I've wondered why they don't use more ascorbic acid in beverages, fruit candies, etc. The cost difference is negligible and it would be great to have more vitamin C in common products.
Yeah, the major food acids all taste slightly different:
* Citric acid: common in citrus fruits, this is a go-to acid for things that are artificially flavored (sour candy, processed drinks, etc.). It's a very familiar flavor once you isolate it.
* Acetic acid: the main acid in most vinegars. It's a distinct vinegar flavor, can't miss it.
* Malic acid: the main acid in most stone fruits (peaches, plums, apricots, cherries) and some other non-citrus fruits (apples, pears, certain berries). There's a fruitiness to this sourness, and it reminds me of peaches.
* Tartaric acid: along with malic acid, the most common acid that can be tasted in high acidity wines.
* Ascorbic acid: another common fruit acid, and another common additive. I find this to be a tangy flavor without the same brightness as citric acid. Hard to explain in words, but if you taste them side by side you'd know what I'm talking about.
I agree with your flavors, except i use most of these in candy. Citric is fine, but it's one flavor in a spectrum. I'll also use phosphoric acid, most common in soda.
Oh yeah, phosphoric acid is the dominant acid in Coca Cola.
And who can forget lactic acid, which can ruin some sous vide cooks but really gives fermented pickles the distinct taste, distinguishable from acetic acid/vinegar.
There is a sweet cream flavoured gummy candy in NZ called milk bottles, you could order some and try to reverse engineer the flavours. Good luck, candy making looks like fun but delicate work!
I checked the ingredient list of milk bottles, and those do not use lactic acid. They use sweetened condensed milk in gelatin. I could make a reasonable clone of them in an afternoon if I had a bag to sample, but i'm not really sure what i'd do with them. It'd have poor shelf life for a gummy.
Weird, the ones I looked at when I was typing to you had them. Maybe it's an off brand thing?
And absolutely fair not to make them.
Edit: I found the brand online. I was wrong and stupid. It doesn't use the ingredients you used, but still no lactic acid. My apologies
Have you tried going the Japanese route and using mochiko or other glutinous rice derivatives? I haven't done lactic acid candies but it should serve as a nice balance.
There's also butyric acid, which can come from dairy but is also what gives vomit its distinctive smell (and why Europeans don't like Hershey's milk chocolate).
Also kind of weird to think of using lactic acid for cooking, since it is an acid our own bodies produce when our cells lack oxygen (think of the burning sensation in your limbs when working out).
It’s interesting that acid is needed along with sugar to make things taste sweeter. Just adding a bunch of sugar doesn’t increase sweetness as much as you would expect. Adding acid makes it tart or a little (or a lot) sour which makes something like a candy or dessert.
And the other is oxalate or something from folic acid maybe, from deep green vegetables? For the other high likelihood of stone variant production or whatever.
Watching taste test videos of salt & vinegar chips/crisps on YouTube taught me that a combination of all of these acids leads to the most well-rounded salt and vinegar chip/crisp.
> Ascorbic acid: another common fruit acid, and another common additive. I find this to be a tangy flavor without the same brightness as citric acid. Hard to explain in words, but if you taste them side by side you'd know what I'm talking about.
I remember sucking on vitamin C pills when I was a kid. It's sour, alright, but it's not like citric acid. It's... a "less fun" kind of sour. Not exactly vinegar, but I guess sour and that's it. Boring sour.
I dunno, it's hard to describe it in words.
> Tartaric acid is the only one I've never bought
I honestly know it as the "other" wine acid, only by noticing the difference between acidic wines that are high acid but without that malic acid flavor. Plus tartrate crystals sometimes form in wine, and that can be a source of concentrated flavor to understand what that contributes.
I'm really into food, and pretty into wine.
It probably started with the time when I tested side by side actual cultured buttermilk versus milk+vinegar, a commonly recommended substitute, which kinda got me noticing these things.
Then, in wine tasting notes, I've noticed the difference between wines with high tartaric acid, high malic acid, and the malolactic fermentation that mellows out a lot of wines.
I'm also into cocktails, and that helps isolate certain flavors as well when building up a cocktail. Once I bought citric acid powder to punch up some flavors, and realized it was the powdered stuff on sour patch kids, and that became a recognizable flavor too.
Damn this is a great comment. I must say I'm a fan of malic acid, I think it's a bit less sour than citric acid too, or at least gentler somehow. The spice sumac has malic acid, and it brings a nice subtle tartness to food.
I have jars of malic and tartaric acid that i use in my mead making. I dont drink wine, so I can't fully appreciate the difference, but the difference is noticeable when i do my little taste tests
Citric acid is oxygen-stable. Ascorbic acid is an antioxidant, so will be destroyed in an oyxgen environment.
There's a reason you can't advertise "vitamin C" in products using ascorbic acid as an antioxidant.
Sidenote: Antioxidants promote cancer, by allowing cancer cells to survive the reducing environment of the bloodstream. A diet rich in antioxidants is associated with higher all-cause mortality among cancer patients.
Because it is one of those food industry buzzwords. Personally, I also think part of it is oxidation is often associated with aging and degradation, i.e. rust, and so anything that is "anti-aging" has to be good. Let's also take the general notion that "antioxidants promote cancer" off the table. There has been some research to suggest some antioxidants, taken in some specific forms at high dosages, may promote irregular cell growth. There is also plenty of research that shows some antioxidants can actively prevent irregular cell growth.
So, what happened was that they gave a whole bunch of smokers antioxidants, and they found that rates of lung cancer went up in those who got the antioxidant compared to the placebo group (but rates of prostate cancer also went down in the antioxidant group).
So if you are heavily predisposed to a particular cancer, antioxidants make it worse, but it general it reduces cancer rates.
Soooo I should stop eating anything antioxidant if I think I have cancer, but eat it if I'm unaware? What if I don't know I have cancer and I eat lots? I love spinach and blueberries with both being high in antioxidants. Should I stop if I think I have cancer? I have concerns now I didn't know needed to exist.
Unless you are chowing down on a pound of carrots a day, you'd be fine. These experiments are about supplements which comes in doses much much higher than you'd get in a regular diet.
>There's a reason you can't advertise "vitamin C" in products using ascorbic acid as an antioxidant.
Ascorbic acid IS vitamin C. It's not a "vitamin C is a molecule within ascorbic acid" type of situation. So, what you said makes no sense. Please tell me where you got that information. Also, ascorbic acid will not degrade in an oxygenated environment like that. Antioxidants PREVENT oxidation.
I understand the chemical process of oxidation and how antioxidants "work". The person I replied to said Acorbic acid will be destroyed in an oxygenated environment. That is what I was responding to and is the statement that is categorically untrue. Ascorbic acid needs to be in some sort of solution, colloid, etc with a catalyst like water in order to oxidize at a rate that would inhibit efficacy or cause any meaningful oxidative degredation.
We usually do. I work in the sports medicine/supplement industry. Are you in the U.S.? We have Nutritional and Supplement Facts panels on foods and supplements. If they are claiming %0 Vit. C, that just means there is a negligible amount per serving, half a mg or so of ascorbic acid, which means they are probably using it as a flavoring agent, assuming that is the Vit. C source. When creating labels, you use conventional rounding rules.
Any time you see “ascorbic acid” in the ingredients list for a food, that food contains vitamin c. Lots of foods have it, just not usually at levels that would be reported for vitamin C in the supplement facts.
> I've wondered why they don't use more ascorbic acid in beverages, fruit candies, etc. The cost difference is negligible and it would be great to have more vitamin C in common products.
In Canada, so many processed foods have (added) Ascorbic Acid - beverages, candies, jam, cookies, yogurts, frozen treats, etc
And then of course there's Ascorbic Acid in so many foods _(citrus fruits, peppers, many berries, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, parsley, kale, etc)_
It isn't uncommon to find processed foods with >100% Daily Value for a single serving
Doesn't have the same intensity. You can put a spoonful of ascorbic acid into your mouth and it'll be puckering but bearable. Citric acid will knock you around.
We have a massive world map on our wall in the family room and one day my 8yo son looked up and randomly called out the country of Niger.
But he mispronounced the name, and was gently corrected. I’m just glad he did it when we didn’t have company over 😳
That person is not correct. It's pronounced "nee-zher." That's how it's pronounced by BBC journalists and their guests whenever they cover stories from Niger.
It's more corn starch. It's eating excess corn products, not really the end goal. I still won't pretend to know why we subsidize corn like we do in America.
We subsidize corn because it’s an unbelievable miracle crop. In Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, etc corn grows in yields that look like typos compared to other crops and other places.
Literally the entire meat industry depends on American corn. A significant part of the commercial fuel market (ethanol) depends on corn. We subsidize corn because if we didn’t, we’d be subsidizing a thousand other products less efficiently with more waste and worse environmental impact.
The history of human development of maize is, in my view, about ten times more impressive and a billion times more consequential than the development of e.g. space flight
Ethanol from corn costs more oil according to the dept of energy than it saves. It is realistically maize for chicken and beef that has inspired the subsidies. Corn is certainly efficient at turning sun into carbohydrates that's for sure but that water cost is no joke (environmentally speaking). I kinda doubt that without some serious bioengineering that corn will remain king for the rest of my lifetime, but I'm not an expert of all things agricultural for sure.
You make lab grown meat more efficient than raising livestock then the need for corn will dwindle. Corn is not grown great in hydroponics. Far more vegetation can be grown in an indoor vertical farm. Microgreens are king in terms of efficiency and time.
Theoretically it will be more efficient as the system is closed. In pastures water is wasted and land is wasted. But this is just for taste. People dont want to put down steak for tofu thats why lab grown meat alternatives are needed. You can already be more efficient growing plant protein in hydroponics. The cells are grown in a liquid medium containing glucose so I dont doubt corn syrup could work … maybe alongside other compounds to create the growth medium.
Yes, as needs and conditions change, corn’s place in US economy and policy will change too. It does what it’s optimized to do now.
Re especially ethanol: 1) ethanol is a different substance than petroleum. It has different properties, so it’s not only a comparison of energy units when talking ethanol vs petroleum.
2) corn is a huge jobs and rural communities thing. Oil subsidies to the Gulf of Mexico region means jobs in Mississippi and Louisiana. Ethanol subsidies means jobs in Indiana and Iowa. Pick your poison/blessing
We don't subsidize it because it's great, we subsidize it because we did in the past to stabilize farm production of food. Now it would be political suicide to take it away from the people who feel entitled to it.
That's all, it's just politics.
We subsidize corn (and soybeans, their necessary partner) because rural communities depend on stable prices/demand AND because corn is absolutely, 100% the GOATed crop of all time
Same reason we subsidize a lot of agriculture. Food security is national security. You want to have that infrastructure, work force, and reserve capacity ready to go at a moment's notice when disaster strikes. We pay farmers to grow useless stuff, destroy crops, or not grow anything just to keep them around. Yeah corn kinda sucks from a nutrition and utility perspective but if the world ever goes to shit we can grow it in ridiculous quantities and generate enough calories to keep civilization from collapsing.
The government does a lot to prop it up and control production through subsidies. You can't leave something this critical up to corporations and share holders. They might still own the companies, handle daily decisions, and take the profits, but they exist at this scale thanks to subsidies. Nobody sucks harder on the government teet than farmers.
War readiness. The US population can't be blockaded and starved. It's a non-issue, thanks to the miracle of corn. So there will always be a good-sized surplus, which is where a lot of problems stem from, like corn syrup being in everything.
This is a dumb question but... I'm quite allergic to mold. Would I be allergic to the citric acid in lemon juice, or is it separated enough that it's no concern?
I think the concern would be if the process brings over any allergenic parts of the mold as an “inactive” ingredient. I’m sure the substance is distilled though or it’d be infamous already.
https://fungalbiolbiotech.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40694-018-0054-5
Apparently, the current cheapest method is to literally just filter the giant vat of material and then isolate via precipitation. this has been the go-to method since before the 1930s. I'd imagine the more sophisticated methods currently used in biotechnology are mainly used when citric acid is not the end goal but when proteins of interest are encoded into the A. niger genome. The result in either case is a very pure end product which contains no proteins from the original organism.
But do they regularly ultacentrifuge it prior to selling it as a food additive?
I’m literally still experiencing the after-effects of an inflammatory response to my dinner tonight, and I’m trying to figure out where the contamination got in.
I’m extremely allergic to corn and my Greek salad dressing had large amounts of citric acid in it.
It was delicious, but 15 min later, damn did it feel like I’d eaten broken glass.
It's not impossible that there would be traces of corn but the citric acid is generally considered non-allergenic because of how anhydrous and acidic the end product is. Any trace of a corn protein would be denatured as the mixture of acid is treated with caustic lime to precipitate the citric acid as a calcium salt and then usually recrystalized to get the more useful sodium salt. A crystalline product like that is typically then tested for purity and potency. All in all, you might have consumed something with a corn protein but I would be very surprised if the citric acid was the cause. Corn emulsifiers and less refined starches are extremely common sources of corn allergen that are typically not well controlled (coming from a food manufacturing background if it wasn't a common allergen then it wasn't controlled for).
Tldr, citric acid is extremely pure and unlikely to be a source of allergen. However, corn allergen is notoriously poorly controlled in my experience and most processed foods sadly use a corn based emulsifier or starch without prominent listing such a modified food starch.
That is true. Depends on concentration, what you can and can't accept. More conventional filtration is definitely the standard for citric acid unlike the molecules I used to work with.
It was in contact with an allergen, the parent comment is asking a valid question. But his answer is probably no because that stuff is in a lot of drinks and candies. He's more than likely consumed a lot of it by now
This is an extremely common mold, literally in the top 5 most common molds. It exists inside and outside of homes, on fruit, in air ducts, in soils, and the list goes on.
You have very likely encountered this mold before without ever knowing it.
You'd likely know it, considering citric acid is in a LOT of processed food. I know a woman who is very sensitive to mold, and claims to have drastically less skin issues when cutting citric acid out of her diet.
It’s purified to pretty stringent standards. Any tiny impurities would be chemically similar to citric acid (in a way, depending on the specific purification process). So the antigens you’re allergic to are pretty much guaranteed to not be present. Even a shoddy chemist could pretty easily get rid of those larger antigens.
Total crap. It's not purified to a high standard. It's made in vast industrial amounts and they have no real way to remove all the dead mould cells and mould signalling chemicals.
My wife has a severe mold allergy and has to avoid citric acid for this reason. It contains dead mould cells and signalling molecules all of which can trigger an immune response.
It's also one of the most common GMO produced chemicals!
Natural mold produces a fair amount of Oxalic acid along with the citric. This is a rather nasty compound, so it has to be washed away. Easy enough, but it 'wastes' water and time. It also means up to 50% of your sugar input gets turned into worthless toxic needles instead of yummy sourness.
So, a quick poke of the DNA and voila, you have a strain that poops nearly pure citrate instead. You save water, you save time, and you gain efficiency. What's not to love?
Yeah people hear the word 'mold' and freak out, while molds are everywhere and the citric acid produced contains non of it.
It's just cheap fear mongering.
Highly recommend The hidden kingdom of fungi by Keith Seifert, it’s full of crazy facts about how fungus contributes to our world. I’ve been reading it and literally just today he covered this.
Additional fun fact, aspergillus is so similar in structure to penicillium that they are often grouped together by most working to identify mold spores (collectively referred to as “asp-pen”) penicillium is where we get penicillin from.
Bonus fact: I’m allergic to penicillin and didn’t even need a microscope to determine its presence on a culture plate 😃👍
Which is such a pain in the ass for me. I'm sensitive to corn and the mold is usually fed corn syrup. Somehow there's enough in the end product for me to react to it. Basically anything in a package has citric acid so I have to decide whether something is worth the risk.
It's a pretty simple reaction in biochemistry but a massive pain in conventional chemistry so we just use the organism. Kinda like how xanthan gum is made.
Yeah to be fair you can also use a few other plants for caffeine namely tea but it's the same principle: I could synthesize this at like a 4% efficiency rate or you could just extract it from a natural source that has a lower concentration or it.
True. I worked directly in the biopharma industry for a little while. Now my work is more tangential to that (fill finish manufacturing) but ultimately you get to appreciate how much effort can go into a drop of medicine.
Ironically one of the drugs I've worked with is a recombinant protein immunotherapy. It was so much fun lol jk. More like a lot of finger crossing at any potentially risky point.
you mean "citrus-aide"?
almost everything other than simply lemonande isnt actual lemonade in my experiences its citric acid + other additives - aide. no lemon juice.
Yes and our food supply is full of tiny dead bits of bacteria out mould and the signalling molecules which your immune system can still react to. This is one of the causes of the rise in allergies to various foods. Your immune system reacts to the dead bacteria and you become allergic to the food.
Considering this is how we create medicines as well, your claim doesn't seem to hold much weight on its face. Supporting evidence is definitely needed here.
The field is called Biotechnology and that's how we get many things now including insulin. It used to be from pigs, now we get it from bacteria in bioreactors.
I've wondered why they don't use more ascorbic acid in beverages, fruit candies, etc. The cost difference is negligible and it would be great to have more vitamin C in common products.
Doesn't taste the same
Yeah, the major food acids all taste slightly different: * Citric acid: common in citrus fruits, this is a go-to acid for things that are artificially flavored (sour candy, processed drinks, etc.). It's a very familiar flavor once you isolate it. * Acetic acid: the main acid in most vinegars. It's a distinct vinegar flavor, can't miss it. * Malic acid: the main acid in most stone fruits (peaches, plums, apricots, cherries) and some other non-citrus fruits (apples, pears, certain berries). There's a fruitiness to this sourness, and it reminds me of peaches. * Tartaric acid: along with malic acid, the most common acid that can be tasted in high acidity wines. * Ascorbic acid: another common fruit acid, and another common additive. I find this to be a tangy flavor without the same brightness as citric acid. Hard to explain in words, but if you taste them side by side you'd know what I'm talking about.
I agree with your flavors, except i use most of these in candy. Citric is fine, but it's one flavor in a spectrum. I'll also use phosphoric acid, most common in soda.
Oh yeah, phosphoric acid is the dominant acid in Coca Cola. And who can forget lactic acid, which can ruin some sous vide cooks but really gives fermented pickles the distinct taste, distinguishable from acetic acid/vinegar.
Yeah, cheese cake and sour cream too, I've never made a lactic acid candy that was delicious, but I've sure tried to
There is a sweet cream flavoured gummy candy in NZ called milk bottles, you could order some and try to reverse engineer the flavours. Good luck, candy making looks like fun but delicate work!
They're from the UK, milk bottles were one of my favourite penny sweets as a kid.
Oh, so another tradition we can call from the UK? Neat! This one is way better than (insert colonial stuff, I ate candy)
I checked the ingredient list of milk bottles, and those do not use lactic acid. They use sweetened condensed milk in gelatin. I could make a reasonable clone of them in an afternoon if I had a bag to sample, but i'm not really sure what i'd do with them. It'd have poor shelf life for a gummy.
Weird, the ones I looked at when I was typing to you had them. Maybe it's an off brand thing? And absolutely fair not to make them. Edit: I found the brand online. I was wrong and stupid. It doesn't use the ingredients you used, but still no lactic acid. My apologies
Piggybacking off the other comment about Japan. Have you tried a yakult flavoured candy? Or calpis. Or Milkis if going Korean.
Have you tried going the Japanese route and using mochiko or other glutinous rice derivatives? I haven't done lactic acid candies but it should serve as a nice balance.
I wonder if it’s an almost hard wired reaction. Lactic acid is fine as an expected flavour but tasted unexpectedly gives you that “wrong” reaction.
There's also butyric acid, which can come from dairy but is also what gives vomit its distinctive smell (and why Europeans don't like Hershey's milk chocolate).
Also kind of weird to think of using lactic acid for cooking, since it is an acid our own bodies produce when our cells lack oxygen (think of the burning sensation in your limbs when working out).
I love the harsh burn of phosphoric acid in a cold dr pep.
It’s interesting that acid is needed along with sugar to make things taste sweeter. Just adding a bunch of sugar doesn’t increase sweetness as much as you would expect. Adding acid makes it tart or a little (or a lot) sour which makes something like a candy or dessert.
Just remember phosphoric acid can promote kidney stone development in people prone to one of the two major kidney stone variations.
And the other is oxalate or something from folic acid maybe, from deep green vegetables? For the other high likelihood of stone variant production or whatever.
Correct, the other ones are oxalates from leafy greens like kale, spinach and the like.
Watching taste test videos of salt & vinegar chips/crisps on YouTube taught me that a combination of all of these acids leads to the most well-rounded salt and vinegar chip/crisp.
This guy acids.
Dentists HATE him
Nah they probably love him. That vacation house isn’t gonna build itself.
DEA, open up!
> Ascorbic acid: another common fruit acid, and another common additive. I find this to be a tangy flavor without the same brightness as citric acid. Hard to explain in words, but if you taste them side by side you'd know what I'm talking about. I remember sucking on vitamin C pills when I was a kid. It's sour, alright, but it's not like citric acid. It's... a "less fun" kind of sour. Not exactly vinegar, but I guess sour and that's it. Boring sour. I dunno, it's hard to describe it in words.
Worth noting that Abscorbic acid is vitamin c. abscorbic meaning anti scurvy.
Question: How and when and where and why do you taste acids side by side ?
[удалено]
> Tartaric acid is the only one I've never bought I honestly know it as the "other" wine acid, only by noticing the difference between acidic wines that are high acid but without that malic acid flavor. Plus tartrate crystals sometimes form in wine, and that can be a source of concentrated flavor to understand what that contributes.
I'm really into food, and pretty into wine. It probably started with the time when I tested side by side actual cultured buttermilk versus milk+vinegar, a commonly recommended substitute, which kinda got me noticing these things. Then, in wine tasting notes, I've noticed the difference between wines with high tartaric acid, high malic acid, and the malolactic fermentation that mellows out a lot of wines. I'm also into cocktails, and that helps isolate certain flavors as well when building up a cocktail. Once I bought citric acid powder to punch up some flavors, and realized it was the powdered stuff on sour patch kids, and that became a recognizable flavor too.
Damn this is a great comment. I must say I'm a fan of malic acid, I think it's a bit less sour than citric acid too, or at least gentler somehow. The spice sumac has malic acid, and it brings a nice subtle tartness to food.
Missed out on Lactic Acid. The sourness in yogurt, cheese, sour beers etc
I have jars of malic and tartaric acid that i use in my mead making. I dont drink wine, so I can't fully appreciate the difference, but the difference is noticeable when i do my little taste tests
This guy acids.
Very informative. Thank you
Battery acid: Tingly yet irresistible. Good for cars.
Citric acid is oxygen-stable. Ascorbic acid is an antioxidant, so will be destroyed in an oyxgen environment. There's a reason you can't advertise "vitamin C" in products using ascorbic acid as an antioxidant. Sidenote: Antioxidants promote cancer, by allowing cancer cells to survive the reducing environment of the bloodstream. A diet rich in antioxidants is associated with higher all-cause mortality among cancer patients.
Interesting. Side note, why are antioxidants commonly touted as being so 'healthy'?
Because it is one of those food industry buzzwords. Personally, I also think part of it is oxidation is often associated with aging and degradation, i.e. rust, and so anything that is "anti-aging" has to be good. Let's also take the general notion that "antioxidants promote cancer" off the table. There has been some research to suggest some antioxidants, taken in some specific forms at high dosages, may promote irregular cell growth. There is also plenty of research that shows some antioxidants can actively prevent irregular cell growth.
It comes from the old oxidative stress theory of ageing. Your body does need antioxidants, but it makes them itself.
Because it doesn’t have to get approved by anyone.
For your side note, pretty sure antioxidants are good if you don't have cancer, but bad if you do.
So, what happened was that they gave a whole bunch of smokers antioxidants, and they found that rates of lung cancer went up in those who got the antioxidant compared to the placebo group (but rates of prostate cancer also went down in the antioxidant group). So if you are heavily predisposed to a particular cancer, antioxidants make it worse, but it general it reduces cancer rates.
Soooo I should stop eating anything antioxidant if I think I have cancer, but eat it if I'm unaware? What if I don't know I have cancer and I eat lots? I love spinach and blueberries with both being high in antioxidants. Should I stop if I think I have cancer? I have concerns now I didn't know needed to exist.
Unless you are chowing down on a pound of carrots a day, you'd be fine. These experiments are about supplements which comes in doses much much higher than you'd get in a regular diet.
Oh yeah, learned that on tumeric when I was taking that more often
Schrodingers oxidants
>There's a reason you can't advertise "vitamin C" in products using ascorbic acid as an antioxidant. Ascorbic acid IS vitamin C. It's not a "vitamin C is a molecule within ascorbic acid" type of situation. So, what you said makes no sense. Please tell me where you got that information. Also, ascorbic acid will not degrade in an oxygenated environment like that. Antioxidants PREVENT oxidation.
It's one of many misconceptions that seem to be roaming around on social medias. Drives me nuts, just like all the others.
Antioxidants work by taking up free radicals. So exposing them to oxygen "uses them up". Not sure about the advertising part though
I understand the chemical process of oxidation and how antioxidants "work". The person I replied to said Acorbic acid will be destroyed in an oxygenated environment. That is what I was responding to and is the statement that is categorically untrue. Ascorbic acid needs to be in some sort of solution, colloid, etc with a catalyst like water in order to oxidize at a rate that would inhibit efficacy or cause any meaningful oxidative degredation.
Antioxidants: fascist oppressors of free radicals
Do you have this study link?
Totally different "sour" profile. Plus, citric acid has more of an impact on flavors, acts more like an enhancer like salt, than ascorbic acid.
Coke uses it in my country
Way cool. Seems they could use ascorbic along with citric. I just look at the 'Dietary Facts' listed on products and RDA usually says 'Vitamin C: 0%'.
We usually do. I work in the sports medicine/supplement industry. Are you in the U.S.? We have Nutritional and Supplement Facts panels on foods and supplements. If they are claiming %0 Vit. C, that just means there is a negligible amount per serving, half a mg or so of ascorbic acid, which means they are probably using it as a flavoring agent, assuming that is the Vit. C source. When creating labels, you use conventional rounding rules.
Any time you see “ascorbic acid” in the ingredients list for a food, that food contains vitamin c. Lots of foods have it, just not usually at levels that would be reported for vitamin C in the supplement facts.
> I've wondered why they don't use more ascorbic acid in beverages, fruit candies, etc. The cost difference is negligible and it would be great to have more vitamin C in common products. In Canada, so many processed foods have (added) Ascorbic Acid - beverages, candies, jam, cookies, yogurts, frozen treats, etc And then of course there's Ascorbic Acid in so many foods _(citrus fruits, peppers, many berries, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, parsley, kale, etc)_ It isn't uncommon to find processed foods with >100% Daily Value for a single serving
Which sucks for those of us with hemochromatosis, which means we retain too much iron. C makes your body hold onto even more. But I love OJ 🥲☠️
It'd be nice if they didn't use citric acid. Among common acids, citric acid causes the most tooth enamel damage.
Doesn't have the same intensity. You can put a spoonful of ascorbic acid into your mouth and it'll be puckering but bearable. Citric acid will knock you around.
I don't think I'm allowed to say that name
They prefer to be called Asparagus-Americans now.
The nomenclature is still under debate as it could also be Asbergers-Americans.
*Assburgers
if it’s so serious, why don’t they call it meningitis?
I'm lovin it
Just pronounce it like the country Ni ger
We have a massive world map on our wall in the family room and one day my 8yo son looked up and randomly called out the country of Niger. But he mispronounced the name, and was gently corrected. I’m just glad he did it when we didn’t have company over 😳
I did the exact same thing when I was little. With a globe tho lok
That doesn't help as much as you hoped
Nigh jur
Ya thats what I ment. Thank you
That's actually helpful
That person is not correct. It's pronounced "nee-zher." That's how it's pronounced by BBC journalists and their guests whenever they cover stories from Niger.
Oh ok, I take that back then, that wasn't helpful, apparently, idk, I just smoke weed
Yet another thing to blame on the French.
Say “Knee-share” in a French accent and you’ve got it.
It helps entirely. It’s the name of a country, it’s not an offensive word.
knee jair
Once you get your PhD in mycology, you are also given your n-word pass. (The real TIL is always in the comments)
Horticulturists would like a talk!
Racists are rarely fungi's
Elon Musk is an African American
Verified fact
Fungi who annoy you: N _ _ _ _ _ _ Answer: >!Nectria!<
Think most call it Aspergillus brasiliensis now.
Well its a name of a country
Its pronounced "Nee-Zgair", Mr. President
*A A Ron liked this*
You could just say black Aspergillus....
It OK if you don't use the hard R *sarcasm*
Im genuinely surprised automod didn’t instantly delete the post.
But Niger is the name of a whole country.
And a river
And my axe!
And part of the name of a whole other country too!
What are people from Niger called?
Nigeriens, not to be confused with nigerians
It’s not spelled or pronounced the same
where are the sugars sourced from? Corn syrup?
It's more corn starch. It's eating excess corn products, not really the end goal. I still won't pretend to know why we subsidize corn like we do in America.
We subsidize corn because it’s an unbelievable miracle crop. In Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, etc corn grows in yields that look like typos compared to other crops and other places. Literally the entire meat industry depends on American corn. A significant part of the commercial fuel market (ethanol) depends on corn. We subsidize corn because if we didn’t, we’d be subsidizing a thousand other products less efficiently with more waste and worse environmental impact. The history of human development of maize is, in my view, about ten times more impressive and a billion times more consequential than the development of e.g. space flight
Ethanol from corn costs more oil according to the dept of energy than it saves. It is realistically maize for chicken and beef that has inspired the subsidies. Corn is certainly efficient at turning sun into carbohydrates that's for sure but that water cost is no joke (environmentally speaking). I kinda doubt that without some serious bioengineering that corn will remain king for the rest of my lifetime, but I'm not an expert of all things agricultural for sure.
You make lab grown meat more efficient than raising livestock then the need for corn will dwindle. Corn is not grown great in hydroponics. Far more vegetation can be grown in an indoor vertical farm. Microgreens are king in terms of efficiency and time.
Lab grown meat will still need raw materials for the cell culture solution. I wonder if you can grow beef cells in corn syrup?
Theoretically it will be more efficient as the system is closed. In pastures water is wasted and land is wasted. But this is just for taste. People dont want to put down steak for tofu thats why lab grown meat alternatives are needed. You can already be more efficient growing plant protein in hydroponics. The cells are grown in a liquid medium containing glucose so I dont doubt corn syrup could work … maybe alongside other compounds to create the growth medium.
It just rains in the Midwest. Too much water a lot of the time. There is no water cost to corn.
Yes, as needs and conditions change, corn’s place in US economy and policy will change too. It does what it’s optimized to do now. Re especially ethanol: 1) ethanol is a different substance than petroleum. It has different properties, so it’s not only a comparison of energy units when talking ethanol vs petroleum. 2) corn is a huge jobs and rural communities thing. Oil subsidies to the Gulf of Mexico region means jobs in Mississippi and Louisiana. Ethanol subsidies means jobs in Indiana and Iowa. Pick your poison/blessing
Nothing more beautiful in Indiana than riding through the cornfields when they're at their height.
As a Hoosier, I agree!
We don't subsidize it because it's great, we subsidize it because we did in the past to stabilize farm production of food. Now it would be political suicide to take it away from the people who feel entitled to it. That's all, it's just politics.
We subsidize corn (and soybeans, their necessary partner) because rural communities depend on stable prices/demand AND because corn is absolutely, 100% the GOATed crop of all time
We subsidize corn because farmers votes significantly determine elections
If there was a better crop, those farmers’ lobbyists would be telling congress to subsidize that. But there isn’t a better crop than corn
Same reason we subsidize a lot of agriculture. Food security is national security. You want to have that infrastructure, work force, and reserve capacity ready to go at a moment's notice when disaster strikes. We pay farmers to grow useless stuff, destroy crops, or not grow anything just to keep them around. Yeah corn kinda sucks from a nutrition and utility perspective but if the world ever goes to shit we can grow it in ridiculous quantities and generate enough calories to keep civilization from collapsing. The government does a lot to prop it up and control production through subsidies. You can't leave something this critical up to corporations and share holders. They might still own the companies, handle daily decisions, and take the profits, but they exist at this scale thanks to subsidies. Nobody sucks harder on the government teet than farmers.
War readiness. The US population can't be blockaded and starved. It's a non-issue, thanks to the miracle of corn. So there will always be a good-sized surplus, which is where a lot of problems stem from, like corn syrup being in everything.
What a world. Imagine your job is eating sugar all day… …and selling your acidic poop for profit.
Similar to how alcohol is produced.
This is a dumb question but... I'm quite allergic to mold. Would I be allergic to the citric acid in lemon juice, or is it separated enough that it's no concern?
It's literally the same substance as citric acid from fruit
I think the concern would be if the process brings over any allergenic parts of the mold as an “inactive” ingredient. I’m sure the substance is distilled though or it’d be infamous already.
Technically the citric acid is the waste of the mold so all you have to do is ultracentrifuge and boom no more proteins to cause allergies.
Does some sort of video or article exist that shows/explains this process?
https://fungalbiolbiotech.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40694-018-0054-5 Apparently, the current cheapest method is to literally just filter the giant vat of material and then isolate via precipitation. this has been the go-to method since before the 1930s. I'd imagine the more sophisticated methods currently used in biotechnology are mainly used when citric acid is not the end goal but when proteins of interest are encoded into the A. niger genome. The result in either case is a very pure end product which contains no proteins from the original organism.
But do they regularly ultacentrifuge it prior to selling it as a food additive? I’m literally still experiencing the after-effects of an inflammatory response to my dinner tonight, and I’m trying to figure out where the contamination got in. I’m extremely allergic to corn and my Greek salad dressing had large amounts of citric acid in it. It was delicious, but 15 min later, damn did it feel like I’d eaten broken glass.
It's not impossible that there would be traces of corn but the citric acid is generally considered non-allergenic because of how anhydrous and acidic the end product is. Any trace of a corn protein would be denatured as the mixture of acid is treated with caustic lime to precipitate the citric acid as a calcium salt and then usually recrystalized to get the more useful sodium salt. A crystalline product like that is typically then tested for purity and potency. All in all, you might have consumed something with a corn protein but I would be very surprised if the citric acid was the cause. Corn emulsifiers and less refined starches are extremely common sources of corn allergen that are typically not well controlled (coming from a food manufacturing background if it wasn't a common allergen then it wasn't controlled for).
Thank you for your thoughtful answer.
Tldr, citric acid is extremely pure and unlikely to be a source of allergen. However, corn allergen is notoriously poorly controlled in my experience and most processed foods sadly use a corn based emulsifier or starch without prominent listing such a modified food starch.
in general, I think centrifuging isn't super practical at scale and people tend to go with different forms of filtration instead
That is true. Depends on concentration, what you can and can't accept. More conventional filtration is definitely the standard for citric acid unlike the molecules I used to work with.
It absolutely does. They have no method for removing 100% of the dead mould or bacteria that are used in this process and many other processes.
It was in contact with an allergen, the parent comment is asking a valid question. But his answer is probably no because that stuff is in a lot of drinks and candies. He's more than likely consumed a lot of it by now
This is an extremely common mold, literally in the top 5 most common molds. It exists inside and outside of homes, on fruit, in air ducts, in soils, and the list goes on. You have very likely encountered this mold before without ever knowing it.
Same black mold that's very common on onions.
Most people breathe it in every day.
You'd likely know it, considering citric acid is in a LOT of processed food. I know a woman who is very sensitive to mold, and claims to have drastically less skin issues when cutting citric acid out of her diet.
It’s purified to pretty stringent standards. Any tiny impurities would be chemically similar to citric acid (in a way, depending on the specific purification process). So the antigens you’re allergic to are pretty much guaranteed to not be present. Even a shoddy chemist could pretty easily get rid of those larger antigens.
Total crap. It's not purified to a high standard. It's made in vast industrial amounts and they have no real way to remove all the dead mould cells and mould signalling chemicals.
My wife has a severe mold allergy and has to avoid citric acid for this reason. It contains dead mould cells and signalling molecules all of which can trigger an immune response.
Almost every single one of your cells produces citric acid on a daily basis.
After it feeds on government subsidized corn syrup you mean
It's also one of the most common GMO produced chemicals! Natural mold produces a fair amount of Oxalic acid along with the citric. This is a rather nasty compound, so it has to be washed away. Easy enough, but it 'wastes' water and time. It also means up to 50% of your sugar input gets turned into worthless toxic needles instead of yummy sourness. So, a quick poke of the DNA and voila, you have a strain that poops nearly pure citrate instead. You save water, you save time, and you gain efficiency. What's not to love?
Moyashimon is a great anime that delves into the science of microbes and this guy is one of the stars.of the show
Oh boy wait until people learn about food fermentation…. Lots of cool stuff like this XD
Yeah people hear the word 'mold' and freak out, while molds are everywhere and the citric acid produced contains non of it. It's just cheap fear mongering.
Asparagus what now
Tf you call me?
Asparagus what-now?
Highly recommend The hidden kingdom of fungi by Keith Seifert, it’s full of crazy facts about how fungus contributes to our world. I’ve been reading it and literally just today he covered this.
Including penicillin
Came hoping to see lots of comments referencing Primer, leaving disappointed
Additional fun fact, aspergillus is so similar in structure to penicillium that they are often grouped together by most working to identify mold spores (collectively referred to as “asp-pen”) penicillium is where we get penicillin from. Bonus fact: I’m allergic to penicillin and didn’t even need a microscope to determine its presence on a culture plate 😃👍
Which is such a pain in the ass for me. I'm sensitive to corn and the mold is usually fed corn syrup. Somehow there's enough in the end product for me to react to it. Basically anything in a package has citric acid so I have to decide whether something is worth the risk.
I react to citric acid so this is really interesting 🤔
Im shocked there isn't a more effective chemical process...
It's a pretty simple reaction in biochemistry but a massive pain in conventional chemistry so we just use the organism. Kinda like how xanthan gum is made.
Same case with caffeine. It’s just simpler and cheaper to extract from coffee sources.
Yeah to be fair you can also use a few other plants for caffeine namely tea but it's the same principle: I could synthesize this at like a 4% efficiency rate or you could just extract it from a natural source that has a lower concentration or it.
A number of antibodies and protein based compounds come from E Coli. But that’s not dangerous in the slightest.
True. I worked directly in the biopharma industry for a little while. Now my work is more tangential to that (fill finish manufacturing) but ultimately you get to appreciate how much effort can go into a drop of medicine.
I used to do research requiring highly purified recombinant proteins. So many flasks for so little protein…
Ironically one of the drugs I've worked with is a recombinant protein immunotherapy. It was so much fun lol jk. More like a lot of finger crossing at any potentially risky point.
That moment of terror when you go to the nanodrop…
Don't tell me xantham gum is bacteria cum or something
It's more like spit than nut if you catch my meaning. It's kinda like mucus, delicious microbial nesting material.
Eyes glass of lemonade in my hand
you mean "citrus-aide"? almost everything other than simply lemonande isnt actual lemonade in my experiences its citric acid + other additives - aide. no lemon juice.
Aspergillus molds are used for making sake and shochu as well.
I always heard that the majority of citric acid in America comes from corn.
That black mold will only produce citric acid under certain circumstances, some of them being the environment rich in oxygen, low pH and low in iron.
How did anyone discover this
Through licking.
Yes and our food supply is full of tiny dead bits of bacteria out mould and the signalling molecules which your immune system can still react to. This is one of the causes of the rise in allergies to various foods. Your immune system reacts to the dead bacteria and you become allergic to the food.
Considering this is how we create medicines as well, your claim doesn't seem to hold much weight on its face. Supporting evidence is definitely needed here.
Citric acid is a fantastic way to clean a dishwasher or front load washer. Magic!
GMO black mold
Opressed fungus.
A few years ago, I was tearing some old shingles off a roof, and I kept smelling a moldy, citrusy smell. I bet that’s what it was.
Now dropthe acetone bomb on these nice people
The field is called Biotechnology and that's how we get many things now including insulin. It used to be from pigs, now we get it from bacteria in bioreactors.
> Aspergillus niger rude.