellent, especially if you taste what can be produced using such chocolate. I worked at Boehm's for about 3 years, I've never since tasted such exquisite chocolate.
One of the best investigative journalism pieces I've ever read, and a nice look into the world of gourmet chocolate.
i le=article&sid=78
http://www.dallasfood.org/modules.php?name=News&f
The first statement is blatantly incorrect, the second is not relevant, and the third is clearly written by someone with no clue about chemistry. Hydrogenation has the purpose of transforming liquid oils containing unsaturated bonds, such as the peanut oil, into fats that are solid at room temperature (i.e. saturated fats). Saturated fats, which are completely natural, don't have any unsaturated bonds that can be oxidized either. A side effect of hydrogenation is that some unsaturated trans bonds are formed. How about reading a source with less bias and more scientific references? Trans fats on wikipedia:
- Increased risk for coronary heart diseases: yes.
- Cancer: no scientific consensus.
- Diabetes: no scientific consensus.
- Overweight (compared to other fats): no scientific consensus.
No scientific consensus tends to mean that there are one or two studies that show a very small effect and other studies that don't show any effect at all. Even if such na effect exists, it is likely not significant compared to other health risks many people are taking (lack of exercise, smoking, breathing polluted air, to name a few).Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Dude, we're talking about chocolate. I think you're reading too much into my comment if you think I'm coming across as elite and assholely because I like >= 70% cacao chocolate compared to the shit American corporations put out. Everyone around the world agrees cheap, American chocolate is shit. I've tried chocolates from across Europe in my travels, including some made by Monks in a monastery (Montserrat Chocolate). Some were milk chocolate but without any sugar. Again, a different taste. All of the non-US chocolate I've had were tasteful, smooth, and creamy. By comparison, the cheap US chocolate was... "sticky" for lack of a better word. So if being a connoisseur of chocolate makes me a snob, then so be it.
And who is arguing against choice or competition? Regulate herbal supplements and let them compete with other drugs on an even ground.
But my point was, with a given drug that has cautions about side-effects, those side-effects come with normal doses for extended periods of time, or overdosing at one time. If you take a normal dose of Tylenol for a long time, your liver starts to dislike you... and by "normal" dose, I mean a dose that is necessary to reap any of the benefits from it.
But with something like vitmins or minerals, those are things that the body NEEDS and that we are usually deficient in, so taking "normal" doses for extended periods of time (e.g., your whole life) has no adverse effects.
Tylenol, however, is not a deficiency. I don't get sick because I am deficient in drugs, medication, etc. I don't get a cold because I haven't had enough . I get sick because my immune system was down, and quite possibly because I'm deficient in something that my body needs (and most everyone, due to a variety of agricultural problems and simple eating habits, is deficient in a lot of things. How many average Americans do you know get fat because they eat too much spinach...)
What do you recommend for my (hypothetical) cancer? St. John's Wort?
Willful ignorance offends me. Someone who asserts his opinion as fact using fallacious arguments angers me. Someone who does so to attack science and reason makes me violently angry.
"Every man has a right to his opinion. No man has a right to be wrong in his facts." - Bernard Baruch
Again, you are missing the point. Herbal remedies have not been scientifically tested. We don't know which of these remedies are good, which are bad for you, etc. Side effects don't need labelled, in short, we don't know which remedies are worth truly exploring. Classifying them as drugs just means that the same testing and quality assurance guarantees that exist for pharmaceuticals exist for herbal medicines. You want equality, but you're not going to get it by keeping herbs untested and unproven.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
On the otherhand as a counter example, many people take an aspirin--or part of an aspirin--every day for good health reasons. Aspirin doesn't meet your natural definition, yet can be beneficiary on a daily basis. Likewise, there are plenty of natural things that if you consume on a daily basis, can do long term harm. I really don't think you can generalize like you are on this topic. I've even read some speculation that taking things like multivitamins don't really help us that much--that is, if you eat pretty well to begin with (ie, no HUGE deficiencies, which with modern diets we're not likely to have--think scurvy etc, 3rd world food deficiencies, etc) a multivitamin isn't going to do much.
I'm not at all sure that I agree with your assertion that people only get sick because we are lacking some vitamin or mineral or such.. I've actually read blog posts about this at a very interesting blog I read off and on at In the Pipeline, in which there is some debunking of that theory. (I can't claim to follow a lot of his posts, too technical..)
I'm still really not sure of the point of discussion though? Things have side effects? So what, this is known.. As we talked about earlier, vitamins can have side effects too. Like you even said earlier, no doctor is going to prescribe daily massive amounts of morphine to a patient for life. On the other hand, morphine--or similar painkillers--can be enormously beneficial in the right doses, at the right time. What's the problem with things possibly having negative side effects?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not tolerable in NZ. I don't know who makes it here, but New Zealand Cadbury's is absolute crap. I'd much rather eat Hershey's.
Salt and pepper were the other major preservatives in the middle ages, with the latter being ungodly expensive and the source of much of the Italian city-states' prosperity. There was this guy, once, named Colombo or some such who had an idea for getting the pepper cheaply, but that didn't work out so well. Twinkies make you glow in the dark and make you want to shoot Mayors of Major Cities. God bless Vespucciland!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Even the crappiest chocolate over here in Europe beats that stuff senseless as far as price and quality goes. Major brand chocolate is still cheaper and in a totally different league as far a quality goes.
Referring to modern diets, I don't think we actually do get enough, as a rule. Heart attacks at age 40? Something is wrong. Heart attacks don't come from a deficiency in aspirin or alcohol.
I don't think we only get sick because of deficiencies in vitamins and minerals... but I think we'd all agree that our immune systems are constantly fighting bacterial infections and viruses, and it's when our immune system isn't strong enough to fight something that it "wins," so to speak, right? This is the premise for homeopathic cancer treatments and such, which seem to have some amount of success - and which tend to be looked down upon by radiation/chemo docs.
Vitamins can have side effects, yes. My entire point, though, was that vitamins and minerals are not harmful in the same way drugs are. You don't get addicted to C. It's hard to overdose on C. It's not hard to overdose on some random drug, and it's not hard to get addicted to a lot of drugs, either. There are entirely different things going on here... the liver has to treat alcohol, for example, as a toxin. The liver doesn't have to treat C as a toxin, because it isn't one.
...is like making love in a canoe - f***ing close to water!
I would tend to think heart attacks come from sedentary lifestyles and fats rather than a lack of vitamins..
;-) I don't think I particularly have anything new or interesting to add to this conversation anymore.. I think I'll go take my nightly multivitamin though ;-)
With regards to cancer--if it works, it works. I'm not convinced on the merits on homeopathic / chemo--I think few would argue that chemo is a fun thing to go through, and i think everyone wishes we had BETTER ways to fight cancer, but like I said, I'm not convinced.
And though I've said it before, while you're absolutely right about Vitamin C, the liver DOES have to treat vitamin A that way, and that's why too much vitamin A can cause liver damage.
I think at this point though, we're basically just flogging the same (dead) horses
And for thousands of years:
Seriously. There's *NO* law against "natural medicine", what there is is laws that say for something to be sold as a medicine it needs to a) demonstrate that it is unharmful and b) demonstrate, in a proper double-blind study that it actually has the claimed effect.
That's it. Any treatment that can manage this deserves to be called medicine, any which can't, doesn't.
What's your alternative ? Let's let anyone sell anything as medicine, and leave to guesswork what works and what doesn't ?
Modern medicine has achieved MUCH more in the last 100 years than traditional chinese medicine has in several thousand years. And it's done so by insisting on verifiable, tested, properties rather than random guesswork.
Those shameful marketing bastards...
And no one... NO ONE.. no matter how patriotic.. or even just a devils advocate, looking for mod points, is going to defend American cheese. That's how good it is.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
It's not just a chocolate elitist thing -- that same attitude is found everywhere.
Like, some guitar-playing friends say "metal is too easy to play" (not that I've heard most play some decently). Like I care. I like it because it sounds good, not because it's hard to play!
Or like those "audiophiles" with their tube amps (and how such valve sounds wayyy better!), vinyl, and all that (what they love is seemingly the distortion caused by it, not so much the music). Plain old Audio CDs with a simple yet decent AB2 class (push pull)/MOSFET amp with *good* speakers sound great.
I'm all for good chocolate (I dig the 70%, Lindt, etc), but I still hate all these elitist pricks.
Next thing you know, we're all supposed to love "fine foods" like caviar, raw meat with raw eggs (steak tartare), raw fish (most sushi) and god knows what else. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll just stick to whatever these elitists call crap.
We stop trashing the environments where cocoa naturally grows? Chocolate is basically an endangered species due to South American deforestation (Cocoa beans grow primarily in cool, shady settings, and rampant deforestation has also given a foothold to various diseases that cocoa beans are susceptable to). Lets try keeping chocolate sources alive, instead of coming up with new definitions for it?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Yeah, and digitalis, and aspirin and morphine etc. are also from herbs. The diffence is that modern medicine only have a very good understanding of what specific molecule works, how it works and how it is to be used, in what doses, what time of day, how long after symptoms have subsided etc. Herbal medicin as used by "Healers" "Chinese doctors" are used indiscriminantly to cure every disease not knowing whether it works or not, it is a money machine that should be shut down. At most people buy a false hope and get no side effects.
There are quite a few logical failures to fall into when alternative healers use empirical evidence:
1) People usually search help at the height of their disease, thus with or without any treatment the diseasy goes away, but the therapist thinks it is he who cured the client (patient is when someone sees a doctor)
2) People (including excelent doctors) are likely to dismiss negative empirical evidence and overrate positive evidence.
If these herbs are so great, why on earth, aren't they registered as drugs. In Denmark the cheapest effective drug is used and, if a cheap herb drug (such as aspirin) is as usefull, in the specific condition, as an expensive one (such as clopidogrel), the cheaper one is used and the pharmaceutical company making that one makes money. Sometimes the effective molecule is more expensive to refine, than to synthesize it chemically.
so try and replace peanut butter with Peanut-Vegetable Margarine and then try to stomach it..double points if both use olestra.
Storm
Find me a decent MAJOR wine label that doesn't say in bold "CONTAINS SULFIDES". And yes, I know wine naturally contains sulfides, but I don't think that the labeled bottles are indicating that.
The quality of food and drink in the US has been going steadily down since, well since forever. There are more chemicals (MSG, Aspertame, Preservatives), cheap semi-toxic fillers (Any partially hydrogenated oil), and re-used byproducts in our food than there has ever been. The FDA is basically a rubber stamp for a few corporations who prey on the masses inability to find food sources that are anything but super convenient.
Consequently, there has also been a rise in Cancer, in Obesity, in every type of human health problem that we know of.
And consequently there is a huge movement and desire among consumers to have organic foods available.
The sad reality of the situation is that THE NUMBERS ARE IN. And these corporations are quickly and efficiently KILLING US ALL. The FDA should already KNOW that, and should already ban pretty much every product on the shelves in favor of a healthy, more natural alternative. But we know longer live in a democracy, or maybe never did, so the FDA doesn't actually work for the American people anymore, but AGAINST us.
If you see it any other way, I'm sorry, but you are a complete and utter moron with no knowledge about the topic.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I do agree with your general sentiment though. The chocolate foisted on American consumers who simply don't know any better is simply atrocious. I would hope that the FDA mandated terminology for chocolate that uses cheap substitutes would be something along the lines of "Vaguely chocolate like product which you will one day realize actually sucks goat balls after having your first bar of real chocolate." They might have to shrink their font size to get all that on the package but I'm sure there's plenty of space.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Remember way back when, about 18 years ago, when they were telling everybody that coconut oils and other tropical oils were bad for you, then recently decided they weren't so bad, compared to the transfats they were putting in everything? Well then, why not use tropical oils? It isn't like they're any worst than the proposed oils mentioned.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Alcohol is also toxic to humans. Granted, you'd have to injest a lot of grain alcohol to kill you, but it can happen.
It's much quicker with other types of alcohol.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I can GUARANTEE you that eating the beans is healthier than eating the shit they are mixing in with the beans. Seriously.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
So protien powder, vegetable powder, binders and colouring could be called cheddar cheese. Without actual milk product. or maybe just whey protein. Basically its happened to most food already, now they just want to knock down the last bastion which is "standardized food"
Storm
When will you arogant euro-elites realise there is no such thing as European Chocolate!?
The concept is just at pointless as American Champagne or Irish Whisky!
To the best of my knowlege, cacao is predominantly grown in south/central America and central Africa (anyway, atleast not in Europe, unless French Guiana counts).
As a matter of fact, American (more specifically Trinitaian and other Caribean) chocolate is internationally regarded as the very best by "people who know".
That said, for all those humour impared (US-residents as well as continental Europeeans and Irishmen), this post is attempting to express sarkasm, without the use of smileys. If you still don't find it funny - that's your problem...
Cheers!
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
None of that is what makes modern medicine "modern". Knowing why it works is just icing on the cake. Knowing that it works is what's important, and it takes serious studies to prove that (double-blind and all that).
Don't want to do a double-blind study ? Then you're selling snake oil.
"Hey, this mold is killing bacteria, and our study has shown that pneumonia patients are three times as likely to survive than with a placebo." - Then you're doing "modern" medicine. Even if you can't exactly explain how those bacteria are killed.
I read other (obviously inferior) news sites, and when some idiot like the poster to which you replied mentions Herbal Medicines people lose their shit with how safe, natural, and effective the carbonated weasel urine the witchdoctor down the street uses. (Medicines not drugs... So the FDA can't regulate it since it is only a medicine and not a drug. Duh!)
On a bad day, I engage. On a good day I mutter to myself and go kick a dog or something.
So I clicked this link and... Ooooohhh.... yeeeessssss.... WONDERFUL! All the smart people were modded up, and the idiots modded down. AND you threw in a Scientology dig to start it off too. You have made my week.
If these herbs are so great, why on earth, aren't they registered as drugs.
Because they can't patent them. Prior art and all that... 7000 years of people taking herb X means that if a drug co studies X properly in a double blind multi year trial and finds out that it does indeed work, there is nothing it can do to prevent people from buying X from all the places it has been available for the last 7000 years.
But if they can find a "NEW" molecule that does X, they can patent that, and spend the next few years making back the money they spent proving it works, and then several more years after that raking in the profits.
with different engines and not just different trim
With different rocker covers. Rather like Volvo and Renault. One casting different between both engines (oh, and the mounting holes are drilled slightly differently).
Definitely there is crap here as well, lots of it, shelves of it, can you say "snickers" or "mars bar", lots of cloying candy crap, but pretty well every corner store has a couple of bars of decent chocolate, pretty well every half sized supermarket sells 70% cocoa content bars. And this is the UK, laughed at for its crap food across the rest of Europe.
We had the same battle here if you remember about 10 years ago with European Union food people trying to get huge numbers of British "chocolate" bars relabelled as not-chocolate, The Sun newspaper and the other red tops threw a wobbly. Shortly after that an American friend of discerning taste introduced me to proper chocolate (higher cocoa content) in France and then I realised yup, now I see why these food guys in Belgium and France wouldn't feed their dog on the stuff I've been eating.
US chocolate is pretty poor generally though in my experience, I think over there you have to go to expensive boutiques to find what you get in an average ASDA/Walmart or Tescos here.
We had this here in Europe a couple of years ago, under the pressure of junk makers. :(
;-)
There were very hot debates, petitions etc. which appeared entierely useless
Good luck!
If you resist I promiss I switch to US chocolate
(FWIW, the worst junk makers here, and at the origin of the move, were UK manufacturers)
Herve S.
If you are ever in a power failure situation (Think hurricane). Simply add a wick to your american chocolate bar and it will double as an emergency candle. It may save your life.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
Of course the only way to make your vegetable oil thick enough to be solid and melt-in-the-mouth is to use partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, aka trans-fats aka double-plus ungood. As a person who lives off Cadbury's chocolate I can recognise cheap shoddy imitation choco from China that is already made this way and it tastes like crap and is about as good for you.
Still I believe the US is still using HFCS in soda drinks so who am I to judge their tastes?
I'm tagging this one partiallyhydrogenated AND trans
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Remember FDA testing requires money, not idealism. If you can't patent it, it's unlikely that any research dollars are going to go in to test it.
I've never had decent Cadbury's.... What they sell in the UK certainly doesn't taste like chocolate. And I'm not the type that get off on Green and Black's etc. I want my chocolate sweet and milky (yes, I know, heresy). But I still want it to actually taste of chocolate and have a texture that resembles that of purer chocolates. The only "chocolate" I've tasted that have been as bad as Cadbury's or Hershey's is Galaxy
So anyone making the slightest criticism of America must be a commie. I'm afraid you're just perpetuating the stereotype that Americans aren't very clever.
Who said it was meant to be eaten in significant quantities? Alcohol is bad for you in significant quantities too - that doesn't mean there isn't a difference between the cheap nasty stuff and high quality wines or spirits.
As for European chocolates being packaged as gourmet foods, there are lots of cheap and good European chocolate brands. Personally I was appalled when I moved to the UK and could find nothing to even remotely match the brands I was used to from Norway where I'm from. Norwegians tends to overestimate the quality of the "local" market leader in cheap/mass market chocolates, Freia (most people not used to their milk chocolates seems to find them too sweet), but compared to Cadbury's or Hershey's it's heavenly... I know there are lots of other decent mass market brands around Europe too, but as I've only had them every now and again when traveling I don't have any good examples.
I noticed that as I expanded my palate, my tastes changed.
Of course they did. With an expanded palate your oral and nasal cavities are bound to be much smaller, which impacts your ability to properly smell and taste. You should really see a doctor about this.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
In the 70's and 80's real chocolate was almost impossible to obtain due to lack of cocoa butter. People had to be provided with sweets, so the communists started manufacturing "chocolate-like product". Everyone hated the taste of the vegetable oil, yet there was no alternative. At least the name was obligatory, calling this product "chocolate" wouldn't have been accepted by citizens.
Even today if we want to say that something is an ersatz or a bad imitation we say "oh, it's a chocolate-like product, right?"
It's amusing and worrying at the same time to discover that USA has come to the point where it adopts yet another communism-era thing (further to "security enhancements" and taking other liberties away). And all of that without people caring (except minority).
And they didn't work. Most of those herbal remedies didn't, and don't, do a thing - though quite a few are actively dangerous. In 1900 we had aspirin and opiates for pain relief, and iodine and carbolic acid for disinfection, and that was basically it for effective medicines. The sulfa drugs and then penicillin were ENORMOUS breakthroughs - they could actually cure diseases! In the US in 1850, the life expectancy at birth was around 40 years for both men and women. By 1900, it was around 50 years. By 1950, after the introduction of these antibiotics, it was 66 for men and 72 for women.
And herbal medicines haven't changed at all since 1850. Think about that.
I didn't know that Ghana, Cote D'Ivoire, Indonesia and Nigeria were in South America. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa#Production)
(though I'm sure that tons of shit is going on there as well)
If you've ever tried English clotted cream fudge you'll realise that the think blocks of icing passed of as fudge in America are nothing like real fudge. Fudge is a bit like chocolate in that sense.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
WOW - There's a lot of misinformation floating around here! Obviously this is a topic that's near and dear to many of your hearts!
I'm the technical director of a chocolate company. I've been making chocolate for many, many years.
The proposal from the GMA isn't directed just at chocolate, but would include it. It essentially calls for the use of 'all safe and suitable' sweeteners and oils. Chocolate has a standard of identity, which means that the government controls the definition of chocolate. That definition can be changed (white chocolate actually didn't legally exist until a few years go, at which time a white chocolate section was added to the CFR) - however it takes many, many years to do so (white chocolate took over a decade).
This is driven by a number of things, which include, but are not limited to:
1) the desire to be able to legally call sugar free products sugar free chocolate, when formulated to meet the other standards
2) the desire to harmonize global chocolate standards - most of the rest of the world allows the use of up to 5% CBE (cocoa butter equivilants - these are oils that are chemically the same as cocoa butter, but are usually - not always - more economical).
ANY change would be required to be labelled, so no one would pull anything over on you, same as it is today. Mfr's would be able to choose to do this or not, it would not be a requirement, so it's not that all chocolate would change overnight. My take on it is that the GMA has written this petition so broadly as to be ridiculous, hoping that the FDA allows on a portion of what was asked for. It will likely take years before the FDA even acknowledges it 8-)
We in Mexico do not recognize TexMex as Mexican, although clearly recognize the several influences from Mexican cuisine in fajitas or a good burrito.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are wiser regarding apple pie now.
If you eat food from many different places (as any educated person should do nowadays) you will identify some traits pointing you in the general direction of the origin of the food.
There are some ingridients, froms of preparation and combination of ingridients so unique to one place, region or country, that it is very easy to identify the provenance of a dish.
SOme others are much muddled. For example a lot of Brittish bread confectionary has British names, but the same thing can be found in places as disimilar as Mexico or Malaysia, it becomes harder to identify the true origin of food when it becomes very popular.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They want to be able to add (page 4) extra emulsifiers, extra fake flavours, things to make production easier, fake salt, fake sugar, oils, enzymes, fake egg.
'Alternate make' is the term they use where a 'roast' chicken is boiled and painted with brown die instead. They want 'alternate make' allowed on their products.
'Diet' foods need to have 25% less calories than the standard. They want that reduced to 10%.
It goes on like this, but the thrust of it is to deceive the consumer by labelling one thing as another.
There was a huge "scandal" about it when Sunny Delight was popular here in the late 1990s and all of a sudden it was all over the papers when someone realised "OMG!!!! IT'S NOT REAL JUICE, IT'S JUST SQUASH!!!!11111". Like, you don't say.
(Then there was even more scandal when there were reports of kids turning yellow through drinking the stuff. I know it's crap, but how much of the damn stuff were these parents feeding their kids?)
I hate all those crappy "juice drinks" that come in fruit-juice like packaging, but contain (at best) 25-50% fruit juice, with the rest made up from citric acid, sugar and God-knows-what. For what it is, it's fine, but I'm willing to bet that they're designed to fool countless morons into thinking they're fruit juice (and that they succeed).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This isn't specifically about chocolate from what I read. Looks like it covers any food product. I skim read but I didn't see anything specifically identifying one food or another.
Overall I'd say that if I know one thing it's that whatever is best for big business is usually bad for consumers.
Technically alcohol is a poison, perhaps you should review your standards?
I learned that there are two flavor components to chocolate: (1) the cocoa -- originally the hard cell wall in a cocoa bean; and (2) the the cocoa butter -- the fat stored in the cocoa bean cells. Chocolate requires extra cocoa butter, which makes cocoa powder a by-product of chocolate manufacture.
My concern is that if manufacturers are allowed to substitute alternate fats for the cocoa butter, then one of the flavor components of chocolate may be diluted or entirely missing, and I will have no way of determining this before buying the product. To take an extreme case, white chocolate gets all its chocolate flavor from cocoa butter; there is no cocoa component. If you remove the cocoa butter from white chocolate, the remaining product will be sugar mixed with flavorless fat and a white colorant.
I frequently buy candybars as well as boxed candy. I frequently read the labels of the candy I buy. If the label says, e.g. "cocoa, sugar, and fractionated palm kernel oil" then I know the candy is missing cocoa butter. If the label says "chocolate," then I know the candy has all the components necessary for chocolate flavor. It may turn out to be lousy chocolate, but at least it is basic information before I spend my money. I particularly like the labeling I find on some European dark chocolate (presumably voluntary) that says "65% dark" or words to that effect. This labeling gives me an even better idea of what I'm buying.
If the definition of chocolate is changed in the USA, then I will be even less able to judge whether American candy will taste good to me without the risk of spending money. Since the Europeans are not changing the definition of chocolate, their labeling will be more informative than the labeling on American candy, and I will be more likely to buy the European products.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
This is like Sinclair Lewis' "The Jungle".
Yup, even in the "non-diet" tonic water.
For a long while, I couldn't drink gin and tonic anymore, because even the non-diet tonics had replaced half their cane sugar content with saccharine, possibly the worst-tasting sweetener ever.
Happily, the tide seems to be turning - Tesco (the UK's Wal-Mart), has introduced a "Premium" brand that has no artificial sweetener. Alas, double the sugar, double the calories, but my mouth doesn't feel "blah" anymore after drinking a G&T. The "Premium" version of the diet tonic uses a more modern sweetener than saccharine (I can't recall, maybe sucralose).
What really gets my goat is that you can legally label a product "Contains no artificial flavours", even if it contains artificial sweetener. I mean, what happened to "sweet" being one of the six basic flavours?
You're not arguing against regulation of medical concoctions, you're arguing for greater government sponsorship of medical research and efficacy testing.
The herbal supplements industry makes millions in profit every year. You'd think they've have some cash left over to spend on proving the efficacy of their wares. Or would that kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
Big pharma tends to "sell" to doctors (convince them to prescribe). Doctors have extensive medical educations and skeptical minds. Big pharma has only recently found out what the herbal supplements and "alternative medicine" quacks know: that selling direct to the general public is more profitable, because the public don't have degrees in medicine and will swallow any vaguely scientific sounding bullshit.
I wasn't around or knew about it when the FDA allowed HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup), but we're finding out now that it's pretty dangerous stuff and it's everywhere!
... it costs much more to eat healthy because we've driven market forces with a high demand for what "tastes good" vs. what's good for us.
;)
Learning the lesson from last time, let's leave well-enough alone! Or let's not let an industry dictate definitions based on cost and profits.
That's why we're in this mess now
Ok, thanks for the soapbox!
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
I hope that the FDA should not mess with the chocolates, just to please the lobbying by the chocolate manufacturers association. The more the govt intefers with business, the more business becomes complicated and suffers. When will business associations get this? There is no point in fixing something until it is broken. Ikey http://www.ezymoneyinfo.com/fast
The creator of $100,000 monthly for life system. http://www.secret33.com/home-based-business-progr
"Wax is a traditional ingredient of chocolate."
Not so, it's added as a glazing agent to make the chocolate more appealing and shiny. It hides the powdery crystals that badly made chocolate has.
http://www.jobyandmartys.com/sg347.php
Joby and Martys all natural chocolate:
Dark chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate liquor, soya lecithin - an emulsifier, vanilla) non-hydrogenated palm oil, soybean oil, peppermint oil, white non-pareil seeds (sugar, corn starch, confectioners glaze and carnauba wax*) and green non-pareil seeds (sugar, corn starch, spinach powder, and carnauba wax*)
Whats confectioners glaze?
Confectioners glaze is an alcohol based solution of various types of Food Grade Shellac.
Whats Shellac?
Shellac is a brittle or flaky secretion of the lac insect Kerria lacca, found in the forests of Assam and Thailand.
Yum bug droppings.
Punitive fines for misrepresentation and false selling are a pretty effective remedy against commercial enterprises that peddle lies and unsupported wishful thinking.
"Mother Nature" has produced some of the most lethal poisons and toxins known to man. By all means drink a tea infused from a cocktail of god-knows ingredients grown, harvested and stored in god-knows conditions for god-knows how many years with god-knows what effects on the body or a small percentage of users. But you can't for a second claim that it is somehow safer and as efficacious as a properly controlled, scientifically tested drug.
Terry Pratchett, "Thief of Time"
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Seems like you missed the boat.
Look for "Organic" or "Natural" Peanut Butter. It's Peanuts and Peanut Oil.
Funny thing, it's not that much more expensive than the gunk sold as "peanut butter" at eye level.
I see. So because you can take OD on one kind of vitamin pill with no ill effect, it somehow validates that natural is better that prescription medicine? In which case homeopathy must be the safest medicine of all since I could easily down an entire bottle of pills every day of my life with no fear of any effects whatsoever.
Read a book on chocolate in my cooking phase. It's a lot like coffee with less opportunity to explore bean varietals: purity, freshness, some qualities of the grind and flavorings you might find pleasant. Freshness for instance. Godiva originally commanded its price because it was the one that shipped in refrigerated cars.
If American manufacturers want to sacrifice purity with crap ingredients, that's just something else to buy elsewhere.
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
And ginger tea works very well on my nausia and my virtigo when I travel.
For every ginger tea, there's 400 "Fat Sucker 6000"s made from secret ancient rainforest vegetables the manufacturer found growing under the workbench in the garage. And every time you find out Fat Sucker 6000 with Blippidydooinol doesn't work, there's absolutely no barrier to releasing Fat Sucker 6001 with Kerflufferine that does exactly the same nothing. So ginger tea is just going to have to eat it and do some studies if it wants to claim to be a medicine.
And of course, they will also take molecules known to work already, whether from old drugs moving out of patent, or from herbals, and tweak the molecules subtly.
Hey presto! Redo the trials, print some glossy pamphlets about decreased morbidity, and you have a brand new patent medicine ready to milk some more money from the punters...
Yeah terrible. And I do not know who to blame but if I take the ferry to the UK, with their great choice in real ciders, the boat serves me some sweet sugary bubbly muck. The onboard taxfree seems to only sell shitty stuff on purpose, to force you to buy the cafe's nastiness.
Hop over to our organic food coop, we have (EOS) Bitter Lemon based on lemon grass, a refreshening delight. Not too sweet either. We have (Naturfrisk) 'ginger ale', (alas, based on apple juice) with real ginger in it: orgasmic. Then the (Loverendale or Beutelsbacher?) 100% mango juice, creamy soft. Easily distinguishable from the 100% cranberry juice, pear juice, etc.
Back on topic: Haven't really tried American chocolate since 1972 and I wasn't a critical consumer then. The organic chocolate we sell is from Vivani, I guess between B+ and C-. (the so-called chocolate in Romania (eastern Europe) in the 1990-ies was a clear 'E+'). Some Fair Trade bars (cappucino) top that. And many Belgian pattisserie chocolates obviously.
But the question is, what constitutes an overdose. I know for a fact that you can take up to 10 grams of vitamin C and nothing goes wrong. That's like, 20 "normal" pills (normal vit C pill seems to be 500mg in my experience).
Poor choice of example--you're talking here about quite possibly the least toxic substance we can consume. Measured as "percentage of minimum necessary for life" it's possibly easier to overdose on water than on vitamin C. Has anyone ever died from taking too much vitamin C?Just about any other vitamin or nutrient (including many vital to life) is far, far easier to overdose on.
When I lived in the USA I really noticed that what you call "chocolate" is a completely different substance. One day I saw some Cadbury chocolate and thought "At lat! Some chocky that's fit to eat!". I was shocked when I tasted it, and found it was crap. Try some Cadbury chocolate from Australia or New Zealand - it's not the same as Belgian or French, but it's quite good for its price.
..."chokolate" and be done with it. Then, there won't be any confusion.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
According to Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, the saturated fat in chocolate is in the form of stearic acid; which does not raise cholesterol levels.
0 1-02c.html
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/Pubs/HealthyHeart/04
However, most people who enjoy the stuff you listed probably eat it because they like it. Just because it's not to your tastes doesn't mean everyone agrees with you, and you really shouldn't talk down food just because it's weird or unfamiliar; stuff you're okay with probably seems equally weird to other people. (Personally I think most fish is far better semi-raw than fully cooked; about the only fish I eat is sushi or smoked.)
I make candy at home for fun, including chocolate goodies. Just so you know, the palm oil is substituted for the cocoa butter so that you don't need to temper the chocolate, which is a royal pain in the arse.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
As if the average slashdot reader has ever heard of exercise.
Sorry, it was just too easy.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
"Ever tried taking morphine for the rest of your life? Might not be a good idea. Most doctors won't let you do that."
And that's why so many people have to die in pain. Not that I care, anyway, because when you're dead, you won't care for the pain you felt while you lived, one way or another. But there are some who say that dying should not be painful.
But even without such willful misinterpretation (?) of what you write: It's true for morphine as for anything that its the dosage which counts. There are many who took morphine for decades without ill side effects.
Funny thing is: if they really wanted e.g. natural vitamin C, they should eat sixty oranges a day or something like that. The stuff you get in supplement form is usually "artificially" produced by genetically modifying or selectively breeding yeast or bacteria to excrete vitamin C which is then put into pill form and sold.
Yeah, some people prefer "high-quality" plain chocolate over milk, but sod 'em.
Seriously, I'm damn sick of sanctimonious tossers on TV and in the papers telling us that "real", "high-quality" chocolate is actually healthy, and, blah blah.... usually in conjunction with yet another shitty story about how chocolate is actually good for us.
Look, I've nothing against chocolate; I like the stuff. But I hate the endless stories about how it's good for you if you eat the "real" high-quality stuff with like 99.9% cocoa solids, when it's just feelgood bullshit to let the masses keep stuffing their faces. (Yeah, like they're really eating one small but oh-so-high-quality square of fucking rare Bolivian Fair Trade chocolate in a week. We all know that after 5 minutes, the only bit they remember is "chocolate is good for you" and use it as an excuse to buy some overpriced mass-market stuff from Nestle). Fucking third-rate Daily Mail journalism.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
While they're redefining everything, can we please quit referring to "white chocolate" as "chocolate"?
Ok we have fake meat in Mcdonalds, now fake chocolate posing as chocolate.
I cry for you guys who have their taste buds pounded by food substitute. I went to Disney recently and all food that i hate over there tasted the same, you cant even tell there is cheese and bacon in your hamburgers.
You must go crazy when get out of your country and realize that you havent lost your taste but were robbed of it by your food industry
Yup, they've been doing all natural poisons over there in China for quite a while too!!! & let's not get into all natural minerals!
The point seems to be more a fear of artificial inflation to support pharmaceutical prices.
Of course pharmaceutical companies always play nice & fare, & there is no corruption in America.
Anyway, back to the point, chocolate. Eat too much & its bad for you! Just like vitamin D.
Especially if you live in a buyer beware culture.
thx e
American pizza is far removed from the Italian original.
Pizza crossed the Atlantic with the four million Italians who by the 1920s had sought a better life on American shores. Most Italians weren't familiar with the many regional variations their fragmented homeland had produced, but a longing for pan-Italian unity inspired a widespread embrace of a simplified pizza as their "national" dish. Fraternal "pizza and sausage" clubs, formed to foster Italian pride, sprouted in cities across the Northeast. Women got in on it too, participating in communal pizza exchanges in which entrants competed with unique pies, some molded into unusual shapes, some with the family name baked into the dough.
Although non-Italians could partake of pizza as early as 1905, when the venerable Lombardi's--the nation's first licensed pizzeria--opened its doors in Lower Manhattan, most middle-class Americans stuck to boiled fish and toast. The pungent combination of garlic and oregano signaled pizza as "foreign food," sure to upset native digestions. If pizza hoped to gain an American following beyond New York City and New Haven, it would have to become less like pizza. By the 1940s a few entrepreneurs had initiated the transformation, starting a craze that forever changed the American culinary landscape.
The modern pizza industry was born in the Midwest, not coincidentally a place of sparse Italian settlement. Although pizza had pushed into the suburbs as second-generation Italians relocated, most of the heartland was pizza-free. Its inhabitants had neither allegiance nor aversion to the traditional pie. The region also boasted an enviable supply of cheese.
Despite such advantages, Ike Sewell still wasn't thinking pies when he partnered with Ric Riccardo to open a Chicago restaurant. Sewell, a native of Texas, planned on offering a menu of Mexican specialties. Riccardo willingly agreed, having never tried Mexican food. His first meal changed his mind so completely that, he liked to say later, he fled to Italy to recover from it. While there, he sampled classic Neapolitan pizza and found it much better than Sewell's Mexican offerings. Sewell eventually agreed to forgo enchiladas for pizza, but not until he'd inflated the thin-crusted Neapolitan recipe to make it more palatable to Americans. "Ike tasted it and said nobody would eat it, it's not enough," Evelyne Slomon, author of The Pizza Book, said. "So he put gobs and gobs of stuff on it."
Sewell's lightly seasoned deep-dish pie, introduced in 1943, the signature item at Pizzeria Uno, was the first true American pizza. The pie was a uniquely Chicago institution, like a perennially losing major-league baseball team, that other cities showed no interest in adopting. Until Uno's opened its first location outside Chicago in 1979, people had to go to East Ohio Street to sample anything like Sewell's idea of a pie. But its success liberated pizzeria owners nationwide to tinker with their product, ultimately paving the way for the megafranchises. American Pie
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.
And it's usually oh-so-effective. If I am having surgery and require antibiotics for the incision site afterwards, I'll trust those over your herbs, thank you very much.
Why don't we go back to drilling holes in our heads to let out the evil spirits, too? That was around way before your fancy-schmancy "Chinese medicine".
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
At least the cornfields get vacuumed once in a while.
For that matter, the New Orleans area was wet-vac'd a few years ago.
Sparta is alive and well.
E. Guittard or Etienne Guittard is by far one of the best if not the best chocolate companies in the US. They're located in San Carlos, California and each chocolate uses beans from different parts of the world. They mostly produce dark chocolate which pair well with wine. You'll find their chocolates used in fine restaurants and in high end grocery stores. I love them and order them once in a while. If I'm going to eat chocolate it's going to be E. Guittard. http://www.guittard.com/home/learn_varietals.html
1. There is a reason why these alternative practitioners stay in business. Because they work.
2. Big pharma is a business. They take risks to bring you Viagra and therapies designed to build repeat business.
3. Big pharma certainly has sold a whole host of drugs that are far more harmful than your draining blood example.
Big pharma are most certainly *not* the Good Citizens you make them out to be.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
In the US in 1850, the life expectancy at birth was around 40 years for both men and women. By 1900, it was around 50 years. By 1950, after the introduction of these antibiotics, it was 66 for men and 72 for women.
Actually, advances in nutrition and public health (think sanitation) contributed much more to the increase in life expectancy in the 20th century than modern medicine. Infant (and early childhood) mortality rates drag down a population's life expectancy a great deal; the mother's nutrition and the cleanliness of the baby's environment play a much larger role in reducing infant mortality (thus increasing life expectancy) than breakthroughs in medicine. Here's a decent Wikipedia article that hits the highlights.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Well, who cares. That is, if you give a damn about quality at least. Good chocolate won't have whey protein anyway. Any connoisseur will tell you that dark chocolate, at least 65-70% cacao is where it's at. And no respectable chocolatier would ever consider replacing cocoa butter. The only people this affects are your typical, ignorant consumers. Unfortunately, that's most people. Those of us who choose quality over quantity won't be effected. That may be a small percentage of people now, but it's growing. Anytime I find myself at the store with a friend of mine, and they decide to pick out a candy bar - I slap them on the wrist for their choice, pick out something for them (granted, it's usually 3-5x more expensive, but I cover the difference), and sit and watch them eat it. I've done this with probably 15-20 people... Not a single one has decided to go back to eating the crap they had before. Most of them curse me for ruining the enjoyment they had from their cheap chocolate, because one they knew how good it could be, they simply couldn't enjoy the nasty shit that gets passed off on the unknowing public. And don't even get me started on the whole fair-trade/slavery issue.
If you want quality chocolate, get a 100g bar of Valrhona.
Hey, not fair, Valrhona has Magic inside it! I mean, it must, to taste like that, no? (seriously, one cannot make relative judgements about chocolate until eating some Valrhona - it makes Lindt and those San Francisco chocolatiers look like amateurs).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Coincidentally, Dr. King's speech was about "chocolates" as well...
Somehow, This first read to me as "The US is considering redefining 'chocolate' as a Drug." [First post, don't mod-hate me!]
Every decent grocery store I know of sells some okay stuff like Ghiradelli - you just have to look hard for it amongst the Hershey wax bars. With a whole damn aisle of candy at your average grocery store, they're bound to accidentally stock something half decent.
...unless you are referring to the fact that Irish whiskey has an 'e' unlike Scotch "whisky" not quite sure what you're getting at - written references to Irish whiskey predate Scotch by almost a century.
Me, give me a decent German champagne any time...
Now I see why these food guys in Belgium and France wouldn't feed their dog on the stuff I've been eating.
Chocolate is deadly for dogs, especially good chocolate (it's the cocoa that's the problem).
"The number is way off though. Before 1900 nearly all remedies were herbal"
WTF? Yeah, there was herbal stuff. There was also bloodletting with lancets or leeches. Amputation without anasthetic followed by cauterisation with hot iron. People would drink fucking MERCURY, how's that for a natural remedy?
This idiocy is just what all you Democrats (and many Republicans) deserve.
It is in most cases just the cost.
Indeed. I am not a physician, but I suspect that most of the ways of dying involving vitamin C overdose involve acute acidosis, and I don't even want to think about how much ascorbic acid you have to consume to cause that.
Regulating herbal remedies like drugs = banning herbal remedies. This is why the big drug manufactures are the biggest force lobbying for the regulation of herbal remedies.
This is of course ignoring the moral arguement, that in a free society I shouldn't need to get anyone's permission to consume a fucking plant. That doesn't mean they work. It means they are not dangerous. It means that there is no reason for the government to ban them.
One doesn't have to give up modern medicine in order to want to be allowed to consume plants and vegetables of their choice. If someone wants to sell a chinese herb, that has been grown and cultivated for thousands of years for a medicinal purpose, what is the logic of stopping it?
Why is it so important, so critical to our nation, to forcefully prevent people from eating plant or vegetable - especially when the number of people who die from that plant are insignificant compared to the number of people who die from complications or overdose of legal prescription drugs.
What we are seeing is a coalition: Authoritarians and Totalitarians such as yourself who believe that all human behavior should be severly restricted by the government, working hand in hand with the big pharma corporations who want to eliminate competition. You get the benifit of the government spanking you and telling you "bad boy" like your dad used to do when you were a kid, and the big pharma corporations get the benifit of a patent monopoly on health products.
The question is why you feel the need for the government to regulate unprocessed plants and vegetables the same way it does synthetic drugs? Why do you feel the need for the government to have absolute authority on the plants and vegetables you are allowed to consume? Why do you feel that the government has the right to micromanage my body? Why not let people who want to experiment with traditional herbal medicines, do so at their own risk?
Why is it justified for someone to threaten me with violence or imprisonment if I want to eat a candy bar sweetened with stevia instead of corn syrup? Why is it justified for someone to threaten me with violence or imprisonment if I want to drink Chamomile tea to help me sleep? Why not just lay off?
(Fully) Hydrogenated oil means that all the double bonds are "filled in" with hydrogen. Hydrogenated oil is not any different chemically than other saturated fat. It's generally considered more of a heart risk, but isn't bad in small quantaties.
Partially hydrogenated oils means that only some of the double bonds are "filled in." The way this is done industrially creates roughly equal amounts of cis and trans (isomers in chemistry speak) configurations in the remaining double bonds. Only the cis configuration occurs in nature, so human bodies aren't equiped to utilize the trans configuration because the appropriate enzymes can't wrap around them. Because of this they tend to accumulate in the body which is bad. Current advertising rules in the US allows companies to advertize "No trans fat" if there is less than 0.5 g or 0.1 g per serving (I don't know which it is). This is particularly misleading for things like margarine that have a small "serving size" but are often used in higher amounts for cooking. If you see partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients list, there are trans fats no matter what the advertizing blurb on the package says.
The reason that food companies hydrogenate oils is to get the consistency of the oil correct. Unsturated oils have a lower melting point than saturated oils of the same molecular weight. This makes it easy to extract and separate liquid oils and then partially hydrogenate them to get a solid fat that melts easily and is spreadable.
In general fat-like substances accumulate in your body because the body's active transport systems all revolve around water. Fat is transported passively. This is why you can kill yourself by overdosing on fat-soluble vitamins, but not water-soluble ones. (Vitamin C is water-soluble so it's pushed as a "cure-all" rather harmlessly) Any fat-like substance that your body can't use is a big no-no health wise for this reason. That's why you need to stay away from trans fats and why I'm suspicious of fat subtitutes (although I don't have any specific information on Oleo or the like).
Disclaimer: I've taken University classes in organic chemistry and biochemistry and have an advanced degree in Chemical Engineering, so I could be considered part of the "establishment."
they're busy right now determining the safe level of melamine powder for use in bread flour.
that ought to be good for approximately 250 equivalents of college scholarships for officials' kids.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What is so terribly frightening to you that you need the government to regulate natural remedies? I mean, I see why the big corporations and financial interests want to ban herbal remedies: Why would you want people to drink of cup of Chamomile tea before bed, when they can pop an expensive patented sleep pill instead? But why are *YOU* so terrified of herbal remedies? The government isn't subsidizing herbal rememdies like it is patented big-pharma drugs... people are not dying from overdose and misuse in large numbers, the way they are from legal prescription drugs... why can't you simply not purchase herbal remedies if you don't like them? Why do you need to force people not to use them?
Why, out of all the risky behavior that people engage in, that are completly unregulated, would you choose to go after something like unregulated herbal remedies, which harms very very few people. (people killed by herbal rememdies are statisticly insignificant compared to STDs, diabetis, murders, etc.)?
Clearly there is powerful financial interests who stand to gain by banning medicinal plants, but there are not powerful financial interests pushing to ban unprotected sex or snowboarding despite the equal or greater danger... and your fear and paranoia of things that grow in your garden are a product of the media blitz being waged on natural remedies.
Just curious...is this how you feel about lexus drivers.....or anyone in a higher priced car?
Do you feel the same way about Porsche drivers, or Mercede's drivers or Cadillac drivers?
If not...what is it about lexus drivers I wonder that you find makes them jerks over drivers of other brands of cars?
I personally wouldn't own one...but, then again, I don't car for cars that have more than 2 seats.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yeah, FDA approval... GREAT!
This is the same FDA that banned stevia as a food additive in the U.S. (stevia, is of course not only approved as a food additive in every other industrialized country, but encouraged as a healthy alternative to sugar... years of testing have shown absolutly no negative side effects), because it recieved ONE ANONYMOUS EMAIL from someone who claimed it gave them a stomach ache (yes, the FDA openly admits that they banned it because of one anonymous email!!!)... while at the same time allowing corn syrup to be widely used as a food additive despite the fact that there are mountains of evidence of its negative effects on the human body.
Science and safety have nothing, zero, nada, zilch, to do with FDA approval. There is absoluty no safety requirements or scientific testing for a plant product to be approved for consumption by the FDA, nor is there any scientific requirements or testing for a plant product to be banned. The corn growing lobby is more politically and economicly powerful than the stevia lobby, therefore corn syrup is "healthy" and stevia is not.
The parent is garbage. The fact that it condemns trans fats, which _are_ bad for you, appears to be lucky.
Oils are partially hydrogenated to make them an easily spreadable or easily meltable solid. It doesn't matter if it's corn, soy, canola, peanut, olive, or whatever oil. To get a butter or lard substitute, we've been doing it this way for the last 50-something years. The problem is that industrial processes use methods that don't discriminate between the cis and trans isomers and produce roughly equal amounts of them. The body doesn't know how to deal with the non-naturally occuring trans isomer and so it accumulates. That's why it's bad. (Beware of products containing partially hydrogenated oils that advertize "0 g Trans fats" because that just means they have a small serving size.)
Incidently, (fully) hydrogenated oils aren't chemically different than naturally saturated fats. It's the _partially_ hydrogenated oils you really have to watch out for.
Different oils have different health values depending on the amount of saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated oils they contain as well as minor fat-soluable ingredients. However, canola oil (as well as olive) is supposed to be one of the better ones (less saturated fat than some of the tropical oils). Regardless, your chemical explanation was completely bogus. It has nothing to do with preservation and everything to do with making a spread and little to do with what is available in the US. If olive oil were cheaper here, they would do the exact same thing and it would be just as bad.
Now importer of chocolats will be putting the same crap in it's chocolate that it ships to the US.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hello my name is Aaron Berg from Minnesota. As an individual consumer I believe it is not appropriate to allow a business to name a food type as "original" when it contains artificial or inferior "taste a like" products. The new proposed plan of allowing candy makers to mark their candies as chocolate when the only thing they contain is a very small percentage of coco powder and the rest being fillers is, I believe, not the correct way to handle the situation. Historically chocolate has consisted of two key ingredients coco power and coco butter. Products labeled Milk Chocolate contain milk. Allowing manufactures to name products not consisting of these ingredients means misleading consumers. Allowing this new naming standard would monetarily help companies that produce whey protein, like local Minnesota based Davisco foods, however it will not mean more jobs as these products are highly mechanically automated. It would also lower the high purity and quality standards that the FDA is known for. I appreciate your time and efforts to establish and justify standards. Please do not allow Docket: 2007P-0085 to pass. Thank you, Aaron Berg
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Regulating herbal remedies is essentially the same as banning them. You want equality, but you're not going to get it by keeping herbs untested and unproven. I don't want equality. I don't want the government to subsidize herbal remedies. I don't want insurance companies to pay for herbal remedies. I don't want hospitals to dispense herbal remedies. I don't want doctors to prescribe them as an alternative to scientificly proven effective drugs. I simply want it to remain legal for people to be able to buy and consume any herb and vegetable they choose - and you want to make it illegal for anyone to purchase or consume a herb or vegetable unless the government desides it is OK.
Hahaha, nice try. maybe you should actually go read some of my posts in this thread.
What we are saying is that people should be allowed to take them or use them without them having to spend billions of dollars and 15 years of clinical testing in order to be approved This is what *you* are saying. What SpecialAgentXXX is saying is that natural remedies are superior in most, if not all, ways, and that we should use them exclusively, and that we should be extremely skeptical of all drugs developed by major corporations. He isn't saying that we should have a choice, he is saying that we should have his choice.
What is so terribly frightening to you that you need the government to regulate natural remedies?[. . . ] I think at the very root of things, if a natural remedy works, there is some scientific reason that it works, and that it should be discoverable as to what that reason is. However, sometimes the supposed reason that a treatment works is unverifiable, unobservable, nonexistent, and generally outside the realm of science. And sometimes the effectiveness of a natural remedy does not exceed the effectiveness of a placebo. Both of these things do not sit well with me.
Additionally, see Michael Woodhams's post:
I don't know if regulating natural remedies as drugs is the right solution, but I do think there needs to be some way to protect consumers from remedies with unverifiable claims and no perceivable health benefits. I do realize that there are useful natural remedies out there and that we have derived some medicines from them (aspirin, quinine), but I also realize that Merck (et al) isn't interested isn't interested in investigating and developing them, so it is likely that we have two problems to solve, instead of just one. I wouldn't be the first to admit that there is something broken with a system where my taxes go to the government who pays Merck to develop a drug which it then patents and charges the consumers, who paid for the development of the drug to begin with, an arm and a leg for.
Just curious...is this how you feel about lexus drivers.....or anyone in a higher priced car?
Well, I think drivers of luxury brands have a certain tendency to be pretentious douchebags, but I think most of this subset of people would be so inclined, even if they were driving a Honda. They're the same sort of people who rice-up cars, just richer usually. Ostentatiousness for its own sake, so to say.
I'm a member of the PCA (Porsche Club of America), and an interesting feature of the club is that the jerkoffs who can be initially attracted to the club (because they think the club consists mainly of other narcissistic jerkoffs) usually disappear from events in sort order, since their antisocial attitudes are generally incompatible with the activities and club philosophy. So, it's an interesting disparity, a lot of the drivers of Porsches I meet on the road are assholes, but most everyone who attends club events are great people.
I don't really harbor any negative feelings to Merc or Caddy drivers, or drivers of other brands. I just think driving a Lexus screams "Hi, I have shit for brains, AND I'm too poor to afford a 5 series Beamer!" Furthermore, it doesn't help that every Lexus driver on the planet seem to be constantly on the phone, and seem to be too poor to afford, or too stupid to use a Bluetooth headset, and therefore drive like they have a pineapple shoved up their ass.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Indeed. I took a tour of the Scharffen Berger factory in Berkeley in late 2005 and the woman giving the tour said this is one of the most frequently asked questions. She said it made everyone a little nervous at first but they're allowed to operate exactly as they have been, but now they have as much money as they need. The chocolate hasn't suffered yet.
Web consulting +
a) How is this politics?
b) 8 pages of chocolate and no cracks about mocklate?
But a normal dose of Vitamin C, or whatever "natural" remedy you are raving about, does not reduce pain, lower fever, etc... Obviously, if the risk of the side-effects of Tylenol are worse than the symptoms of the disease you have, you should not take it. If you can come up with a medicine that cures everything, and has no side-effects, please do so. In the meantime, stop blaming the world for not living up to your ideals. Tylenol works for what it's designed for.
If you are deficient in vitamins and/or minerals, you get sick. Very few people in rich western countries are getting deficiency diseases like scurvy today. Thus there is no rationale for saying people are usually deficient in them.
Unlike what you seem to believe, people have always gotten sick. Even healthy people get sick. The millions who died from the black plague didn't get sick because their immune system was deficient. They got sick because the black plague was a new powerful disease that even the immune system of otherwise healthy people didn't know how to fight.
Also, you are probably eating more healthy today, than humans ever has throughout history (that is, unless you choose to live from coke, burgers, and french fries only). Blaming the modern agricultural system for producing unhealthy food is like blaming the auto industry for making cars so much slower than horses. Let me put this straight, unless you can prove otherwise, I'm 99.999999% that you are not suffering from a deficiency disease.
Your irrational fear of "being deficient" in certain nutrients, is just that; irrational fear. By eating a normal and varied diet, and exercising regularly, you will become far more healthy than by continuing to delude yourself that you need vitamin pills to survive.
I hear you, and I typically go with Godiva myself, but Cadbury Creme Eggs are awesome!
I find it utter appalling that the FDA is considering allowing foods marked as "Chocolate" to contain "cheaper" and "inferior" ingredients such as vegetable oil and dried milk, is the FDA in the pockets of Corporate America? If they allow this the message is clearly YES!
If anything we need the FDA to place restrictions back on our foods to only allow wholesome ingredients, and eliminate the ability of corporate America to use sub standard products in lieu of profit over quality. I find it extremely appalling that many manufacturers are allowed the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and only disclose this on miniscule text in the ingredient list. For example does bread really need that high fructose corn syrup? Heck NO!. It's a wonder why America has such a high diabetic type 2 rate these days with high fructose corn syrup in everything. This especially hurts the poor, and middle class, as the supermarkets often don't offer a comparable product for a reasonable price, so you have to end up purchasing a lower grade product with high fructose corn syrup. People aren't stupid or misinformed they just don't have the choices to allow a healthier eating habits. The FDA and Corporate America are the ones to blame in my opinion for America's weight problem. Corporate America for putting profits above quality, and for the FDA allowing it by lax regulations.
As for personal responsibilities arguments how can you make the right choice when everything contains high fructose corn suryp? Not everyone lives on a farm where you can milk your own cows, grown your own grain, etc, and most "gormet" products that don't contain unpronouncable lists of crap are 3x the price of what they should be just because they are marked gormet.
I personally to combat the high fructose bread issue have gone back to baking bread myself, however I also have a kitchen aid stand mixer and am single, so i don't have the kiddies to contend with and only have a single mouth to feed. However I can't make everything I eat from my single apartment, nor do i have the time living in silicon valley, so in the end i must shop at the supermarket and contend with eating large amounts of sodium, and high fructose corn suryp.
I'm a chocolate addict and I'll admit it. They shouldn't change what "Real Chocolate" is and the ingredients they are made of. I have tried "chocolate" in one of those manufacturer's survey made with vegetable oil is doesn't have the same flavor or texture as "Real chocolate". This controversy is the same as the "Margarine" and "Bread spread" verses "Real Butter". Margarine may have similar taste and consistency of butter but doesn't compare to Butter for taste and consistency. If you cook or bake and try to substitute one for the other the flavor or texture of what you are cooking or bake will be different. Chocolate verses "chocolate made with vegetable oil" will have the same affect.
The immune system fights diseases => correct!
Homeopathic treatment of cancer is based on knowledge about the immune system => wrong!
Homeopathy is based on the delusion that water somehow "remembers" remedies it is mixed with, even when diluted so much that not even a single molecule of the original substance is left. As such, it is the most efficient demonstration of the efficiency of placebo in existence, as millions of people are willing to testify that it works.
You do get addicted to alcohol. It's not particularly hard to overdose on it either. Neither alcohol or Vitamin C helps cure diseases.
The liver doesn't classify stuff as toxins or not. It just tries to metabolize substances the body doesn't need. Research shows that some alcohol is beneficial to the body (just as some Vitamin C is beneficial), so I fail to get your point.
Herbal medicine should be regulated like any other medicine. You should know what the side effects are. You should know that the claims made about the effectiveness are true. You should know if the bottle actually contains what the label claims.
Don't count on it. Most of these pills contain sugar, so you could end up fat.
In general speech, we do not call our languages Canadian French or Canadian English. We only do so when distinguishing it from British English or American English.
English does not belong to the UK.
We've added bleach to the list of effective disinfectants, and you missed the alcohols, but these 4 are the only ones that haven't developed resistant strains, hardly a great leap forward.
I'll admit antibiotics are huge, but "herbal medicines haven't changed at all since 1850" is a load of bull.
There are many herbs that have been validated in double blinded studies, and that are available in standardized extracts. Forskolin and Theanine(from tea) are two that I've used and can vouch for their effectiveness. (I don't take theanine because I already have too much GABA, it and Lyrica both put me to sleep, but the theanine capsules didn't rape my wallet like the lyrica).
so that new chocolatey would be safe for them?
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
That was a very interesting post, though prone to exaggeration. Your attitude seems to be that if American's change a foreign dish, we get credit for it but if
someone else changes an American dish, we still get credit.
Bananas did not originate from Hawaii, though bananas were probably introduced there between 500 and 700AD.
According to wikipedia: "They are native to the tropical region of Southeast Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and Australia."
One of my ancestors, an American by the name of Minor Cooper Keith, was responsible for the global banana trade (before it became exploitative), starting around 1873. Although a few banannas had been imported to the mainland US, and probably other areas like Europe as well, by sailors, they were something that you would only eat on a dare (imagine a banana after a multi-month sea voyage). He created an enormous infrastructure to bring these highly perishable fruits to the US from Central America, including the worlds first fleet of refrigerated steamships and dedicated ports to take the fruit quickly (under 60 hours) from harvest to hold. The railroad express shipment within the US had to be orchestrated and retailers had to be specially trained in how to handle and ripen the fruit. He discovered the bananas while building the first transcontinental railroad (before the panama canal) across Central America, along with his Uncle Henry Meiggs who built the first railroad in Chile. Meiggs died during the building of the transcontinental railroad along with around 4000 people (mostly American's from New Orleans) building the railroad through territory the natives were wisely afraid to visit. The workers from the US did not follow recommended safety precautions
but workers who were imported from Barbados survived to complete the railroad. The fruit company they founded has been known over the years as United
Fruit Company, United Brands Company, and Chiquita Brands International and has had a checkered history since Keith's death. Keith himself meddled in
the politics of Costa Rica backing benevolent dictators during the country's transition to the first stable democracy (he married the daughter of the
first president) in the region (other attempts to transition to democracy in the region, which was unaccustomed to citizen participation, were unsuccessful
and bloody). He refinanced the debts of several Central American countries, built hospitals, schools, and railroads throughout the region, and paid
workers enough to get ahead (double what other workers in the region were paid).
http://www.freelabs.com/~whitis/clan/empire.html
Given that bananas existed for well over a thousand years in many parts of the world before Keith introduced them to Europe/America, I suspect that there are
many banana dishes that are not of American origin. Likewise, although the tomato originated in South America and was common in the US (but thought poisonous
before Jefferson rehabilitated it here), the tomato's history in England dates to around 1590, around the 18th century in France, and around 1550 in Italy. By
the mid 18th century, tomato consumption in Italy was widespread. So I am sure that the Italian's and others would take exception to the notion that anything
with tomatoes not of hispanic origin is created here. http://plantanswers.tamu.edu/publications/vegetabl etravelers/tomato.html
The American hot dog is a perversion of the german Wurst (pronounced Vurst) or Wiener, though the National Hot dog council, according to wikipedia, credits a butcher in Germany, not an American, with the invention of the Hot Dog (the bland miniature version).
The Hawaiians had a very healthy diet before western influence, now the Hawaiians are the highest per-capita consumers of Hormel products (or so I was told
in Hawaii).
As for chee
Gee, I learned something (well, a bunch of things) new here.
:-)
The one that made me reply was my grammar-nazi impulse: I thought "beleaguer" wasn't a word, but I just learned that it is, and that this article used it properly. Darn it!
I would have used "belabor" instead (to belabor the point), but only for want of choice.
Carry on!
Is the twinkie half-life how long it takes before someone eats between one bite and half the twinkie, then just leaves the rest lying around somewhere?
Or the life-spam of this half-twinkie? Though one might expect the life to increase with time, not decrease...
You mean besides the fact that chocolate is poisonous to dogs?
Just look at what Hershey and similar brands are already doing.
Replacing cocoa butter with vegetable oil.... Notice that they left of the word "hydrogenated" which would, of course, be necessary to produce a solid
"chocolate". The hydrogenated oils are unhealthy compared even to saturated fats. And of course, the vegetable oils will be heaviliy refined, removing all the
healthy nutrients found in vegetable oils in their natural state. "Vegetable Oil" sounds better than "Fully Hydrogenated refined hot-pressed vegetable oil".
My house mate brought home a bag that was labeled something like "Hershey's white chips". Yep, they couldn't legally call it white chocolate since there
was no cocoa butter. They assume that consumers will assume it is chocolate because it says "Hershey's". What is the defining ingredient in white chocolate? Cocoa Butter. Likewise, "Nestle Toll House Premier white morsels". Basically, they are trying to sell hardened margarine chunks with sugar, whey, fake? vanilla flavor, and a few other ingredients as white chocolate. Such "white chocolate" products do not contain any part of the cocoa plant.
Interesting post until you got to the unnecessary slam against liberals. Particularly when it's conservatives these days who tend to avoid long-term thinking.
For examples, see Iraq, AKA "the six-week long war which would pay for itself". You might also want to see "deficit spending" and "abstinence-only sex education". You can collect them on any conservative's greatest hits package.
Whilst at Uni in Scotland about 10 years ago the Chemistry department had a lecture on chocolate from a guy working (I think) for Cadburys.
He explained that the Hershey "flavor" came from the fact that the factories originally couldn't get milk that hadn't gone off. Hence Hershey chocolate had an "off" flavour. When Hershey later tried to correct this the consumers palate was so used to it that they revolted (!) and the old flavor was retained.
I'm not sure of the verity of this tale but it was from a leading Chemist at a worldwide chocolate producer (albeit in the context of a most entertaining lecture).
Here in the UK we occassionally have news stories about how the French want to get UK chocolate classed as chocolate flavoured confection (what they actually mean is that there's a move to classify a minimum cocoa solids threshold for chocolate in the EU).
The United States Federal government is not authorized by the Constitution to regulate food (do you see it listed in Article I Section 8?).
I personally don't want the government regulating my food, and I dont think the American Founding Fathers did either!!!
Libertas in infinitum
Does anyone else find irony when you say "how about reading a source with less bias and more scientific references?" and then you promptly provide a link to Wikipedia?!?!
That's good, thanks for giving me a good belly laugh today.
Libertas in infinitum
Definition is determined by consensus. England and English now have nothing to do with each other. People from England are now known as British.
Will this mean Chocolate Melamine will qualify as 100% pure chocolate?
The combination is circa the 16c. Flemish Wars, and implies coercion by attrition and denial. I find the insinuation amusing.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Since when does a cynical asshole, that can't even read the post his rant supposedly is 'in reply to,' qualify as 'Funny?'
Who knew, indeed? What an asshole. Let me guess, while others learned to appreciate chocolate, you were too busy packing fudge, am I right?
Oh, and snobbishness, has two letter 'b' symbols in it, dumbfuck.
People who appreciate things are snobs. What's this, the front end of the revolt of the ignorant? You're such an asshole, tell ya what, while folks with functioning tastebuds enjoy the real deal, you can eat shit. After all, it's brown, right? Just add high fructose corn syrup, what's the difference eh Fuckwad? All in favor of turning this illiterate, tasteless fuck into soap and/or dog food, say Aye.
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.
..) ...)
... in my history book, they never had a black plague wiping half their popoulation ... ...)
... the funny thing is that it doesnt prevent us from entering an election where the main point is : 'France is declining' ... talk about the effectiveness of drugs anytime you wish, but please prove your point with good exemples, at the very least !!!
:-) )...
Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists.
Sure, that's right, except for the little geography && history you forgot :
- draining blood was an european practice (yup, the same one who believed you ought to wash only once in a month or so
(as a side note, this practice diappeared a while ago
- chinese medecine was, well, pretty limited to eartern asia
(as a side note, this practice is about 3'000 or so years old, and still going on
An interesting point is that I live in France, a country where (pharmaceutical) anti-depressant(*) sales are amongst the highest in the world
And for that headache of yours, massage the back of your head, and it'll disappear (or use aspirin, a naturally accuring chemical
(*) : sorry for mis-spellings
When I was in the UK, I ate at a stake house and found the cheese at the salad bar too bland. I made a suggestion to the manager and got read off about how their cheese was specially formulated for the tastes of their clients.
My friend Robert Singleton would say, "People don't really like American Cheese, they just think they do..."
Sorry, in the UK, "I wouldn't feed my dog on that" is a colloquial turn of phrase, referring to food of such poor quality that it is not fit to be given to dogs to eat (dogs being considered less discerning eaters than humans and lower form of animal).
Not meant to be taken literally.
Not sure what the equivalent expression is in your country.
Even when things move from the US _to_ the EU they get better there. For instance, soda in the EU is mostly sugar and NOT mostly corn syrup.
To my understanding the reason for this is US farmers pushing for high sugar tariffs, so sugar is relatively pricey in the US.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I just bought some juice, not paying too much attention to the label. When I got home, I discovered why it was such a bargain and why it tasted like diluted crap. It was 27% actual juice, the rest being water, corn syrup, and other filler.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Bouillabaisse is absolutly not of US origin.
s se.html/ la-fo-bouillabaisse29sep29,1,5890509.story?coll=la -headlines-pe-food
http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/bouillabai
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/food
General Tso's Chicken is in doubt. Nobody knows for sure.
http://pressurecooker.phil.cmu.edu/tso/
Need Mercedes parts ?
Fuck you people and your attitudes of indifference to the monolithic pharmacological complex that permeates your lives and controls you with its intense advocacy of mind and body-altering drugs. You have only yourselves to blame for your inept decline into an ignorant stupor where you would sooner stare at the wall than engage in significant conversations about reality.
Misa no botha with yousa.
Great! Now go find a bunch of Vitamin A and eat ten times the normal dose for a week, or if you're impatient try 60mg of Vitamin D all at once and let us know how well that works out for you.
Capsaicin (the active ingredient in chillis) is not an expectorant at all -- it is a mild neurotoxin that binds to the VR1 receptor in neurons, causing a depolarization. Medically this may be useful as an analgesic (pain reliever) and possibly as a means of quenching neurogenic inflammatatory responses. Most medical use of capsaicin, however, is as a topical test of neural function ("do you feel heat here *spritz spritz*?"), with some research going into other neurogenic diseases (diabetes in particular) and neurogenic apoptosis (to fight certain cancers).
Capsaicin is a strong irritant, however, and inhaling even small amounts certainly will trigger the cough reflex.
However, an expectorant increases the productivity of coughs, where productivity is measured in terms of mucous or phlegm expelled from the airways. Expectorants are not protussives (they do not provoke coughing on their own), they either cause the production of more mucus, wetter mucus, or both.
Guaifenesin's expectorant action draws water into the bronchi and bronchioles, resulting in mucus which is thinner (less viscous), slicker (less sticky) lighter (in the mg/cm^3 sense), and consequently more likely to be expelled by a cough.
Guaifenesin's name is taken from the Guaiacum genera of trees which are popular in alternative medicine, but is of artificial origin (first synthesized in the early 1950s), and is manufactured in factories.
"Lumbrecin" is not a part of the British or U.S. standard pharmacopoeia, and again is used in alternative medicine in the form of teas made from the "biohumus" (excrement) of common earthworms. It is difficult to imagine even the consistent presence of any particular active ingredient (it would depend enormously on the diet and activity of the worms and the soil environment (including the soil microflora), and these three variables can vary substantially even in "captivity" settings, and are much harder to control than monoculture microbial fermentation).
"Western" pharmacopoeia is pretty non-uniform with respect to volatile extracts from plants. The French pharmacopoeia includes a substantial number of essential oils mainly used topically as external antimicrobial treatments (in competition with or in combination with, for example, ketoconazole). The British pharmacopoeia has a few plant extracts, but has generally moved away from ingredients which are difficult to make to standard in a consistent fashion, or which contain a complex constellation of bioactive substances. The Australian and New Zealand pharmacopoeia have been moving in the opposite direction with respect to topical preparations -- honeys have been used as external topical treatments, much as is seen in France. The German pharmacopoeia has tried to occupy a middle ground by standardizing phytochemicals not just in terms of the end formulations but also in terms of the whole production process from planting to extraction.
The "Anglo-Saxon" allopathic drug model is very attractive in the sense that a given single-medicine treatment is likely to follow the expected course in a patient, and armed with a list of medicines, a prescriber or pharmacist is usually able to help the patient avoid any adverse drug interactions. "Constellation" allopathic drug preparations of plant grinds or tinctures made from them are harder to compare because they usually contain small amounts of a variety of active ingredients which may trigger ADRs. Worse, dose control is much harder, since these preparations can vary substantially for natural reasons.
""Mother Nature" has produced some of the most lethal poisons and toxins known to man."
True. As has mankind. Or has mother nature produced mankind? Perhaps it was God who created us. Then God is indirectly responsible for CO2. The bastard.
"By all means drink a tea infused from a cocktail of god-knows ingredients grown, harvested and stored in god-knows conditions for god-knows how many years with god-knows what effects on the body or a small percentage of users."
Now now, that'd be unwise. Perhaps saying yes and amen to what your doctor prescribed you for whatever, without knowing the side effects, is THE ultimate solution? It isn't, ignorance is possible in both natural and synthetic way or combinations thereof. Whole books are dedicated to this. The effects of natural drugs are, in general, quite documented and known to mankind. What you argue that people ingest without looking up is indeed unwise but happens in the synethetic drug communities as well. The same is true for LD50. Growing conditions for both organic and pesticide-induced herbs can be controlled. Last but not least, there is the process of standardization. Without all that, you might (not always the case as it depends on the herb) be playing Russian roulette indeed. At least the risk of playing Russian roulette is lower this way (there is always some risk involved). It isn't as if you're plucking some random mushrooms when you take a natural drug or herb, but ofcourse the synthetic drug companies would love to FUD you into that. Now, I wouldn't want clueless people to use and then discredit natural drugs or herbs either because then the chance of them becoming illegal is higher. The synthetic drug community can keep the morons as far as I'm concerned; people are welcome to inform themselves and others and experiment though. Yes, it is in the end still experimenting. I give you that, I do have the balls to admit that. Synthetic drug communities, in general, don't. Especially not the pharmaceutical corporations fabricating the drugs.
As I posted elsewhere (also as AC) I had except for gelatin a 100% natural ephedra supplement, fully standardized. You may want to look up the origins of ephedra. Unfortunately, it got banned because some people didn't abide to the prescribed dosage. Alcohol and water are still legal though. I bet you the number of suicides on SSRIs is higher than the number of suicides on LSD. There's no documented proof people in China en masse made too strong ma-huang tea and died because of that. I've also effectively used e.g. coffee, 100% natural amino acids, and 5HTP. All with the desired effect and with the latter 2 standardized. The former not, but I name the example because one shot of espresso from my coffee machine is approx the same as another shot of espresso. The same amount of beans are pressed. There are pads avail. which approx contain the same dosage. The effect is not always the same, but that has different reasons. Hence, it is "good enough" there is no standardization required! I name this example because its a common, known one.
"But you can't for a second claim that it is somehow safer and as efficacious as a properly controlled, scientifically tested drug."
Yeah. Aspartame, AZT, MSG are all 'properly controlled, scientifically tested drugs'. The numerous scientific evidence that they also develop cancer (among other culprits) is merely 'controversy'. They're safe, because the FDA claims them to be. If they'd be unsafe, the FDA would ban it for us. What your doctor prescribes you is all safe and well tested, he's the authority and your best friend who wants to see you healthy. You're not his customer, and he really does know your first and last name as he's your best friend. Ahem.
If I were a M.D. and wanted to earn as much as possible I'd make sure my customers were ill enough to see me often and required me to take action for them. But I would not heal them, nor kill them. That'd make the customer go away. Making this known to the customer would also make them not trus
Hello. I've taken ephedra and I am still alive. My gosh, how can that be? Also, it really is an effective weight loss drug. Perhaps it competes with certain other drugs on the market? Perhaps for thousands of years the Chinese used it succesfully? Perhaps some assholes used it as a amphetamine substitute? My ephedra supplements were standardized, btw. I had cough syrup (for throughout the day; not the night) which contained pseudo-ephedrine. This is also standardized. Except for purpose and dosage theres no big diff. Sure, 100 mg standardized ephedrine kills you. Yet if you'd drink too much alcohol or water you'd die as well. You simply need to follow the freakin' manual, it is written for a reason. If you don't mind dying then ignore manuals. If the manual says 'take one during morning and one at afternoon' then don't take 6 after the 1st one doesn't appear to work. You don't do this with anti-biotics either, do you? (If you do I feel sorry for you as well as your flora.)
Ok I really have a hard time not flaming you for your ignorance but I'll refrain.
So you decide for me that I should spend my money on the pharmaceutical money machine instead of the (alleged) herbal money machine. Quite authoritarian I'd say.
"If these herbs are so great, why on earth, aren't they registered as drugs."
Simple economics 101: specialization. First of all because theres too much competition because they can't patent 'em. Second because certain ingredients in the herbs are also synthetically producted.
You see, e.g. an amino acid is an amino acid wether its made synthetically or derived from a natural herb and standardized does not matter.
"In Denmark the cheapest effective drug is used and, if a cheap herb drug (such as aspirin) is as usefull, in the specific condition, as an expensive one (such as clopidogrel), the cheaper one is used and the pharmaceutical company making that one makes money."
That might be true, but I know certain herbs which are very useful for certain diseases yet these certain herbs are banned throughout in certain countries. Example for Denmark (EU) would be Kava. Yet alcohol is legal. I also know several examples where its sure they're cheaper than synthetic alternatives.
The problem is not the people taking placebos and ineffective medicines, the problem is the people passing on effective, proven mediciens in favor of BS herbal remedies. I'm happy to take anything that has its efficacy proven in a real, randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trial.