MAHA is cannibalizing its own! This one dumb ‘influencer’ went viral with a tiktok in which she got outraged that Lucky Charms contains sodium phosphate, and she went to Home Depot to show that you can buy industrial-sized tubs of the same compound, implying that this must be bad for you. Then a second idiot influencer copied the same content, almost word for word, chasing after the same gullible MAHA viewers.
As Jessica Knurick says, “Can the people who never took a chemistry class please stop ‘teaching’ us about chemistry?”
The first ditzy tiktoker racked up millions of views of her phony story. I guess ignorance pays.
Practically my first exercise as a young labrat many years ago was making up phosphate buffered saline. It’s routine and good and safe — you don’t need gloves or a fume hood. If you’re working with embryos, or surgically opening up adults, you can’t just leave them naked and dry on the bench top, you have to keep them immersed in an osmotically balanced salt solution of the proper pH. That’s what sodium phosphate salt solutions are good for. If they’re safe for laving little embryos, why are you upset that your kids are getting it? (The problem with Lucky Charms should be the sugar content, not the basic baking ingredients used to make them.)
I also have a big jug of sodium bicarbonate, research grade, in my lab. You know there are different grades of reagents that reflect the purity of the substance, right? It makes a difference. Food grade salts are purer than the industrial grade stuff you might buy at Home Depot, and research grade is purer still.
Hey, if I made a tiktok video of me measuring out phosphate salts and mixing them into distilled water, do you think I’d get millions of views?
Ignorance and incuriosity on this level makes me wonder if we’re a nation of high school dropouts. Or if somehow my high school was abnormally exceptional and just taught me far better.
I recall taking a writing class while pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. That was many years ago. We had to learn the proper verb tenses and the overall language structure of a journal paper. I remember trying to correct a poorly written paper for a quiz. One of the word combinations was ‘Sodium Phosphate.’ Nobody caught the problem. We all groaned when our instructor asked, “What is the chemical formula for Sodium Phosphate?”
Mono-, di-, and tri-Sodium Phosphate only then entered our undergraduate brains.
It is worse than it appears.
Phosphate is an essential nutrient for life.
Anything living has phosphate somewhere.
Humans have a phosphate level in blood of 2.5 to 4.5 mg/dL.
Your bones are made of, among other things, calcium phosphate.
The basic energy unit in your body is ATP, Adenosine triphosphate.
Another point: the dimwit didn’t get TSP. If you look carefully at the label, she got TSP substitute. At least where I live (great lakes), TSP was banned from cleaning products decades ago due to its environmental effects.
Wait until she finds out that all of our food contains massive amounts of hydrogen hydroxide. The same chemical that’s used in cosmetics, soaps, paper production and even industrial materials for electroplating and concrete.
Big Boppa, dihyrogen monoxide is common in food products, and is also used in many industrial processes.
Cell Phone Signal Booster Sticker Test: Does it Work?
Hint: the answer is no.