Critical Thinking FAIL

This is going to be ranty and screedy. But as I said before, there seems to be such an excess of stupid in the world right now that I can't quite deal with it.

Have you heard the latest news about "evil" High Fructose Corn Syrup?

That it contains - ZOMG - MERCURY! Booga booga booga!

Okay - mercury is bad. Some forms (like methyl mercury - Minimata Bay, Japan is a case study I will always remember from Environmental Geology) are worse than others, but yes, I agree, mercury is not something we want exposure to.

However - the amounts of mercury detected?

0.113 parts per million (source of this information).

My reaction upon reading that?

"Wow. I didn't know they made equipment sensitive enough to detect that small an amount."

I think Ken - if he is reading this - will agree with me.

Maybe an illustration of a part per million (or ppm) will help, for those who don't use chemistry daily. A part per million is about equivalent to one drop of water in the gas tank of a small car. The amount of mercury we're looking at here would be equivalent to one tenth of that.

I dare say we are exposed to a greater amount of mercury from the ambient air pollution we all breathe. (Coal-fired electrical plants produce small quantities of mercury). If you live anywhere near the Canadian Shield, you are probably exposed to natural sources of mercury from it.

(Sources of mercury in the environment from the USGS).

Okay. So mercury in tiny quantities, while not something to be happy about, is probably not something that will make your children developmentally delayed, make you sick or crazy, or cause you to develop cancer. And even if it is, it is probably not something that can be eliminated from our environment. That's just how it is.

So, now on to the Critical Thinking FAIL part of the program.

I am on a networking website - one devoted to fiber crafters. There are message boards on there...some devoted to technical aspects of the craft, some more general. On one of the general boards there was this topic:"ALERT: Mercury found in High Fructose Corn Syrup."

I read the entire thread last night. It grew increasingly strident and crazed. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, people said. THIS IS HURTING THE CHILDREN. Other people smugly reported how they NEVER consumed anything with HFCS, and that thinking people would do well to do likewise.

I kept hoping for a voice of reason to step up - for someone to say, "Hey guys, I'm a chemist. Avoid HFCS if you wish for dietary reasons, but this really isn't the end of the world."

But no. It grew increasingly unbalanced. One poster claimed that chicory and inulin were "other names" for it. (Chicory is a plant, rather like a dandelion, of which the root is used to flavor things. It is the famous ingredient in New Orleans style coffee. Inulin is made from starch; it is a naturally occurring fiber and it can help with absorption of certain nutrients in the human gut).

I so dearly wanted to go in there and open up a can of Scientific Tushie-Whip on those fools. But I didn't. You know what stayed my hand?

People who hold those kind of emotional opinions don't want to listen to science.

I almost posted. ALMOST. Then I thought of how I'd be hounded. How people would flame me, would speculate on how I was maybe a "shill for the industry"

(Trust me, I'm no fan of HFCS. I don't like how it tastes in stuff; I don't drink pop mainly because I don't like the sticky-sweet aftertaste it gives pop. I'm also not entirely convinced that it's metabolized "just the same as" sugar; there are a few small studies suggesting it affects insulin differently than sucrose-based sugars do. But I think the issue could be taken care of on a "marketplace" basis - let those who dislike HFCS request products without it, and be willing to pay the premium they command. Those who don't care, fine - they are probably really not going to be hurt at all by consuming the stuff.)

I could imagine days upon days of "private messages" sent to me screaming at me and telling me how I was WRONG and EVIL and STUPID and DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN WHO ARE NOW PROBABLY GOING TO GET AUTISM FROM THIS IF THE VACCINES DON'T CAUSE IT FIRST.

That kind of thing.

The one thing I will observe, though: I really, really hope they don't start a grassroots movement to ban HFCS. Because I can only imagine the unintended consequences that would come from that - probably other sweeteners would be banned as well, in the worst-case we could see our cereal choices dwindle down to Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes, or unsweetened shredded wheat. And cookies, cake, and ice cream become black market items. In the less-than-worst-case scenario, food prices go up sharply because manufacturers have to use more expensive alternatives than HFCS.

I can kind of see a connection between this and the CPSIA issue I talked about a week or so ago: contamination shows up. "Something must be done!" Something is done, but it turns out it casts a net far wider than needed. Consumers and small businesspeople suffer.

In this case, it's slightly different: the lead and melamine contamination of toys really WAS a problem. Perhaps it was a problem that, had the proper existing laws have been adhered to, would not have happened. Mercury in trace amounts - in some cases too small to be detected - in one component of some foods - is not a problem on the order of a Dora the Explorer doll covered in paint with lead.

I used to say that if someone said, "We must do this for the children" that meant my taxes would soon go up. I think I'm going to add that if someone says "Something must be done!" it means my freedom and choice in the marketplace will soon decrease.