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posted by chromas on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the Food-and-Science dept.

It's actually cured, and it's not better for you. When was the last time you read a story where the villain was celery? Pull up a chair.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-uncured-bacon-illusion-its-actually-cured-and-its-not-better-for-you/2019/04/19/0c89630c-608c-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html

The issue is that "uncured" bacon is actually cured. It's cured using exactly the same stuff — nitrite — used in ordinary bacon. It's just that, in the "uncured" meats, the nitrite is derived from celery or beets or some other vegetable or fruit naturally high in nitrate, which is easily converted to nitrite. In ordinary bacon and cured meats, the nitrite is in the form of man-made sodium nitrite. But the nitrite molecule is the same, no matter its source.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:47AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:47AM (#833740)

    Splitting sucrose into glucose and fructose is trivial: heat it in an acidic environment

    So for example, suppose you made ketchup with sucrose. Ketchup is acidic. Ketchup is heated to bottle it. Well, there you go: sucrose splits into glucose and fructose.

    This is also how one makes "invert sugar" or "golden syrup".

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:53PM (3 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:53PM (#833849)

    True, but not relevant unless you're proposing that the human stomach provides sufficient heat to perform that process. Salt is just sodium (a poisonous metal) and chlorine (a toxic gas) loosely bound together with ionic bonds that rapidly dissociate in water - that doesn't mean it's safe to consume the constituent elements individually, or in different ratios.

    That said, the human body does seem to rapidly break sucrose into glucose and fructose, but I believe it's by another method.

    What puzzles me is, given the bad press, why do they keep making HFCS? After all, in making corn syrup they first make glucose from corn starch, and then process some of it to produce the sweeter fructose, which they mix with glucose to obtain the desired blend. Does a 55/45 blend really taste or behave substantially differently than a 50/50 blend which would no longer be "high fructose" (I think).

    Of course, to the extent that there does seem to be some health problems associated with HFCS consumption rather than sucrose, my money is on contamination by othermolecules - perhaps glyphosphate from growing the corn, or the enzymes used in the conversion process. I could easily see the presence of a bunch of enzymes merrily converting glucose into fructose within your gut tipping the balance to becoming a much more pronounced problem.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @03:08PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @03:08PM (#833873)

      thank you, sir.
      sucrose FTW!
      "HFCS" sounds like something that keeps water from freezing ^_^

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:26PM (#833981)

        To be fair, I am betting it would.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @03:25AM (#834202)

      Try adding pure glucose (dextrose is essentially the same thing) to your coffee and see how sweet it is. Not very.
      Add sucrose, and it's a whole lot sweeter. The Fructose half of sucrose is considerably sweeter tasting than the glucose half.
      HFCS's 45/55 (g/f) is noticeably sweeter tasting than the 50/50 mix.

      As for health -- search for a lecture by a UCLA biochemist. (I'd link to it but, late, lazy...) He describes exactly why and how Fructose is very, very bad for you (about 9/12 as bad as alcohol). Glucose, not really bad for you (unless your body is putting too much of it in your blood, but a healthy body can deal with whatever quantity you eat of it.)

      So, sucrose is 50% bad for you. HFCS is 55% bad for you. Yes, it's worse. About 10% worse.