What Is On Your Mind?

Ah, so they haven't LEFT, it's just "51% of the people want us to leave".

Here's hoping they make decent decisions. I'm all for the voice of the people but as the modern age is showing SOMETIMES the people don't know what the fuck they're yelling about. Which leads to something I'm much more easily upset about, and that's censorship and removing inconvenient facts and teaching the people that they don't need to know what they're talking about....

 

I love how anyone can just say "Science side of Tumblr here" and everyone hangs on every word they say. This person is fearmongering and has nothing scientific nor relevant in their post bar the dosage numbers.

It is true that they cause cyanide poisoning, because they do have cyanide (or rather, the chemicals that get metabolized into it) in them. So do apples. And peaches. And lima beans, to name a few. I was always warned not to eat too many of those fruits either, but that hasn't stopped me buying and eating them regularly as I'm sure most people do too. My 55 y/o father has 3-6 apricot seeds a day and is completely healthy, 100% against the expectations of his doctors. I even have them myself sometimes because I like them. May I also point out that it was accepted by the British scientific community 16 years ago that cyanide is an extremely effective way of killing cancer cells. Simply put, the reason that a body's immune system doesn't recognise and attack cancerous cells is because they secrete an enzyme that "camouflages" them into (chemically) appearing the same as a regular cell. Cyanide molecules destroy that enzyme coating, leaving the cancer cells vulnerable to the immune system. Our bodies can handle and in fact also utilise small amounts of cyanide and cyanide-like chemicals as part of our immune systems.

That said, of course you're going to get poisoned if you consume too much. Just like you would with almost any other kind of chemical or medical drug. That's why they have dosage and warning labels with them, but I don't see this person making a huge fuss over acetaminophen poisoning or dextromethorphan poisoning, both of which can be caused by overdoses of common consumables that can be picked up at your local supermarket easier than obtaining apricot seeds that haven't been rendered inert. Hell, you can even get water poisoning/intoxication from overdosing on water.

The apricot seeds are fine. They have a warning for a reason. If someone ignores that and injures or kills themselves, that's their problem, but please don't take the "we have to help people by limiting their options because they don't understand" route. I can't fucking stand that. I really don't want to live in a "Demolition Man" world where anything deemed even potentially slightly harmful is banned.

tl;dr: Don't take anyone on Tumblr seriously. Most of them are minors and chances are they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

This is completely incorrect. The FDA do and have approved things that are demonstrably harmful to ingest, yet ban things that are common in other countries over trivialities. I use essential oils for my hair and skin, but last I heard the FDA also wanted to ban those because of a handful of idiots using them incorrectly and making themselves ill. Things not regulated by the FDA are difficult to come across and acquire, even in other countries, but they are cracking down on """alternative""" stuff with the stupidest reasons.

From what I've read, they're already going through the process of making the independence official and Cameron has stated that he is resigning. Our economy is in freefall again and our next Prime Minister will be another one of two asshats. I can't say I'm not slightly worried. I love the amount of non-Brits and non-EUers weighing in on the situation though.

 

Seems you kinda, you know, ignored the actual sourcing that one person posted regarding cyanide. Also seems like you ignored that how they picked apart the hypocritical and BS labeling. But, hey, I'm an organic foodie too, so I understand how you feel, anything some company labels a superfood and tells us has been lost from our diet for centuries has gotta know more than any of us dumb consumers do, right?!

Fine. Let idiots kill themselves. Maybe we'll have less people voting Trump then.

And to be fair, I'm well aware of how much bullshit flies around in Tumblr. That's why I use my head and THINK when sifting through it to find something of value. I decided to peek in on Icestar's Tumblr just to see what she's been up to, maybe made some more plushies or sketches, and felt this stood out after I checked it over. Trust me, I HATE Tumblr and it's vocal community.

 

The FDA operates on a more "ramp up the tests until we know how much it takes to hurt someone, divide that by 100 to get the maximum allowed dosage, and then if it works at those levels, we'll consider it" system. The problem is all the loopholes that various industries have gotten over the years, and people are now too politically afraid to fix.

 

Well yeah. "Prove it can hurt someone" is more a shortened explanation that has the same outcome, but I can understand the need to specify that.

Also, I'm sorry to laugh @AkaiKitsune but the bit I said about "rake in the cash and pay a fraction of it to lawsuits later"? That really is how it works with the US's pharmicutical industry. Take the tests to figure out how many people are likely to suffer from what by the new fancy MiraclepillTM, how much the projected lawsuits from deaths or legally compensatable class actions in 10 years, how much profit is projected, and if the difference is enough, market it. A good chunk of the money from said lawsuits goes to the lawyers handing the case, and the rest is divided amongst X number of participants which typically ammounts to pocket change.

I'd mention the "If you or a loved one suffered X while on Y, you may be entitled to compensation" advertisements on TV but if you're from the UK you probably don't get those....lucky you.

And before anyone goes and pulls the beaten and rusted "It's not a conspiracy" card, yeah, it's not a conspiracy if they put relatively little actual effort in hiding it beyond not admitting it and letting complacent people ignore what's going on and shit on anyone who points it out.

 

Yeah, because they just spun it to sound like "OMG, IT HAS CYANIDE! THEY CAUSE CYANIDE POISONING GUIZ! THEY'RE LYING TO SELL POISON". They don't if you're sensible, but the warning is there just in case you're not aware and it looks completely reasonable to me. The only sources they provided were information about amygdalin and a wiki page about cyanide, neither of which are necessarily wrong, but don't really have a point to them besides showing dosage amounts and that amygdalin is not strictly speaking a vitamin, which is a point of contention anyway.

And the issues with the rest of the packaging is nitpicky semantics. Yeah, they got a definition wrong. I doubt even most people know the correct technical definitions, but the poster is also guilty of that in several contexts along with scaremongering language. It's not a reasonable "rebuttal" at all and flat out wrong in places. Literally everything they warn about the seeds can also be ascribed to medicines, chemicals, drugs and other foods that are completely legal and non-prescription. It's a big mess out of nothing based on misunderstanding, as is Tumblr's typical MO.

They're just marketers like any other, just that they're easier to pick on and pull apart than most due to their unorthodox products. At least they're responsible by adding a warning label.

 

Not sure warning about a product having a chemical that metabolizes into poison should be labeled "scaremongering".

And the difference between the seeds and medicine is that nobody in their right mind would sit there munching a bag of pills while watching TV. I can promise I've picked up a new snack before, thinking "This looks tasty" and not actually read the back to check if it will kill me, then proceeded to eat it all in one sitting. It's not beyond the realm of possibility for someone to sit there and munch down a bag of nuts absentmindedly.

 

Gee, I sure love it when someone takes what they read, and completely misreads it because it doesn't support their opinion.

See, this right here. I love mixed nuts, and nine times out of ten if I have a bowl of mixed nuts that someone in my house put together, I'm not going to go interrogating them to make sure there's nothing that's gonna kill me in it. It's a damn bowl of food, I shouldn't have to WORRY that there's something that will poison me if I eat the whole bowl (which again, I often do with nuts, usually with a good glass or two of water so I don't get stomach problems).

Now, browsing the market? Yeah, damn right I read labels, ingredient lists, and manufacterers (seen too many cases of something turning out to be a greenwashing brand owned by Clorox or Coca-Cola or Kraft)

EDIT: If I'm being confusing here, I'm sorry. I'm agreeing with Murphy on this.

 

I want to make it clear that people are completely within their right to be eating these, but the labeling on the package is so misleading as to be frightening. It's touted as a "Healthy Snack" when it's something that can, if not carefully regimented, make you quite ill or possibly dead. It's not impossible that some mom will read the front of the package and not the back, sending her kids to school with 3-5 servings of these in their lunchbox each day, and slowly kill her kids without realizing it. There are just so many scenarios when something is labeled like this that can end in accidental death, that labeling it as "Healthy" is essentially an outright lie. That's what everyone is up in arms about.

And I'm not sure if it was someone here who said it, but yes, apple cores have the same kind of substance. The difference is that you have to eat the apple to get to it, and you'd have to eat so many apples you'd get sick from that before you'd get sick from the cyanide, unless you were cutting open apples to eat just the seeds. And you'd still have to cut open 40 apples, because it would take about 200 seeds to kill you. Nobody's going to accidentally do that, and everyone is taught at an early age not to eat the core anyway. Everyone would be just as up in arms if people were selling apple seeds as a "Healthy Snack".

 

@AkaiKitsune @Rassandra Gendal @MurphyAlter finally a fight I didn't start

 

They could easily have just said something along the lines of "guys, take care if you eat these because they can be dangerous in large quantities" not "GUUUUUYS, THEY'RE POISONOUS BECAUSE CYANIDE!! DON'T EAT THIS POISON BEING SOLD AS FOOD!!". It's not their fault that most people don't understand cyanide.

Well that's your own damn fault then. If you don't research what you're putting in your mouth regardless, you deserve what you get.

Don't we all.

Again, that's entirely your own prerogative. Take some responsibility.

Again, there were many other ways to bring it to people's attention instead of the way they did. I wouldn't have an issue if they had. There are also plenty of foods like that out on the market that never get treated like this yet are still considered mainstream products and also touted as "healthy", none of which were even referenced.

I know, but I was pointing out how stupid it is that someone's getting people riled up about cyanide in a particular product when it's also present in many others. I wasn't talking about the amount.

So what would you prefer be changed? The packaging or the availability? If you'd prefer the packaging to be changed, I wouldn't be against that, but that isn't what the majority of the original post was about. The availability is a moot point. If you're taken in believing something to be healthy solely because the packet says so, well I don't know just how to explain that level of ignorance. The product isn't a problem, dumb people are.

 

TL/DR "I don't care, stop criticizing things in your country even though I don't live there."

 

Pretty sure nobody said "Hey nobody should ever eat these ever."

"You deserved to die because you thought that thing clearly marked 'healthy snack' was safe to snack on."

Well damn, you got me there. I guess I deserve it. Think they'll put that on my grave? "He didn't research the product beforehand. He didn't read the back, so he totally deserved to die" has a great ring to it.

Hey, and it's not like I'm going to a "family-friendly" chain grocery store that I trust not to sell me poison without my knowledge. I'm going to Skeezmart, sketchiest dump this side of the Mississippi.

Right. Because you can't warn someone on the internet about a single specific product's potential dangers without also mentioning every other product that's also potentially dangerous. Forgot that they passed that law in the summer of '09.

Did it occur to you this was being used as an EXAMPLE?

I'm pretty sure people would stop buying other products if told they contained potentially harmful levels of cyanide.

The availability and labeling are both the problem. It boils down to the fact that you can easily buy a bag of this without knowing the possible risks.

 

Pssst. Murph.

 

You are the master boat rocker from boat rocker island, captain of the boat "Rocker."

 

Blaring the song "Rock the Boat" while hauling rocks on a boat to a marina in a city called Rockport where there are lots of boats.

 

Me too!

 

You should always rock the boat.

 

MY OPINION IS I DON'T CARE. WE WILL ALL DIE ONE DAY SO FUCK IT.

Everyone is poisoning themselves. Hell, drinking too much water can kill you. You could die from an ingrown toenail. I MEAN CAN WE ALL JUST STOP THE ARGUING AND REALIZE LIFE IS SHORT AND JUST LOVE EVERYONE?


Jesus.

 

You need hugs Jazz?

All the hugs