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.
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Ah… Good old trisodium phosphate. My father’s original use for it (in the Navy) was as a boiler compound to reduce/remove scale caused by salt water contamination. Later, the use was for cleaning out automobile cooling systems.
Hello Big Boppa @ 5. Here’s the link to to the DHMO website if you didn’t know it. https://www.dhmo.org/
Penn and Teller organised a petition on an Earth Day long ago and many people signed to support the banning of it.
I bet those Lucky Charms contain Sodium Chloride as well
doesn’t she know that elemental sodium is dangerously reactive, and elemental chlorine is so toxic it has been used as a chemical warfare agent?! who’s going to take a stand to protect the children!?
It’s even worse than this woman realizes. Food manufacturers are using untold quantities of the chemicals C₆H₈O₇ and C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Especially in the foods we give to our children, from baby formula to the candies people stuff into their kid’s Easter baskets. One McDonalds happy meal contains more than 50% of the FDA recommended daily amount for adults of the second chemical alone.
Robbo @6. My research on YouTube and Facebook has shown me that dihyrogen monoxide is a major component of chemtrails. It’s so obvious that “they” are trying to kill us, or worse, turn us into woke libruls. I, for one, intend to hold my breath until “they” stop doing this.
There is no problem with Lucky Charms or any other breakfast cereal. If someone doesn’t want to consume sugar, or feed it to their kids, they should avoid sugary breakfast cereals. Buy the unsweetened stuff.
My parents were dairy farmers and would clean the milk utensils with a sodium compound (mixed with dihydrogen oxide) after each work session morning and evening. It is harmful practices like this that for a while gave Sweden the highest life expectancy in the world…no, wait!
The BS about ‘air pollution’ by extreme left Democrats (all Democrats are extreme left) is rubbish, because if we run out of air we can just mine the oceans to get more oxygen! As a side effect you even get a flammable gas.
Go ahead and look at the varying uses and concentrations of polyethylene glycol, rather reminescent of an old SNL sketch (“It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax!”): Often-essentially clearing of matter in/above the sigmoid colon, and even that varies greatly in both quantity and concentration; antifreeze for internal-combustion engines (and formerly for external-combustion engines, although that’s pretty obsolete); and wood preservative. In short, if you only have plain water to refill your radiator, you can get better performance and more protection by adding about six to ten times the “recommended for internal use” quantity of Miralax and stirring to dissolve before putting it in the radiator. The converse, however, is not true…
I’m actually a lot more worried about that really suspicious-sounding and obviously daaaaaaangerous chemical adenosine triphosphate… although I suspect it’s not available in industrial quantities at Home Depot.
In regard to the pseudo-science tiktoker mentality, PZ is correct in providing actual scientific info for them. But, as I’ve posted before, “you can lead a horses-ass to knowledge, but, you can’t make him think”
@17 Jaws
Ethylene glycol is more usual for this application, which is not the same as polyethylene glycol.
#1 @ Recursive Rabbit
Silly rabbit, education is for kids! In California, half of all students don’t graduate. Of that half, half of those can pass a seventh grade Math test and a ninth grade English test. …owayt
#2 @ Peter B
I didn’t watch the video. I’m sure she’s worth making fun of, just not the mood today. But my reaction was the same as yours: how many moles of sodium are we talking about here?
Sodium phosphate is probably not bad for me, in reasonable quantities. My kidneys would complain first. If I took industrial-sized tubs of the same compound and dumped it in the river, though, it would mess with the natural phosphorus cycle and contribute to eutrophication downstream. Not great for the ecosystem.
The thing that keeps me up at night is thinking about how those industrial-sized tubs are moving “Peak Phosphorus” just a little bit closer, and what we would need to do to grow food without any more easy sources of the stuff.
reminds me of the hullabaloo people in Australia made over permeate in milk a while back
https://www.farminstitute.org.au/permeate-crisis-yet-another-example-of-food-vilification/
dihydrogen monoxide is often used as an industrial solvent.
@19: ethylene glycol is cheaper, and may mix better with some of the more-recent additives (the “brown” versus the “green” stuff at your auto parts store). My experience is with the shocking-green stuff in the 80s and 90s — military usage, always polyethylene not ethylene. If they’ve switched, my sorta-bad…