Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Why modern sandwich bread is different from 'real' bread" video.

  1.  @KVergara  properly speaking, it means you can 'literally taste the chemicals' in Both of them... that's how taste and smell actually Work, after all. Receptors in your mouth, nose, throat, and stomach detect various chemicals in the air, food, and water that enters your body and send signals to the brain accordingly. The difference is a matter of your brain having settled on one thing as standard and normal, and throwing 'hold on, this is different, better make sure that the difference isn't something bad.' warnings for the other one. And it's perfectly capable of both freaking out over things that are perfectly fine and completely failing to register things that are actually really bad, depending on exactly what you are and are not used to and what the chemicals in question happen to be. Mind you, some of the 'this is bad!' reactions are fairly hardwired into the system on the basis of the substance being something humans are reasonably likely to encounter in the wild that absolutely IS poisonous... Interestingly, this Does include sugars, but only in excessive quantity. Quantities that some drink companies' colas actually exceed to the point where they have to (or possibly had to, and this may not hold true across all markets, haven't looked up the current state of things in a few years) include chemicals specifically to suppress the body's automatic response to such excessive sugar intake, or no one would be able to get through a can of the stuff without puking when the taste buds in their stomach (ayup, those are a thing) registered the massive sugar dump. (on the other hand, the human body is wired to actively encourage the consumption of smaller quantities of sugar. Probably because in the wild, sugar mostly means fruit, which in turn means quite a few necessary nutrients that prevent various diseases and are rather hard to come by otherwise.) And then there's bananas... there is a type of banana that most people today will tell you tastes 'artificial' and 'like chemicals'. It's nothing of the sort, but there IS a reason they say that: That sort of banana used to be the absolute standard, to the point where it's the one that all the Artificial Banana Flavours are based on... but then a plague of some sort wiped out that type in most of the places that grew them in huge quantities for export, forcing them to switch to the (different tasting) bananas most people around today grew up with... but the artificial flavouring wasn't changed. So with the plague under control and the older type of banana being spread around and grown in larger quantities in more places again, you can now get the bananas... that taste like the artificial, 'chemical' tasting, banana flavour. Because you can absolutely taste the difference between the flavours of the two types of bananas, and there is a specific thing that is done in the process of making most, if not all, artificial fruit flavours that makes them taste detectably different from the actual fruit in a specific way (basically they find the chemical that makes it taste like That fruit, rather than a Different fruit, isolate it, and Only Use That in the artificial flavouring, so it's missing all the secondary flavour influences that the Actual fruit would have (the ratio and type of sugar, for example, will be different).), so in that case you actually Can 'taste the chemicals' ... or more specifically, the artificial Absence of certain chemicals. One of the effects of all this is that your body Can actually 'taste the chemicals', and even to some extent identify at least some of the ones that are either bad, or at least indicative that you should check that some other bad thing that often co-occurs with things that taste like that isn't present, even when you have No Idea what the chemical in question is actually called... which doesn't change the fact that a lot of people making such claims about various things are spouting a load of nonsense (if only because they lack the relevant vocabulary or, as in the case of the banana, their frame of reference is somewhat skewed by what is and is not common in their day to day life, and thus what they are and are not used to.)
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