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Sunday, April 28, 2013

Upcoming Superbious article teaser: "Dumber Ingredients for a Dumber Consumer"

I've submitted a piece that will tackle the issue of over-simplified ingredients lists replacing the functional, thorough ones which include IUPAC systematic names, like "sodium chloride" (which is commonly known as "table salt"), or "potassium sorbate", amongst many others. I'll loosely elaborate below.

There's a mindset where a consumer will avoid purchasing an article of food if they read an ingredients list consisting of any number of ingredients they cannot pronounce, nor that they understand of their purpose & composition. Many of such are ignorant (wilfully or otherwise), indoctrinated by the media or disingenuous nutritionists (often a combination of such, since nutritionists are provided platforms to share information with audiences), or are simply put off by the complexities therein. A basic understanding of chemistry should be in order and would be an appropriate response to this mindset, right? Well, this isn't a perfect world.

It's certainly true that there are ingredients that are questionable in their use, but generally speaking, not all inorganic compounds found in our foods are malign. Plus, one should not be intimidated by them simply because they cannot read, verbally or mentally, their chemical names. As I mention in the article (which should be available tomorrow as of this writing), vitamin B12's IUPAC name is "cyanocobalamin", and for anyone under the ill effects of the above-mentioned mindset, that name, if found on an ingredients list, may be off-putting. A simple solution, especially in this digital age considering that consumers are sometimes armed with tablets or smartphones, would be to do research on the spot. But you can't always expect people to take responsibility. Sometimes, unfortunately (for the sake of the market), people with such mindsets, whether they peddle it or not, may make waves through the media. Such press can be damaging to a food company's PR image, so they act on restoring it any way they can.

Without getting much further, since the upcoming article will be the primary entanglement of this discussion, these food companies are responding by dumbing down ingredients list. If the trend continues, and more troubling, worsens over time, then you won't see such items as "potassium sorbate", but rather just salt. Instead of telling you what is actually in the tomato sauce dotting the frozen pizza you're buying, it'll just say tomato sauce. And that's the problem I tackled, for your (eventual) reading pleasure.