[HN Gopher] Polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon) as a Way to Increas...
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Polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon) as a Way to Increase Food Volume
and Satiety
Author : networked
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-07-25 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| The paper addresses the use of fiber supplements (such as
| psyllium).
|
| "Fiber is sometimes supplemented to the diet for this purpose,
| but the use of fiber causes soft bulky stools and is commercially
| limited because it alters the taste and texture of food."
|
| In fact, that's generally why people take them, but there is too
| much of a good thing. PTFE doesn't do that.
|
| That said, I'm not going to start grinding up Teflon in my food
| just yet.
| s0rce wrote:
| I can't imagine that bulking up my foods with teflon powder
| wouldn't also alter the texture, possibly the taste as well,
| although simply by diluting with tasteless powder.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I'm guessing that the "soft, bulky stools" is really the
| limiting factor here.
| s0rce wrote:
| I don't think all natural fiber sources have this issue.
| Finely ground non absorbent insoluble and non fermentable
| fiber, like wheat bran or just cellulose appear to have the
| opposite effect.
| maddyboo wrote:
| Tough choice. We could fill our foods with tasteless indigestible
| plastic so that we can gorge ourselves on processed foods and not
| get fat, or we could eat a healthy diet. I'm split.
| sildur wrote:
| This is going to add a fair amount of impossible to decompose
| microplastics to the ocean.
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| I had a similar thought, but I wonder how much a 'powder' would
| qualify as microplastic - can a microplastic be so small that
| it doesn't have the same food-chain impact as slightly-larger
| microplastic? Is it possible to make a substance that is
| universally 100% excreted by every organism?
| [deleted]
| jVinc wrote:
| Interesting research, even if it isn't something you'd
| immediately assume would go into commercial products. The fact
| that they see a weight decrease simply from adding calorie free
| weight to the food is interesting to me. I knew different foods
| can have vastly satiety at the same calorie count, but I would
| not assume that this could be simply due to a weight or volume
| difference. I would more have assumed that our bodies response to
| breaking down the foods would regulate our hunger to aim for a
| given amount of energy intake.
| medstrom wrote:
| It's rarely questioned in our society that satiety comes down
| to food volume (or weight). It's what we mean by "high calorie"
| food: high kcal per gram.
|
| I agree with you, but a mind-bending consequence is that
| there's no such thing as high calorie food.
| Q57C3HYc7g wrote:
| I believe this article was cited in this paper which was featured
| on HN recently: https://osf.io/x4fk3/
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016). Two very
| opposing viewpoints...
| s0rce wrote:
| This seems fundamentally the same as insoluble fiber component of
| plants/vegetables. Why not just eat a bunch of
| cellulose/lignin/chitin/other non-starch polysaccharides, seems
| less likely to have some bad/unexpected side-effect.
| User23 wrote:
| Fundamentally I agree with you and have been doing my best to
| remove 20th century laboratory science experiments from my
| diet. I mostly don't use Teflon at all and when I do I clean it
| using hot water jets instead of scrubbing it.
|
| That being said, I'm not a chemist, I was just mostly awake
| during undergrad chem, and I know there are fluorine compounds
| that are enthusiastic oxidizers[1], but some like Teflon
| coatings are more or less chemically inert. I assume that's
| because the oxidization has been taken to the point it's going
| to go. Is there a fluorine compound that will happily oxidize
| Teflon? The point of my rambling is can it be conclusively
| shown in controlled laboratory experiments that these compounds
| are completely nonreactive with the human digestive tract?
|
| [1]
| https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > Is there a fluorine compound that will happily oxidize
| Teflon?
|
| No. It can't be done. PTFE is fully oxidized (well,
| fluorinated).
|
| > The point of my rambling is can it be conclusively shown in
| controlled laboratory experiments that these compounds are
| completely nonreactive with the human digestive tract?
|
| I haven't looked for the study, but even if it hasn't been
| done, it's clear that fully fluorinated substances are not
| major health risks.
|
| What so many "oh no, TEFLON!!1!" people don't understand is
| that PTFE really is as chemically harmless as the evil
| chemical companies say it is. The problem is that this stuff
| isn't entirely PTFE (or even PFA, which is close enough even
| if it's oxygen in some spots instead of fluorine). Fail to
| fluorinate one location on that PTFE molecule and you've left
| a reasonably reactive pocket that can start causing trouble.
| (You end up with an inert PTFE chain hung off of some other
| molecule, which will gum up the works.)
|
| So... just fully fluorinate stuff, then? Unfortunately
| there's only one fully fluorinated molecule chain, and that's
| PTFE. Everything else, other than PTFE, is more reactive, and
| thus more toxic. (I guess there's also tetrafluoromethane,
| but that's gaseous.) And you need other things than PTFE:
| PTFE is chemically inert enough that it's difficult to
| mechanically bond to things. Other fluoropolymers are used to
| make bonding layers to help attach PTFE to substrates.
| _These_ are what you should worry about in your cookware:
| they 're intentionally more reactive!
|
| The other wrinkle is that I mentioned that fluoropolymers are
| chemically inert, because they are. But they're not
| thermodynamically inert. Get them hot, and they decompose
| into things with more reactive sites, usually in an
| uncontrolled way that admits some pretty nasty byproducts.
| (See "MTV flares" for an example of how to harness this.)
| Thus, the fact that PTFE pans kill birds who are sensitive to
| these decomposition products is real, and you should _never_
| use PTFE at high heats.
|
| Fluoropolymers are useful, good for many things, and often
| quite safe. But there are real dangers. Don't listen to the
| suits from the chemical company who insist that it's all
| safe, or the tinfoil hats who insist that it can never be
| safe. As with so many things, the truth is in between.
| User23 wrote:
| Thank you! This is quite educational.
| ars wrote:
| > PTFE is fully oxidized (well, fluorinated).
|
| Can't the C-C bond by oxidized? Teflon will burn if heated
| enough in a high oxygen atmosphere. From my understanding
| that's what happened to Apollo 13.
|
| (I'm not implying this will happen in a human gut :)
| s0rce wrote:
| The manufacturing byproducts are known to be hazardous. Like
| PFOAs.
| medstrom wrote:
| The manufacturing byproducts of vegetables are known to be
| hazardous (pesticide residue).
|
| I'll wager those PFOA are worse, but it's worth saying that
| if you're gonna manufacture PTFE for human consumption you
| could possibly clean up the process and get something
| perfectly clean, even cleaner than vegetables.
| [deleted]
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| This comment makes no sense, it's like you've never heard
| of organic farming
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Yeah I felt minor horror reading the abstract. Do we really
| need to reduce caloric density through indigestible plastics
| when we could just.. you know.. eat plants??
| gumby wrote:
| Food Engineering (i.e. design and production of factory food,
| which is most of what's in the grocery store) relies on more
| flexibility and reliability, plus lower cost, than you can
| get from ordinary, perishable foods. PTFE is made from
| petrocarbons, and is easily sourced.
|
| Also the fad for "healthy" foods (when healthy isn't really
| what's wanted) results in abominations like frozen "organic"
| (and/or "natural") burritos and the like which require even
| more stabilizers than the "normal" kind. This is why the CEO
| of Whole Foods famously declared that 90% of what was on the
| shelves in his stores was garbage.
|
| TTTT ignoring its production and disposal,* PTFE is super
| inert (tightly linked to itself, which is why it makes a good
| nonstick coating). I once ate some plumber's teflon tape to
| prove to a colleague that it was inert: it came out the other
| end intact and white.
|
| * but let's not ignore that...I was merely addressing the use
| in food production in my comment.
| s0rce wrote:
| PTFE is not really produced from petrocarbons, at least not
| directly. Its made by polymerization of
| tetrafluoroethylene, which appears to be made from
| chloroform + HF, the former is made from petrocarbons
| (methane/methanol + HCl/Cl), the latter from minerals. PTFE
| is quite expensive (compared to most other polymers). I
| suspect PP or PE could work just fine in this application.
|
| I'm just saying that you could simply eat insoluble fiber
| (from plants or other source) instead of ground up
| plastics, which will also create a massive source of
| microplastic pollution and contamination as it comes out
| the other end.
|
| You can easily store insoluble fiber (cellulose/chitin,
| etc), in vast quantities in dried form without any major
| issues, I can't imagine ground up PTFE being significantly
| better in that regard.
| User23 wrote:
| Remember the fiasco that was Olestra?[1] It's an indigestible
| fat. I had the misfortune of being in a test market and tried
| some Olestra Doritos and they tasted great. Unfortunately the
| whole point of Olestra is that it's an indigestible fat.
| Guess how that works out when it reaches the end of the GI
| tract.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra
| riffic wrote:
| this sounds absolutely awful. psyllium powder does effectively
| the same thing without the complexity required to produce it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Produc...
|
| Also, consider where the output needs to go after being consumed
| by a person.
| jitl wrote:
| "Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced
| CHOW(tm). CHOW(tm) contained spun, plaited, and woven protein
| molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by
| even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal
| sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous
| materials, colourings, and flavourings. The end result was a
| foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two
| things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and
| secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to
| that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you
| lost weight[1].
|
| [1] And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long
| enough, vital signs."
|
| - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (1990)
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Ooh the Crunch Enhancer? Yeah, it's a non-nutritive cereal
| varnish. It's semi-permeable, it's not osmotic, what it does is
| it coats and seals the flake and prevents the milk from
| penetrating it. Chevy Chase, Christmas Vacation
| BenFrantzDale wrote:
| So... forever microplastics?
| klyrs wrote:
| It makes one long for the days when the FDA was created to
| combat the use of fillers like sawdust...
| scotty79 wrote:
| And what to do with that teflon after it passes through humans?
| zaknil wrote:
| We should of course recycle it.
| vburg wrote:
| soylent brown
| mrfusion wrote:
| Wait, Teflon is safe? Why did my mom make me throw out my chipped
| Teflon pans?
| briefcomment wrote:
| Since when is Teflon non-toxic? Scientists need to stay away from
| food.
| readams wrote:
| Teflon won't react with anything in your body. It's totally
| inert. It's one of the most inert things we know about. That's
| the whole point of the article.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| It's effectively inert to anything except molten sodium,
| magnesium, or the like.
|
| It will depolymerize at temperatures above 650-700C.
|
| Neither of those conditions is likely to be found in your
| body.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, the manufacturing biproducts (PFOA, PFOS etc) can
| certainly interfere with biological processes and endure in
| the environment for a long time, but PTFE is relatively
| benign as a solid... until it gets really hot and decomposes
| into carbonyls.
| zaknil wrote:
| You could have said the same thing about asbestos.
| markzzerella wrote:
| The food of the future is going to be 25% Teflon, 30% mealworm,
| 30% lab-grown meat concentrate, and 15% assorted insects as real
| food is regulated out of existence for us proles.
|
| At least we can take solace in watching our betters jet around
| the world to dine on real food on TV or whatever social network
| is in vogue at the time.
| wonnage wrote:
| This is what you get with MD MBAs writing papers huh
| mrfusion wrote:
| Does anyone else not feel full if you eat a large volume of low
| carb food?
|
| I can feel my stomach stretched but if my blood sugar doesn't
| rise I still feel hungry.
|
| I don't think this trick would work on my body.
| airhead969 wrote:
| I hope this is a joke.
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