Considering that pH plays a major role in teeth health and acid-reflux, two things that a significant portion of the population suffers from and can dramatically reduce quality of life, shouldn’t the pH of a food item be just as important as nutritional values?
[citation needed]
pH doesn’t necessarily tell the right story if you are concerned about acidity for your teeth, GI tract, or taste. Something like distilled water will turn acidic with a pH of 5.8 due to co2 absorption. There’s barely any “acid” there, though, it just doesn’t have any buffering capability compared to water with some dissolved solids in it (like tap water). What really matters is what they call “titratable acidity”.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45776-5_22
So, funny thing.
In the EU, we have a system where we label certain ingredients with e-numbers. The EU did that because nobody knows the difference between, say, perfectly safe calciumferrocyanide (to prevent spices from clumping) and calciumcyanamide (a fertilizer that will release poisonous gas when wet).
So they said “Lets give all those safe chemical a unique number, so that people know the difference between what we vetted, and what we didn’t!” and Calciumferrocyanide became E-538 and we all lived happily every after!
Hahah, no of course not. Moronic crunchy parents and immoral liars jumped on that system and decided that e-numbers were the source of all evil, the cause of ADD and hyperactive kids and they poisoned the well and rustled the cattle too. Dozens of allergies were literally invented without any medical cause or evidence, because it became really easy to identify, say, E-133 instead of erioglaucine disodium salts. In the 2000’s, you’d frequently hear “My kid is allergic to food colouring” by people who had not a single clue that maybe their kid would get super active because the food colouring is mixed with 99% sugar in that candy you’re feeding them.
That has mostly passed now, as the grifters moved to other things, but there are still a ton of people who would never think of eating E-300, who would panic over anything that contains scary-sounding ascorbic acid, but who happily buy pills containing 10000% of the recommended levels of vitamin C, blissfully unaware that those are all the same thing.
Why are people up voting this blatently incorrect claim?
I think it could be dangerous given the limited scientific literacy of the general public.
I can imagine a slew of issues where people treat it like fat/calories and assume lower is “better”, or where other people think it’s like a vitamin and high is “better”.
I think 95% of people wouldn’t look, but that last 5% would be a mix of people that use it to their benefit as you suggest and people that misuse it as I cynically assume.
You forgot about the strain of person that would want to get pH banned claiming it’s a gub’ment mind control agent.
Those who need to know the pH value, might be a small minority, just like people with specific allergies. The size of the group doesn’t seem to be a deciding factor in these things. As long as the information benefits someone, it makes sense to include it.
On the other hand, delusional and paranoid people will always find a way to make stupid decisions. They are already using e-codes for that purpose, so I think we can just ignore them in this case.
using e-codes
What’s an e-code?
Food additives. People are afraid of scary chemical names, but hiding them behind numbers doesn’t really help much. It just makes the ingredient list shorter.
But that kind of logic applies to all public information. And you are not wrong that it will be misused but that is happening to almost any thing really. Like the Carnivore diet which is being held as some secret to health, or alkline water, or “natural” bs, or raw milk, or “keto” and so on.
Informing the public is not always successful, but it is almost always a net positive. This is the same philosophy as OSS
Like the Carnivore diet which is being held as some secret to health, or alkline water, or “natural” bs, or raw milk, or “keto” and so on.
As both a Carnivore and Keto person, it’s not that meat is magical, its that sugar is toxic.
sugar is toxic
Sugar is what now? That’s a bold claim without specificity.
Technically, everything is toxic. Sugar has an LD50 of about 30 grams per kilo of bodyweight (and I promise you’ll be throwing up long before you get there).
But sugar really is pretty bad for you, especially in the amounts some people eat it. It’s not “Toxic” though.
elevated blood glucose will glycate the body. This is how the hba1c measurement works, it looks at the glycation of a sample and estimates the overall glucose rate based on that glycation.
Some people can eat a bunch of sugar and keep their blood sugar low, but most people can’t over a long period of time, thats why prediabetes and diabetes are such huge issues.
Elevated blood sugar by itself can have tremendous emergent problems for type 2 diabetics.
The whole point of keto/carnivore diets is to take the sugar out, reduce the sugar, reduce the insulin, things get better.
Now describe the risks of low blood sugar or high protein diets. Any way you push the needle, there are big words to describe the bad things that can happen.
Eating less processed foods and moving around more seems like better advice than trying to swing eating habits to 11.
low blood sugar - hypoglycemia is of concern for people who are not fat adapted, and it speaks problems with insulin function either from t1d or insulin resistance. The best way to avoid low blood sugar, is to avoid eating sugar, so that the body can have a very flat regulation of blood glucose
high protein - I’ve seen no benefit to eating high protein documented anywhere. In fact carnivore is not a high protein diet, its a high fat diet, with adequate protein. The protein targets for a healthy adult do not change based on their diet, they need the same amount of bioavailable protein on SAD, Mediterranean, vegan, keto, or carnivore. As far as any deleterious effects, you would be missing nutrition from fat, but I’m not aware of any actual downsides either.
Yes, A first step for everyone should be to eat less processed foods and exercise - totally agreed.
I was initially responding to the person above to said keto/carnivore were crackpot pseudo science bs.
Acid Reflux (GERD) is isn’t really caused by acidic foods, but by irritation of the esophagus and a weakened esophagal sphincter. Food that irritates your throat, or fatty food that leaves the sphincter open longer cause GERD, it has nothing to do with acid reaching your stomach.
And that makes a lot of sense really: your stomach has a PH of around 1.5 to 2 before eating, and 3-ish after a meal. Unless you’re straight up drinking a glass of lemon juice, you’re not going to make it any more acidic than it naturally is.
We banning fluoride now.
What makes you think displaying pH isn’t illegal government DEI and far left woke policies led by inefficient deep state government workers?
They’ll deploy the US army to take away your pH values like the far left Biden government took away our guns.
Do you have a license for those litmus strips, citizen?
Based
I don’t think it’s necessary. Generally people who get acid reflux know exactly which foods exacerbate it. And i don’t believe it causes the level of effect on teeth health as you imply.
In other words just like with all the other values that already got added to the nutrition labeling, you’d have to make a strong science-evidence-based case demonstrating that it would be meaningfully helpful to add it to the listings.
It is very scientifically based that people who often drink sodas have higher levels of cavities. Because the high pH dissolves small layers of the enamal which over time and with consistent use leads to weaker teeth.
You can find plenty of studies to support this.
Also how do you think people learn which foods give them acid reflux? Usually a combo of a well know list from the doctor or the internet, and then trial and error which is not fun or healthy.
High pH is basic btw. I’m assuming you meant low pH with the reference to soda
My acid reflux has nothing to do with acidic or basic foods, and everything to do with the ratio of fat I’ve eaten or how many alcoholic drinks I’ve had in an evening. Beer is about a hundred times less acidic than soda (for reference) and soda doesn’t set my reflux off
My point is that human bodies are weird and we react in weird ways to food. That’s why we have to trial foods
Sure, it won’t be a straight and simple indicator, but it helps. Like how you could probably read the fat content on a snack to know if it might trigger it.
You’re misunderstanding. Yes there’s plenty of scientific evidence that excessive soda drinking harms your teeth, but that’s a totally different topic than whether listing pH level on nutrition labels would have any effect on public health.
