[QUOTE=cheesehead;178531]Why not? Because the health-food/natural-remedies/homeopathic lobby spent big bucks late last century to get Congresscritters (guess which party, mostly) to pass a law preventing the FDA from regulating "natural" and "homeopathic" remedies.[/QUOTE]

The funny thing is that those are probably more in need of regulation then most of their prescription counterparts.

I don't blame the stores, though; they just sell what people buy. I do wish someone would step in here, though.

[quote=retina;178532]The text about the 99 elements is probably true. Nothing in this world is ever pure. I expect that everything I eat (or drink) has at least some uranium, plutonium, lead etc.[/quote]So, you're trying to argue that elements with isotope half-lives of a few microseconds exist in wheatgrass? Care to calculate the probability?

[quote=CRGreathouse;178534]Hydrogen through lead, minus technetium and promethium = 80 stable elements. Bismuth and thorium are unstable with a half-life longer than the age of the universe; uranium and plutonium aren't far behind. That leaves wheatgrass with at least 19 radioactive elements, of which at least 15 are less stable than plutonium.[/quote]Okay, my memory decayed. 80 it is.

Wait ... was there wheatgrass in that salad I had?

[QUOTE=cheesehead;178537]So, you're trying to argue that elements with isotope half-lives of a few microseconds exist in wheatgrass? Care to calculate the probability?[/QUOTE]Seems plausible to me. If U and Th are in a mixture, it's pretty near certain that there will be Fr and At in it as well.

You're falling into the classic assumption that a nucleotide can not be generated in situ.

Note that K-40, C-14 and a whole bunch of isotopes of "stable elements" will also be present.


Paul

[quote=xilman;178541]You're falling into the classic assumption that a nucleotide can not be generated in situ.[/quote]No, I'm not assuming that at all. I was and am quite aware that a nucleotide can be generated in situ. Nothing I said above contradicts that.

[I]You[/I] have fallen into some mistaken assumption about what my challenge actually said, or else you need to read it more carefully.

What I challenged was the claim that 99 different elements have been shown to actually be present in wheatgrass. I made my challenge as simple and startling as possible to a "natural foods" store manager by pointing out a simple direct consequence (that there must be at least 19 radioactive elements) of the 99-element claim. Nucleotide generation in situ is completely irrelevant to that.

[quote]Seems plausible to me. If U and Th are in a mixture, it's pretty near certain that there will be Fr and At in it as well.[/quote]... in quantities that wheatgrass advocates have positively identified? I doubt it.

[quote]Note that K-40, C-14 and a whole bunch of isotopes of "stable elements" will also be present.[/quote]So what? I was just presenting the most dramatic way I could think of to show the store owner that the 99-element claim was nonsense, by pointing out that it would imply that there [I]must be[/I] over a dozen [I]radioactive[/I] (a property chosen to be startling to a "natural foods" person) elements. Dragging in anything about radioactive isotopes of stable elements, or nucleotide generation in situ, would only have confused the target of my message.

[quote=CRGreathouse;178536]I don't blame the stores, though; they just sell what people buy.[/quote]... and they make [I]false, nonsensical claims[/I] and sell potentially-harmful products [I]without any warning about their [U]non-obvious[/U] potentially serious hazards[/I], even after they've been informed that they are doing such things.

You absolve them of those trespasses? On what grounds?

Dairy Queen stores sport signs informing their customers that their products may have come into contact with nuts, for the benefit of the very tiny fraction of people who could have serious reactions. (Perhaps DQ does that voluntarily, with no legal requirement -- but they do it.)

Why shouldn't a "health foods" store do the equivalent? (And I'm asking for only a warning on the labels, not signs on doors.) If their products were genuinely as okay as DQ's products for the majority of their customers, they shouldn't lose any business, should they?

[QUOTE=cheesehead;178548]... and they make [I]false, nonsensical claims[/I] and sell potentially-harmful products [I]without any warning about their [U]non-obvious[/U] potentially serious hazards[/I], even after they've been informed that they are doing such things.

You absolve them of those trespasses?[/QUOTE]

Yes. I think the products should be labeled, but if they're not I'm not about to require the stores to re-label them for customers.

[QUOTE=xilman;178541]Seems plausible to me. If U and Th are in a mixture, it's pretty near certain that there will be Fr and At in it as well.[/QUOTE]

Subject to some reasonable assumptions, you would need to have both (or some less-stable isotope) to make the claim hold. Astatine has a half-life of 8 hours or so, and francium only several minutes.

Francium does occur naturally, say in uranium -- but you'd need about a milligram of uranium before you'd expect to find even one atom of francium (occurrence ~1e-18). Francium decays quickly enough that you'd need to have a continuous source to have a chance of having any -- after two days a trillion tonnes would decay down to about 1 atom.

It seems just on the border of plausibility that a food would contain at least one atom of 99 different elements, but it's by no means certain. For 90 elements it would be a sure bet; for 105 there's no chance.

But it's fairly clear that, our games aside, the claim was misleading at best.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;178531]"Homeopathic drugs may harm"
.........
Why not? Because the health-food/natural-remedies/homeopathic lobby spent big bucks late last century to get Congresscritters to pass a law preventing the FDA from regulating "natural" and "homeopathic" remedies (and wishy-washy Clinton signed it).[/QUOTE]That particular product and Cold-eze both hide behind the "homeopathic" fig-leaf. They do not operate in a method consistant with homeopathic principals. They both contain zinc and are designed to poison the virus (or make a non-hospitable environment).

They call themselves homeopathic so that they can avoid the problems calling themselves a drug. But, they operate like a drug, just that they are natural in their source.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;178545][I]You[/I] have fallen into some mistaken assumption about what my challenge actually said, or else you need to read it more carefully.[/quote]Fair enough. I'll go back and read the claims and your response more carefully.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;178545]
... in quantities that wheatgrass advocates have positively identified? I doubt it.[/QUOTE]Now there we undoubtedly agree. My comment was about existence, not detection.

That said, I was working at the Unclear Physics lab in Oxford when the Chernobyl debris came over. They guys there had no trouble whatsoever detecting the fallout from air samples taken on the roof.

Another guy there specialised in finding rare decay modes. He discovered C[sup]12[/sup] emission, for instance.

Something I worked on was a design for a neutrino telescope where the detectors could very easily see a single radioactive decay in a thousand tonnes of D[sub]2[/sub]O or its containment vessel. That water and its surroundings had to be [b]extremely[/b] pure. Maximum U and Th concentration had to be less than one part in 10[sup]15[/sup]; the largest radioactive contamination was actually the C[sup]14[/sup] in the acrylic tank.

My views on what is detectable are perhaps colored by that experience.

Paul

[quote=xilman;178566]Something I worked on was a design for a neutrino telescope where the detectors could very easily see a single radioactive decay in a thousand tonnes of D[sub]2[/sub]O or its containment vessel. That water and its surroundings had to be [B]extremely[/B] pure. Maximum U and Th concentration had to be less than one part in 10[sup]15[/sup]; the largest radioactive contamination was actually the C[sup]14[/sup] in the acrylic tank.[/quote]Context and audience matter. Such esoteric measurements, if allowed to be used in claims about food, would effectively be deceptive rather than informative, for most consumers. The Food & Drug Administration here requires that amounts of vitamins and minerals, for example, that are less than 1% of the RDA be listed as "0" (or not listed at all).

[quote]My views on what is detectable are perhaps colored by that experience.[/quote]Fair enough. :-)