Ask Lemmy

[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?

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.

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.

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.

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.