The Secret House

Everything else
1

This was recommended in some thread on here which I can’t find.

There’s effectively two angles here: a microscopic view of what goes on in your life on a day to day basis (dust mites! bacteria! virus-laden skin cell plates drifting through the living room!) that’s fascinating and mildly disturbing. It’s interesting, but that’s not worth bothering to post about. What is worth posting about is the level of disgusting shit we use on a day to day basis, apparently.

Cakes you buy from a grocery store? Made out of industrial waste-grade fat, with everything from there an addition to cover up the taste. Same deal for most ice cream; only a small amount of the ingredients are regulated to be cow-derived. Depending on where you live, if they don’t call it “dairy ice cream” it can be anything at all. Related details - yeah yeah daily mail, but you can confirm it elsewhere. Toothpaste? It’s actually mostly ingredients to trick you into thinking your teeth are whiter, many of them toxic; using just water and a sonic toothbrush is just as effective, or more, as you don’t have chalk particles shredding your enamel.

The follow-up The Secret Family details the horrors of baby food along the same lines:

After reading David Bodanis’ The Secret Family, I have to say that beef plasma sounds pretty good. Consider the humble jar of baby food: According to Bodanis, it’s common to start making baby food with a polymer base, of the kind that also serves as the main component of wallpaper paste. To cover that admittedly unpleasant taste, manufacturers add pureed tomatoes—ones that are “too decrepit,” in Bodanis’ words, to be sold on their own. Next, they add skimmed pig’s feet extract or the “scooped inner pith of discarded fruit,” whatever that may be. Enough already? Nope. Next comes chalk—yes, the same stuff that covers the common classroom eraser. Then, to make the concoction even more enticing, portions of familiar livestock are added, though not the parts most of us are used to. There’s mucus-lined digestive tubing. And bowels. Brains. Testicles. Nostrils. Plus, for good connectivity, a random assortment of fats. Then, iron shavings are added for baby’s recommended allowance. And if the jar happens to be labeled “for the hungrier child,” it may also include processed cotton shavings, cellulose pulp, or dextrin glue (the stuff they use on the back of postage stamps).

Augggggggggggggggggh. He doesn’t write it from a muckraker angle, mind you, he’s just mr. science guy, but hoo boy.

2

Yeah, I guess a lot of that stuff SOUNDS disgusting, but does that make it actually unhealthy?

3

Would you knowingly eat chalk and wallpaper paste?

4

Chalk? Sure. Its only real effect is acid neutralization. What’s wallpaper paste? It sounds like a scary way to say “starch”

5

Yeah, this seems a typical “gross people out who don’t understand anything” type piece. Oh no, bacteria in our homes! How will we survive?

I can spin the chemical basis of a tomato to look bad, if that’s what you want. Wait until people hear they use animal fecal matter to grow organics!

6

The toothpaste part was interesting, but everything else I found to be expected. Hell I can look at the back of a Slim Jim and know that what I’m eating is made up of the shittiest animal parts available, but damn if I don’t like me a Slim Jim once in a while.

7

When’s the government finally going to crack down on dihydrogen monoxide, anyway? You breathe that stuff it kills you, and there’s no regulation on it at all.

Yes, I’m totally sure that’s all true. Every word.

8

That is probably the most substantial point to be made here. Some of these ingredients sure are downright dangerous, but if we don’t know exactly how much of them are put into the products we eat and use, it’s hard to tell at what point things really become dangerous.

For instance, Inhaling gasoline fumes causes cancer apparently, but will the thousands of times I fill up my car during my lifetime cause me cancer? Perhaps the same can be said of these products, that the incremental usage of even the most hazardous chemical will show no ill effects over the length of a human lifetime.

9

That is probably the most substantial point to be made here. Some of these ingredients sure are downright dangerous, but if we don’t know exactly how much of them are put into the products we eat and use, it’s hard to tell at what point things really become dangerous.

For instance, Inhaling gasoline fumes causes cancer apparently, but will the thousands of times I fill up my car during my lifetime cause me cancer? Perhaps the same can be said of these products, that the incremental usage of even the most hazardous chemical will show no ill effects over the length of a human lifetime.[/quote]

Tip o’ the hat to you, Matt Keil, for successfully deploying a joke that I thought was unusable outside the laboratory.

10

I saw the first post or two in this thread and my immediate thought was to post about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. I even went and Googled it to make sure I had the spelling right. Then I see that MattKeil beat me to it.

We were at a hotel these last few days that had a HUGE VAT of dihydrogen monoxide - totally open on the top in a room that was accessible (via keycard anyways) to kids. I suspect it was mixed with other potentially dangerous chemicals like chlorine. When will the madness end?

11

Thanks for setting me straight! I now know that the detail that toothpaste actually doesn’t accomplish much - apparently flouride is the only effect that matters, and can be acquired elsewhere, and is in your water anyway - and has stuff you don’t realize in it like formaldehyde is actually no big deal, because someone somewhere has previously made an incorrect safety observation about a product.

12

Isn’t the brushing action of the brush on your teeth important? Sure, give me the fluoride and the whitening stuff and I’ll let the brush do the rest of the cleaning work.

I know it makes your breath nicer. I’ve been up close with someone before and after brushing. It makes a difference. I am failing to generate a sense of outrage or alarm over toothpaste.

13

Crap, what did I miss?

edit: Oh… right. I can’t believe I didn’t catch that.

14

Teeth whiteners are partly an illusion, but the appearance of whiteness is all that really matters anyway. And yeah, the breath thing is nice. Makes my mouth feel minty fresh too!

15

From his description, the permanent whitening is accomplished by the chalk tearing off the top yellowed layer of tooth enamel, which is not exactly improving your dental health. The temporary whitening is titanium dioxide, which rubs off in a couple of hours.

Additionally, having the toothpaste foam serves no purpose, but people think it does (misguided soap analogies?), so there’s ingredients specifically to induce useless foaming.

16

On the other hand, minty freshness!

17

I’ve watched enough How It’s Made to know this is sensationalism.

18

Sounds to me like corporate America have learned from the noble Native Americans the important lesson of using every part of the animal.

19

Think of all those poor suffering women put at risk by exposure to ElGuapo. And on top of that, the dihydrogen monoxide exposure.

20

I wonder what Native Americans used buffalo sphincters for.