carrageenan

And it's EVERYWHERE![]

Paula

ORIGINAL: paulaedwina

And it's EVERYWHERE![]

Paula
why does it crack you up?

Because Dihydrogen monoxide - H20 - is water.

Paula

it is?  ive never heard it called that before.....

Because Dihydrogen monoxide - H20 - is water.

 
Ha ha ha, I was wondering how long it would go on for before someone revealed the secret

ORIGINAL: ottoluv

Because Dihydrogen monoxide - H20 - is water.

Ha ha ha, I was wondering how long it would go on for before someone revealed the secret

This is so weird, I did a search on it, and I found two sites that say its water and about a hundred sites saying its a dangerous greenhouse gas or some other kind of toxic chemical.

Yup more proof you can find a web page that supports pretty much anything you want   Just gotta be discriminating to which ones you believe.  H20 is water is dihydrogen oxide.

And as we all know water is toxic and deadly.
 
[linkhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16687211/]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16687211/[/link]

Yeah, the first "dangers of dihydrogen monoxide" website was such a hit (read: so many people believed it) that a bunch of spinoffs popped up.

The chemical formula of water is H2O. Pretend that 2 is a subscript. That's because there are 2 hydrogen atoms ("di" being the prefix signifying "2") and 1 oxygen atom ("mon" signifying 1) in every molecule of water. So the spoof folks like to say "dihydrogen monoxide" because it's not easily recognizable as water and, furthermore, sounds chemical and scary.

Don't feel bad if you fell for that website - I first ran across a similar one in high school when the teacher handed out a list of the dangers associated with dihydrogen monoxide. There were only a couple of people who got it right away - the rest took a good while before figuring it out. And this was in an advanced chemistry class, at the end of the year!

There are lots of folks on the internet who take advantage of people's natural fears, particularly regarding health and scientific information that a lot of people aren't familiar with. That's why I think it's important to look really carefully for several reliable sources to back up any sort of panic-mongering "this ingredient kills you instantly!" sorts of claims.

There are lots of folks on the internet who take advantage of people's natural fears, particularly regarding health and scientific information that a lot of people aren't familiar with. That's why I think it's important to look really carefully for several reliable sources to back up any sort of panic-mongering "this ingredient kills you instantly!" sorts of claims.

 
Boy isn't that the truth.

ORIGINAL: abbysdad

And as we all know water is toxic and deadly.

[linkhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16687211/]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16687211/[/link]

Well you actually can die from water intoxication.

 

" 3. Carrageenan - From seaweed; large amounts damaged test animals colons; possible link to ulcers and cancer."

 
There are a whole LOT of things that are very good for you, but consumed in large quantities are bad for you. Vitamin A, if you don't get enough you go blind. An extremely large amount can be fatal. Drink too much water and you can die.
 
The only recommendation I would take from the above statement would be that extremely large quantities of Carrageenan might be bad for your dog. I consider myself warned and resolve not give my dog cups of the stuff.

Well you actually can die from water intoxication.

 
That's why you have to be careful of people saying this ingredient or that ingredient is "toxic" in dog food, virtually anything in large enough quantities can be toxic.

The whole point of the Dihydrogen monoxide thing is to show you that you can't just go with something because it's on the internet or someone uses chemical terms. In truth we have to trust somebody sometime, we don't all know everything about everything. So you try to hedge your bets by looking for certain proofs. One proof is that a claim should have a cited reference to a primary research article supporting the claim. Of course the research could be wrong too, but it's a start. So, for example, the site one poster linked that says that carageenan in large quantities lead to intestinal damage and might be associated with certain cancers is bogus alarmist opinion because it cites no reference.

Paula

Well, in the OP's defense, the soymilk site did cite:

1) Filament Disassembly and Loss of Mammary Myoepithelial
Cells after Exposure to Carrageenan, Joanne Tobacman,
Cancer Research, 57, 2823-2826, July 15, 1997

2) Carrageenan-Induced Inclusions in Mammary Mycoepithelial
Cells, Joanne Tobacman, MD, and Katherine Walters, BS,
Cancer Detection and Prevention, 25(6): 520-526 (2001)

3) Consumption of Carrageenan and Other Water-soluble
Polymers Used as Food Additives and Incidence of
Mammary Carcinoma, J. K. Tobacman, R. B. Wallace, M. B.
Zimmerman, Medical Hypothesis (2001), 56(5), 589-598

4) Structural Studies on Carrageenan Derived Oligisaccharides,
Guangli Yu, Huashi Guan, Alexandra Ioanviciu, Sulthan
Sikkander, Charuwan Thanawiroon, Joanne Tobacman, Toshihiko
Toida, Robert Linhardt, Carbohydrate Research, 337 (2002),
433-440

I'm lazy and don't feel like checking out these articles some time, but if I get a little free time and feel like procrastinating later I'll look them up and see what they have to say. I'm also not well versed in the medical field (I'm a psych/neuro person, not a cancer person) so I'm not sure how reputable these journals are.

Edited to add: surprisingly enough, Wikipedia has some good information on the carrageenan controversy. Check out the article (and particularly the references at the bottom) here: [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan[/link]

Highlights:

There is evidence from studies performed on [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat]rats[/link], [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig]guinea pigs[/link] and [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey]monkeys[/link] which indicates that degraded carrageenan (poligeenan) may cause ulcerations in the gastro-intestinal tract and [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastro-intestinal_tract]gastro-intestinal[/link] [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_%28medicine%29]cancer... [/link]

A scientific [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee]committee[/link] working on behalf of the [linkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission]European Commission[/link] has recommended that the amount of degraded carrageenan be limited to a maximum of 5% (which is the limit of detection) of total carrageenan mass. Upon testing samples of foods containing high molecular weight carrageens, researchers found no poligeenan. [linkhttp://www.cybercolloids.net/news/EU-carrageenan-opinion.pdf]

[/link]

And those statements were backed up with references.