Tag Archives: plants

Rock bottom: can rocks in your dog’s water bowl protect your lawn?

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fractal image, featuring the hashtag #272sci

Take a look at the Twitter hashtag #272sci

One quick thing before I dive into this month’s post: if you’re a Twitter user, check out my series of very tiny science tweets under the hashtag #272sci. The aim is to explain a science thing in one tweet – without using a thread – and it’s 272 because that’s the number of characters I have to use after including the hashtag and a space. So far I’ve covered leaf colours, frothy milk, caffeine and poisonous millipedes. There will be more to come!

Now, speaking of Twitter, a couple of weeks ago Prof Mark Lorch tweeted about Dog Rocks. Dog… what? I hear you ask (really quite understandably).

Well, it turns out that Dog Rocks are a product that you can buy, and that you put into your dog’s water bowl. Your dog then drinks the water that has been sloshing over the rocks, and, this is where we start to run into trouble, this is meant to have an effect on your dog’s urine. This, in turn, is supposed to protect any grass your dog might then pee on.

photo of a patch of dead grass

Dog urine damages grass

All right, so let’s start somewhere in the vague vicinity of some science: if you have a dog, or even if you’ve just spent some time with someone who has a dog, you’ve probably noticed that dog urine isn’t very kind to grass. Commonly, you see something like the photo here, that is, patches of yellow, dead grass, surrounded by quite luscious green growth.

Why is this? It’s because dog urine – like the urine of all mammals – contains urea, CO(NH2)2. Urea forms in the body when animals metabolise nitrogen-containing compounds, in particular, proteins. It’s essentially a way for the body to get rid of excess nitrogen.

People sometimes confuse urea with ammonia, for reasons that I’ll come to in a moment. But they’re not the same thing. Urea is odourless, forms a pH neutral solution and, if you extract it from the liquid in which it is dissolved, produces solid crystals at room temperature.

Pure ammonia, NH3, by contrast, is a gas at room temperature (boiling point -33.3 ℃), forms alkaline solutions (with pH values greater than 7) and has that pungent ‘ngggh get it away from me!’ smell with which we’re probably all familiar.

Sample pots full of pale yellow liquid

Fresh urine contains urea, but little ammonia

Although these two substances aren’t the same, they are linked: many living things convert ammonia (which is very toxic) to urea (which is much less so) as part of normal metabolism. And it also goes the other way, in a process called urea hydrolysis. This reaction happens in urine once it’s out of the body, too, which is the main reason why, after a little while, urine starts to smell really, really bad.

Okay, fine, but what has this got to do with grass, exactly? Well urea (and ammonia, for that matter) are excellent sources of nitrogen. Plants need nitrogen to grow, but dog urine contains too much, and too much nitrogen is bad – in the same way that too much of pretty much anything nice is bad for humans. It damages the blades of grass and a yellowish dead spot appears, often ringed by some particularly lush grass that, being slightly outside the immediate target zone, caught a whiff of extra nitrogen without being overwhelmed.

Back to Dog Rocks. Interestingly, the website includes an explanation not unlike the one I’ve just given on their fact sheet. What it doesn’t do is satisfactorily explain how Dog Rocks are supposed to change the nitrogen content of your dog’s urine.

photo of a dog drinking water

Dog Rocks are meant to be placed in your dog’s water bowl

The website says that Dog Rocks are “a coherent rock with a mechanically stable framework”. Okay… so… Dog Rocks won’t dissolve or break up in your dog’s water bowl. A good start. It goes on to say, “the rocks provide a stable matrix and a micro-porous medium in which active components are able to act as a water purifying agent through ion exchange” and “Dog Rocks will help purify the water by removing some nitrates, ammonia and harmful trace elements thereby giving your dog a cleaner source of water and lowering the amount of nitrates found in their diet.”

You’ll note they’re using the word nitrate. Nitrates are specifically compounds containing the NO3– ion, but I think they’re using the term in a more general way, to suggest any nitrogen-containing compound (including urea and ammonia). And by the way, nitrates are different from the similar-sounding nitrites, which contain the NO2– ion. Fresh urine from a healthy dog (or human, for that matter) shouldn’t contain nitrite. In fact, a dipstick test for nitrite in urine is commonly used to check for urinary tract infections, because it suggests bacteria are present.

Anyway, nitrates/nitrites aside, it’s the last bit of that claim which really makes no sense. Your dog is not ingesting anything like a significant quantity of nitrogen-containing compounds from its water bowl. Urea comes from the metabolic breakdown of proteins, and they come from your dog’s food.

Photo of puppies eating food that I totally picked because it's cute ;-)

The nitrogen-containing compounds in your dogs’ urine come from their food, not their water

It’s faintly possible, I suppose, that Dog Rocks might somehow filter out some urea/nitrates from urine. But then your dog would have to pee through the Dog Rocks and, honestly, if you can manage to arrange that, you might as well train your dog not to pee on your grass in the first place.

I suggest that there are three possible explanations for the positive testimonials for this product. 1) Owners who use it are inadvertently encouraging their dogs to drink more water, which could be diluting their urine, leading to less grass damage. 2) It’s all a sort of placebo effect: owners imagine it’s going to work, and they see what they’re expecting to see, or 3) they’re all made up.

You decide, but there is absolutely no scientifically-plausible way that putting any kind of rocks in your dog’s water bowl will do anything to stop dog pee damaging your grass. This is £15 you do not need to spend. But hey, you could avoid the money burning a hole in your pocket (see what I did there?) by buying me a coffee… 😉

Check out the Twitter hashtag #272sci here, and support the Great Explanations book project here!

Do you want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not take a look at my fiction blog: the fiction phial? You can also find me doing various flavours of editor-type-stuff at the horror podcast, PseudoPod.org – so head over there, too!

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Vibrant Viburnum: the fascinating chemistry of fragrant flowers

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There’s a Viburnum carlesii bush (sometimes called Koreanspice) near my front door and, right now, it smells amazing. It only flowers for a relatively short time each year and otherwise isn’t that spectacular – especially in the autumn when it drops its leaves all over the doorstop, and I’m constantly brushing them out of the house.

But it’s all worth it for these few weeks in April, when everyone who has any reason to come anywhere near our door says, ‘ooh, what is that smell? It’s gorgeous!’ We also rear butterflies at this time of year, and they love the flowers once they’ve emerged from their chrysalids. (No, of course this isn’t an excuse to include all my butterfly photos in a post. Painted lady, since you ask.)

But let’s talk chemistry – what is in the Viburnum carlesii’s fragrance? Well, it’s a bit complicated. Fragrances, as you might imagine, often are. We detect smells when volatile (things that vaporise easily) compounds find their way to our noses which are, believe it or not, great chemical detectors.

Well, I say great, many animals have far better smell detection: dogs, of course, are particularly known for it. Their noses have some 300 million scent receptors*, while humans “only” have 5-6 million but, and this is the really fantastic part, by some estimates we’re still able to detect a trillion or so smells. We (and other animals) inhale air that contains odour molecules, and those molecules bind to the receptors in our noses, triggering electrical impulses that our brains interpret as smell.

Most scents aren’t just one molecule, but are actually complex mixtures. Our brains learn to recognise combinations and to associate them with certain, familiar things. It’s not that different from recognising patterns of sound as speech, or patterns of light as images, it’s just that we often don’t think of smell in quite the same way.

Viburnum carlesii flowers have a fragrance often described as sweet and spicy.

So my Viburnum bush – and the flowers I’ve cut and put on my desk – is actually pumping out loads of different molecules right now. After a bit of hunting around, I tracked them down to (brace yourself for a list of chemical names) isoeugenol, eugenol, methyleugenol, 4-allylsyringol, vinyl-guaiacol and methyl nicotinate, plus the old favourites methyl salicylate (this stuff turns up everywhere), methyl benzoate (so does this), indole, cinnamic aldehyde and vanillin, and then some isovaleraldehyde, acetoin, hexanal, (Z)-3-hexen-1-ol and methional.

Phew.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about the chemistry of all of those. But just for a moment consider how wondrous it is that our noses and brains work together to detect all of those molecules, in their relevant quantities, and then send the thought to our conscious mind that oh, hey, the Viburnum is flowering! (It’s also pretty astonishing that, in 2021, I can just plug all those names into a search engine and, with only a couple of exceptions, get all sorts of information about them in seconds – back in the old days when I was studying chemistry, you had to use a book index, and half the time the name you wanted wasn’t there. You kids don’t know how good you’ve got it, I’m telling you.)

Anyway, if you glance at those names, you’ll see eugenol popping up quite a bit, so let’s talk about that. It’s a benzene ring with a few other groups attached, and lots of chemicals like this have distinctive smells. In fact, we refer to molecules with these sorts of ring structures as “aromatic” for this exact, historical reason – when early chemists first isolated them, they noticed their distinctive scents.

Eugenol is an aromatic compound, both in terms of chemistry and fragrance (image source)

In fact there are several groups of molecules in chemistry that we tend to think of as particularly fragrant. There are esters (think nail polish and pear drops), linear terpenes (citrus, floral), cyclic terpenes (minty, woody), amines (fishy, rot) and the aromatics I’ve just mentioned.

But back to eugenol: it’s a yellowish, oily liquid that can be extracted from plants such as nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, basil and bay leaves. This might give you an idea of its scent, which is usually described as “spicy” and “clove-like”.

Not surprisingly, it turns up in perfumes, and also flavourings, since smell and flavour are closely linked. It’s also a local antiseptic and anaesthetic – you may have used some sort of eugenol-based paste, or perhaps just clove oil, if you’ve ever had a tooth extracted.

Plants, of course, don’t go to the trouble and biological expense of making these chemicals just so that humans can walk past and say, “ooh, that smells nice!” No, the benefit for the plant is in attracting insects, which (hopefully) help with pollination. Which explains why my butterflies like the flowers so much. (Another butterfly pic? Oh well, since you insist.) Eugenol, it turns out, is particularly attractive to various species of orchid bee, which use it to synthesise their own pheromones. Nature’s clever, isn’t she?

By the way, notice I mentioned anaesthetics back there? Eugenol turns out to be too toxic to use for this in large quantities, but the study of it did lead to the development of the widely-used drug propofol which, sadly, is pretty important right now – it’s used to sedate mechanically ventilated patients, such as those with severe COVID-19 symptoms. You may have seen some things in the news earlier this year about anaesthetic supply issues, precisely for this reason.

Isoeugenol has the same “backbone” as eugenol, with just a difference to the position of the C=C bond on the right. (image source)

Back in that list of chemical names, you’ll see “eugenol” forming parts of other names, for example isoeugenol. This points back to a time when chemicals tended to be named based on their origins. Eugenol took its name from the tree from which we get oil of cloves, Eugenia, which was in turn named after Prince Eugene of Savoy – a field marshal in the army of the Holy Roman Empire. And then other molecules with the same “backbone” were given the same name with prefixes and suffixes added on to describe their differences. As I said in my last post, this sort of naming system it was eventually replaced with more consistent rules, but a lot of these older substances have held onto their original names.

Still, regardless of what we call the chemicals, the flowers smell delightful. I’m off to replenish the vase on my desk while I still can. Roll on May, vaccines and (hopefully) lockdown easing!

Take care and stay safe.

*it’s even been suggested dogs’ super-powered sense of smell might be able to detect COVID-19 infections.

If you’re studying chemistry, have you got your Pocket Chemist yet? Why not grab one? It’s a hugely useful tool, and by buying one you’ll be supporting this site – it’s win-win! If you happen to know a chemist, it would make a brilliant stocking-filler! As would a set of chemistry word magnets!

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. Content is © Kat Day 2021. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. If you enjoy reading my blog, and especially if you’re using information you’ve found here to write a piece for which you will be paid, please consider buying me a coffee through Ko-fi using the button below.
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Want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not check out my fiction blog: the fiction phial.

 

One Flash of Light, One Vision: Carrots, Colour and Chemistry

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“White” light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow.

Sometimes you have one of those weeks when the universe seems to be determined to yell at you about a certain thing. That’s happened to me this week, and the shouting has been all about light and vision (earworm, anyone?).

I started the week writing about conjugated molecules and UV spectrometry for one project, was asked a couple of days ago if I’d support a piece of work on indicators for the RSC Twitter Poster Conference that’s happening from 2-3rd March, and then practically fell over a tweet by Dr Adam Rutherford about bacteria that photosynthesise from infrared light in a hydrothermal vent*.

Oh well, who am I to fight the universe?

Light is awesome. The fact that we can detect it is even awesome-er. The fact that we’ve evolved brains clever enough built all sorts of machines to measure other kinds of light that our puny human eyes cannot detect is, frankly, astonishing.

The electromagnetic spectrum covers all the different kinds of light. (Image source)

Let’s start with some basics. You probably met the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum at some point in school. Possibly a particularly enthusiastic physics teacher encouraged you to come up with some sort of mnemonic to help you remember it. Personally I like Rich Men In Vegas Use eXpensive Gadgets, but maybe that’s just me.

The relevant thing here is that the EM spectrum covers all the different wavelengths of light. Visible light, the stuff that’s, well, visible (to our eyes), runs from about 400 to 700 nanometres.

A colour wheel: when light is absorbed, we see the colour opposite the absorbed wavelengths. (Image source)

Now, we need another bit of basic physics (and biology): we see light when it enters our eyes and strikes our retinas. We see colours when only certain wavelengths of light make it into our eyes.

So-called “white” light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow. Take one or more of those colours away, and we see what’s left.

For example, if something looks red, it means that red light made it to our eyes, which in turn means that, somewhere along the way, blue and green were filtered out.

(Before I go any further, there are actually several causes of colour, but I’m about to focus on one in particular. If you really want to know more, there’s this book, although it is a tad expensive…)

Back to chemistry. Certain substances absorb coloured light. We know them as pigments. Carrots are orange, for example, largely because they contain a pigment called beta-carotene (or β-carotene). This stuff appears, to our eyes, as red-orange, and the reason for that is that it absorbs green-blue light, the wavelengths around 400-500 nm.

β-Carotene is a long molecule with lots of C=C double bonds. (Image source.)

Why does it absorb light at all? Well, β-carotene is a really long molecule, with lots of C=C double bonds. These bonds form what’s called a conjugated system. Without getting into the complexities of molecular orbital theory, that means the double bonds alternate along the chain, and they basically overlap and… smoosh into one long thing. (Look, as the saying goes, “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” – it’ll do for now.)

When molecules with conjugated systems are exposed to electromagnetic light, they absorb it. Specifically, they absorb in the ultraviolet region – the wavelengths between about 200 and 400 nanometres. Here’s the thing, though, those wavelengths are right next to the violet end of the visible spectrum – that’s why it’s called ultraviolet after all.

Molecules with really long conjugated systems start to absorb in the coloured light region, as well. And because they’re absorbing violet and blue, possibly a smidge of green, they look… yup! Orangey, drifting into red.

So now you know why carrots are orange. Most brightly coloured fruit, of course, is that way to attract animals and birds to eat it, and thus spread its seeds. As fruit ripens, it usually changes colour, making it stand out better against green foliage and easier to find. This is the link with indicators that I mentioned at the start: many fruits contain anthocyanin pigments, and these often have purple-red colours in neutral-acidic environments, and yellow-green at the more alkaline end. In other words, the colour change is quite literally an indicator of ripeness.

But the bit of the carrot that we usually eat is underground, right? Not particularly easy to spot, and they don’t contain seeds anyway. Why are carrots bright orange?

Modern carrots are mostly orange, but purple and yellow varieties also exist.

Well, they weren’t. The edible roots of wild plants almost certainly started out as white or cream-coloured, as you might expect for something growing underground, but the carrots which were first domesticated and farmed by humans in around 900 CE were, most probably, purple and yellow.

As carrot cultivation became popular, orange roots began to appear in Spain and Germany in the 15th/16th centuries. Very orange carrots, with high levels of β-carotene, appeared from the 16th/17th centuries and were probably first cultivated in the Netherlands. Some have theorised that they were particularly selected for to honour William of Orange, but the evidence for this seems to be a bit slight. Either way, most modern European carrots do descend from a variety that was originally grown in the Dutch town of Hoorn.

In other words, brightly-coloured carrots are a mutation which human plant breeders selected for, probably largely for appearances.

But wait! There was an advantage for humans, too – even if we didn’t realise it straight away. β-carotene (which, by the way, has the E number E160a – many natural substances have E numbers, they’re nothing to be frightened of) is broken up in our intestines to form vitamin A.

Vitamin A is essential for good eye health.

Vitamin A, like most vitamins, is actually a group of compounds, but the important thing is that it’s essential for growth, a healthy immune system and – this is the really clever bit – good vision.

We knew that. Carrots help you see in the dark, right?

Hah. Well. The idea that carrot consumption actually improves eyesight seems to be the result of a World War II propaganda campaign. During the Blitz, the Royal Air Force had (at that time) new, secret radar technology. They didn’t want anyone to know that, of course, so they spread the rumour that British pilots could see exceptionally well in the dark because they ate a lot of carrots, when the truth was that those pilots were actually using radar.

But! It’s not all a lie – there is some truth to it! Our retinas, at the back of our eyes, have two types of light-sensitive cells. Cone cells help us distinguish colours, while rod cells help us detect light in general.

In those rod cells, a molecule called 11-cis-retinal is converted into another molecule called rhodopsin. This is really light-sensitive. When it’s exposed to light it photobleaches (stops being able to fluoresce), but then regenerates. This process takes about thirty minutes, and is a large part of the reason it takes a while for your eyes to “get used to the dark.”

Guess where 11-cis-retinal comes from? Yep! From vitamin A. Which is why one of the symptoms of vitamin A deficiency is night blindness. So although eating loads of carrots won’t give you super-powered night vision, it does help to maintain vision in low light.

Our brain interprets electrical signals as vision.

How do these molecules actually help us to see? Well, when rhodopsin is exposed to light, the molecule changes, which ultimately results in an electrical signal being transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain, which interprets it as vision!

In summary, not only is colour all about molecules, but our whole visual system depends on some clever chemistry. I told you chemistry was cool!

Just gimme fried chicken 😉

*Ah. I sort of ran out of space for the weird hydrothermal bacteria thing. At least one of the relevant molecules seems to be another carotenoid, probably chlorobactene. The really freaking amazing thing is that there seems to be an absorption at 775 nm, which is beyond red visible light and into the infrared region of the EM spectrum. Maybe more on this another day…

If you’re studying chemistry, have you got your Pocket Chemist yet? Why not grab one? It’s a hugely useful tool, and by buying one you’ll be supporting this site – it’s win-win! If you happen to know a chemist, it would make a brilliant stocking-filler! As would a set of chemistry word magnets!

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. Content is © Kat Day 2021. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. If you enjoy reading my blog, and especially if you’re using information you’ve found here to write a piece for which you will be paid, please consider buying me a coffee through Ko-fi using the button below.
Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not check out my fiction blog: the fiction phial.

 

A natural remedy that’s full of chemicals?

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Blossoms

The summer holidays are here! A time when parents of small children find themselves exploring every park in their local vicinity, quite probably several times (whilst hoping against hope that it doesn’t rain). On just such a quest myself, I recently visited one particular park that was filled with a gorgeous smell.

What was it? A bit of sniffing around quickly identified this tree. Now, I am not a botanist (or even much of a gardener), so I immediately resorted to the rather wonderful Seek app by iNaturalist, which uses some very clever image recognition software to identify plants and animals (disclaimer: accuracy is not guaranteed — don’t eat anything based on this app!)

Seek told me that this was a lime tree, or a linden (genus Tilia). A bit of cross-referencing (thanks Dad!) suggested that it had identified the tree correctly. It’s not an uncommon plant: you’ll probably come across it yourself if you go looking (or smelling).

The name ‘linden’ was more familiar to me. The wood is soft and easily worked, and is used to make musical instruments because it has good acoustic properties. It’s also used to make wooden blinds and other pieces of furniture because it’s lightweight, stable, and holds stains and finishes well.

Linden blossoms can be used to make tea.

But let’s go back to the flowers and their delicious scent. The tree blooms during July and August in the Northern hemisphere. The flowers are sometimes described as mucilaginous — which is a fabulous word meaning, basically, thick and sticky. More specifically: “containing a polysaccharide substance that is extracted as a viscous or gelatinous solution and used in medicines and adhesives.”

Linden flowers are a ‘natural remedy’ with a list of applications in herbal medicine as long as your arm. They contain lots of different substances. One that comes up a lot is farnesol, which is actually a type of alcohol. Of course, it’s nothing like the alcohol we’re familiar with from drinks, which is the much simpler ethanol — but it’s important to remember that ‘alcohol’ actually refers to a class of compounds (which, in simple terms, contain an -OH group like the one in the image here) and not a single substance.

The chemical structure of farnesol

Farnesol turns up in lots of essential oils, such as citronella, rose and lemon grass. It’s used in perfumes to enhance floral scents. But plants don’t make substances just to please humans (well, it’s complicated…). It acts as a pheromone for several insects. Sometimes this doesn’t work out so well for the insects, as it confuses their mating behaviour and effectively acts as a natural pesticide. On the other hand, it actively encourages others: bumblebees release farnesol when they return to the hive to spur other bees into action. It’s the bee equivalent of shouting, ‘oi! Move it you lot, pollen this way!’

Farnesol acts as a pheromone for bumblebees.

Linden flowers also contain one of my all-time favourite chemicals, benzaldehyde. That’s the one that smells of almonds and isn’t a deadly cyanide salt. Its delicious almondy-ness is the reason it’s used as a flavouring and scent, but it’s also a starting material for loads of different chemicals, for example the dye malachite green, which is used to give a green colour to leather, fabric and paper. A form of this dye called ‘brilliant green‘ is mixed with a second, violet, dye to make ‘Bonney’s blue,’ a disinfectant dye used to mark skin for surgeries. Benzaldehyde is also used to make styrene, which is of course used to make the well-known packing material, polystyrene.

And these are just a couple of the substances found in those yummy-smelling flowers. They also contain arabinogalactans, uronic acid, tannins, rutin, hyperoside, quercitrin, isoquercitrin, astragalin and others. In short, a veritable cocktail of different chemicals.

So next time you smell the scent of a lovely flower, just think about all the amazing chemical substances the plant is making. All natural, of course!

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. Content is © Kat Day 2019. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. If you enjoy reading my blog, please consider buying me a coffee through Ko-fi using the button below.
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The Chronicles of the Chronicle Flask: 2018

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As has become traditional, I’m finishing off this year with a round-up of 2018’s posts. It’s been a good year: a few health scares which turned out to be nothing much to worry about, one which turned out to be a genuine danger, a couple of cool experiments and some spectacular shiny balls. So without further ado, here we go…

Things were a bit hectic at the start of this year (fiction writing was happening) and as a result January was quiet on the blog. But not on the Facebook page, where I posted a couple of general reminders about the silliness of alkaline diets which absolutely exploded, achieving some 4,000 shares and a reach (so Facebook tells me anyway) of over half a million people. Wow. And then I posted a funny thing about laundry symbols which went almost as wild. It’s a strange world.

February featured BPA: an additive in many plastics.

In February I wrote a piece about BPA (Bisphenol A), which was the chemical scare of the day. There’s always one around January/February time. It’s our penance for daring to enjoy Christmas. Anyway, BPA is a chemical in many plastics, and of course plastic waste had become – and remains – a hot topic. BPA is also used in a number of other things, not least the heat sensitive paper used to produce some shopping receipts. It’s not a harmless substance by any means, but it won’t surprise anyone to learn that the risks had, as is usually the case, been massively overstated. In a report, the European Food Safety Authority said that the health concern for BPA is low at their estimated levels of exposure. In other words, unless you’re actually working with it – in which case you should have received safety training – there’s no need to be concerned.

In March I recorded an episode for the A Dash of Science podcast, and I went on to write a post about VARD, which stands for Verify, Author, Reasonableness and Date. It’s my quick and easy way of fact-checking online information – an increasingly important skill these days. Check out the post for more info.

April ended up being all about dairy and vitamin D.

April was all about dairy after a flare-up on Twitter on the topic, and went on to talk about vitamin D. The bottom line is that everyone in the UK should be taking a small vitamin D supplement between about October and March, because northern Europeans simply can’t make vitamin D3 in their skin during these months (well, unless they travel nearer to the equator), and it’s not a nutrient we can easily get from our food. Are you taking yours?

May featured fish tanks, following a widely reported story about a fish-owner who cleaned out his tank and managed to release a deadly toxin that poisoned his entire family. Whoops. It turns that this was, and is, a real risk – so if you keep fish and you’ve never heard of this before, do have a read!

In June I wrote about strawberries, and did a neat experiment to show that strawberries could be used to make pH indicator. Who knew? You do, now! Check it out if you’re looking for some chemistry to amuse yourself over the holidays (I mean, who isn’t?). Did you know you can make indicators from the leaves of Christmas poinsettia plants, too?

Slime turned up again in July. And December. And will probably keep on rearing its slimy head.

July brought a subject which has turned up again recently: slime. I wrote about slime in 2017, too. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. This time it flared up because the consumer magazine and organisation Which? kept promoting research that, they claimed, showed that slime toys contain dangerous levels of borax. It’s all rather questionable, since it’s not really clear which safety guidelines they’re applying and whether they’re appropriate for slime toys. Plus, the limits that I was able to find are migration limits. In other words, it’s not appropriate to measure the total borax content of the slime and declare it dangerous – they should be looking at the amount of borax which is absorbed during normal use. Unless your child is eating slime (don’t let them do that), they’re never going to absorb enough borax to do them any harm. In other words, it’s a storm in a slimepot.

August was all about carbon dioxide, after a heatwave spread across Europe and there was, bizarrely, a carbon dioxide shortage which had an impact on all sorts of things from fizzy drinks to online shopping deliveries. It ended up being a long-ish post which spanned everything from the formation of the Earth, the discovery of carbon dioxide, fertilisers and environmental concerns.

September featured shiny, silver balls.

In September I turned my attention to a chemical reaction which is still to this day used to coat the inside of glass decorations with a thin layer of reflective silver, and has connections with biochemistry, physics and astronomy. Check it out for some pretty pictures of silver balls, and my silver nitrate-stained fingers.

In October I was lucky enough to go on a ‘fungi forage’ and so, naturally, I ended up writing all about mushrooms. Did you know that a certain type of mushroom can be used to make writing ink? Or that some mushrooms change colour when they’re damaged? No? You should go back and read that post, then! (And going back to April for a moment, certain mushrooms are one of the few sources of vitamin D.)

Finally, November ended up being all about water, marking the 235th anniversary of the day that Antoine Lavoisier formally declared water to be a compound. It went into the history of water, how it was proven to have the formula H2O, and I even did an experiment to split water into hydrogen and oxygen in my kitchen – did you know that was possible? It is!

As December neared, the research for my water piece led me to suggest to Andy Brunning of Compound Interest that this year’s Chemistry Advent might feature scientists from the last 24 decades of chemistry, starting in the 1780s (with Lavoisier and Paulze) and moving forward to the current day. This turned out to be a fantastic project, featuring lots of familiar and not quite so-familiar scientists. Do have a look if you didn’t follow along during December.

And that’s it for this year. I hope it’s been a good one for all my readers, and I wish you peace and prosperity in 2019! Suggestions for the traditional January Health Scare, anyone? (Let’s hope it’s not slime again, I’m getting really tired of that one now…)

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Spectacular Strawberry Science!

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Garden strawberries

Yay! It’s June! Do you know what that means, Chronicle Flask readers? Football? What do you mean, football? Who cares about that? (I jest – check out this excellent post from Compound Interest).

No, I mean it’s strawberry season in the U.K.! That means there will be much strawberry eating, because the supermarkets are full of very reasonably-priced punnets. There will also be strawberry picking, as we tramp along rows selecting the very juiciest fruits (and eating… well, just a few – it’s part of the fun, right?).

Is there any nicer fruit than these little bundles of red deliciousness? Surely not. (Although I do also appreciate a ripe blackberry.)

And as if their lovely taste weren’t enough, there’s loads of brilliant strawberry science, too!

This is mainly (well, sort of, mostly, some of the time) a chemistry blog, but the botany and history aspects of strawberries are really interesting too. The woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca) was the first to be cultivated in the early 17th century, although strawberries have of course been around a lot longer than that. The word strawberry is thought to come from ‘streabariye’ – a term used by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in CE 995.

Woodland strawberries

Woodland strawberries, though, are small and round: very different from the large, tapering, fruits we tend to see in shops today (their botanical name is Fragaria × ananassa – the ‘ananassa’ bit meaning pineapple, referring to their sweet scent and flavour.

The strawberries we’re most familiar with were actually bred from two other varieties. That means that modern strawberries are, technically, a genetically modified organism. But no need to worry: practically every plant we eat today is.

Of course, almost everyone’s heard that strawberries are not, strictly, a berry. It’s true; technically strawberries are what’s known as an “aggregate accessory” fruit, which means that they’re formed from the receptacle (the thick bit of the stem where flowers emerge) that holds the ovaries, rather than from the ovaries themselves. But it gets weirder. Those things on the outside that look like seeds? Not seeds. No, each one is actually an ovary, with a seed inside it. Basically strawberries are plant genitalia. There’s something to share with Grandma over a nice cup of tea and a scone.

Anyway, that’s enough botany. Bring on the chemistry! Let’s start with the bright red colour. As with most fruits, that colour comes from anthocyanins – water-soluble molecules which are odourless, moderately astringent, and brightly-coloured. They’re formed from the reaction of, similar-sounding, molecules called anthocyanidins with sugars. The main anthocyanin in strawberries is callistephin, otherwise known as pelargonidin-3-O-glucoside. It’s also found in the skin of certain grapes.

Anthocyanins are fun for chemists because they change colour with pH. It’s these molecules which are behind the famous red-cabbage indicator. Which means, yes, you can make strawberry indicator! I had a go myself, the results are below…

Strawberry juice acts as an indicator: pinky-purplish in an alkaline solution, bright orange in an acid.

As you can see, the strawberry juice is pinky-purplish in the alkaline solution (sodium hydrogen carbonate, aka baking soda, about pH 9), and bright orange in the acid (vinegar, aka acetic acid, about pH 3). Next time you find a couple of mushy strawberries that don’t look so tasty, don’t throw them away – try some kitchen chemistry instead!

Peonidin-3-O-glucoside is the anthocyanin which gives strawberries their red colour. This is the form found at acidic pHs

The reason we see this colour-changing behaviour is that the anthocyanin pigment gains an -OH group at alkaline pHs, and loses it at acidic pHs (as in the diagram here).

This small change is enough to alter the wavelengths of light absorbed by the compound, so we see different colours. The more green light that’s absorbed, the more pink/purple the solution appears. The more blue light that’s absorbed, the more orange/yellow we see.

Interestingly, anthocyanins behave slightly differently to most other pH indicators, which usually acquire a proton (H+) at low pH, and lose one at high pH.

Moving on from colour, what about the famous strawberry smell and flavour? That comes from furaneol, which is sometimes called strawberry furanone or, less romantically, DMHF. It’s the same compound which gives pineapples their scent (hence that whole Latin ananassa thing I mentioned earlier). The concentration of furaneol increases as the strawberry ripens, which is why they smell stronger.

Along with menthol and vanillin, furaneol is one of the most widely-used compounds in the flavour industry. Pure furaneol is added to strawberry-scented beauty products to give them their scent, but only in small amounts – at high concentrations it has a strong caramel-like odour which, I’m told, can actually smell quite unpleasant.

As strawberries ripen their sugar content increases, they get redder, and they produce more scent

As strawberries ripen their sugar content (a mixture of fructose, glucose and sucrose) also changes, increasing from about 5% to 9% by weight. This change is driven by auxin hormones such as indole-3-acetic acid. At the same time, acidity – largely from citric acid – decreases.

Those who’ve been paying attention might be putting a few things together at this point: as the strawberry ripens, it becomes less acidic, which helps to shift its colour from more green-yellow-orange towards those delicious-looking purpleish-reds. It’s also producing more furaneol, making it smell yummy, and its sugar content is increasing, making it lovely and sweet. Why is all this happening? Because the strawberry wants (as much as a plant can want) to be eaten, but only once it’s ripe – because that’s how its seeds get dispersed. Ripening is all about making the fruit more appealing – redder, sweeter, and nicer-smelling – to things that will eat it. Nature’s clever, eh?

There we have it: some spectacular strawberry science! As a final note, as soon as I started writing this I (naturally) found lots of other blogs about strawberries and summer berries in general. They’re all fascinating. If you want to read more, check out…

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The Chronicles of the Chronicle Flask: 2017

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We’ve made it! Not only to 2018 (which was starting to look doubtful earlier in the year), but also to the Chronicle Flask’s 100th post. Which doesn’t seem that many, really, but since posts on here frequently run to 1500 words, that adds up to a rather more impressive-sounding 150,000 words or so. I mean, that’s like… half a Brandon Sanderson novel. Oh.

Anyway, it’s time for a yearly round-up. Here goes!

Last January I began with a post about acrylamide. We’d all been enjoying lots of lovely crispy food over Christmas; it was time to tell us about the terrible dangers of such reckless indulgence. The newspapers were covered with pictures of delicious-looking chips, toast and roast potatoes alongside scary headlines such as:  “Crunchy toast could give you cancer, FSA warns”. The truth was not quite so dramatic. Acrylamide does form when foods are cooked to crispiness, and it is potentially harmful, but the quantities which form in food are tiny, and very unlikely to cause you any serious harm unless you literally live on nothing but burnt toast. The FSA (Food Standards Agency) hadn’t significantly revised their guidelines, it turned out, but were in fact only suggesting that the food industry should be mindful of acrylamide levels in food and seek to reduce them as much as possible. That wouldn’t have made for quite such a good “your food is going to killllll you!” story though, I suppose.

In February the spikey topic of vaccination came up. Again. Vaccines are awesome. They protect us from deadly diseases. No, I don’t want to hear any nonsense about “Big Pharma“, and I definitely don’t want to hear how “natural immunity” is better. It’s not. At best, it might provide a similar level of protection (but not in every case), but it comes with having to suffer through a horrible, dangerous disease, whereas vaccination doesn’t. It ought to be a no-brainer. Just vaccinate your kids. And yourself.

It was Red Nose Day in the UK in March, which brought some chemistry jokes. Turns out all the best ones aren’t gone, after all. Did you hear about the PhD student who accidentally cooled herself to absolute zero? She’s 0K now.

April brought a post which ought to have been an April Fool’s joke, but wasn’t. Sceptics often point out that homeopathy is just sugar and water, but the trouble is, sometimes, it’s not. There’s virtually no regulation of homeopathy. As far as I’ve been able to establish, no one tests homeopathic products; no one checks the dilutions. Since a lot of the starting materials are dangerously toxic substances such as arsenic, belladona, lead and hemlock, this ought to worry people more than it does. There has been more than one accidental poisoning (perhaps most shockingly, one involving baby teething products). It really is time this stuff was banned, maybe 2018 will be the year.

In May I turned to something which was to become a bit of a theme for 2017: alkaline water. It’s not so much that it doesn’t do anything (although it really doesn’t), more the fact that someone is charging a premium for a product which you could literally make yourself for pennies. It’s only a matter of dissolving a pinch of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) in some water.

June brought a selection of periodic tables because, well, why not? This is a chemistry blog, after all! And now we’ve finally filled up period seven they do have a rather elegant completness. 2019, by the way, has just been announced as the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, to coincide with IUPAC’s 100th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of Mendeelev’s discovery of periodicity (his presentation, The Dependence Between the Properties of of the Atomic Weights of the Elements, was made on 6th March 1869). Looks like 2019 will be an exciting year for chemists!

In July it was back to the nonsense of alkaline diets again, when Robert O. Young was finally sentenced to 3 years, 8 months in custody for conning vulnerable cancer patients into giving him large sums of money for ineffective and dangerous treatments. Good. Moving on.

August brought me back to a post that I’d actually started earlier in the year when I went to a March for Science event in April. It was all about slime, and August seemed like a good time to finally finish it, with the school holidays in full swing – what could be more fun on a rainy day at home than making slime? Slime was a bit of a 2017 craze, and there have been a few stories featuring children with severely irritated skin. But is this likely to be caused by borax? Not really. Turns out it’s actually very safe. Laundry detergents in general, not so much. In short, if you want to make slime the traditional way with PVA glue and borax, fill your boots. (Not really – your parents will be uninpressed.)

In September it was back to quackery: black salve. A nasty, corrosive concoction which is sold as a cancer cure. It won’t cure your cancer. It will burn a nasty great big hole in your skin. Do not mess with this stuff.

October carried on in a similar vein, literally. This time with a piece about naturopaths recommending hydrogen peroxide IVs as a treatment for lots of things, not least – you guessed it – cancer. Yes, hydrogen peroxide. The stuff you used to bleach hair. Intraveneously. Argh.

The puking pumpkin!

The end of the month featured a far better use for hydrogen peroxide, that of the puking pumpkin. Definitely one to roll out if, for any reason, you ever find yourself having to demonstrate catalysis.

November brought us, somewhat unseasonally, to tomatoes. Where is the best place to store them? Fridge or windowsill? Turns out the answer involves more chemistry than you might have imagined.

And then, finally, December. Looking for a last-minute Christmas gift? Why not buy a case of blk water? I mean, other than it’s an exorbitantly priced bottle of mysterious black stuff which doesn’t do any of the things it claims to do, and might actually get its colour from coal deposits, that is.

And that, dear friends and followers, is it for 2017! Happy New Year! Remember to be sceptical when the inevitable “deadly food” story appears in a few weeks….

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In the fridge or on the windowsill: where’s the best place to keep tomatoes?

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Fresh fruit and vegetables are great, but where’s the best place to store them?

I’ve mentioned before that my Dad is a professional plant-wrangler (if you’ve never read the electric daisies post, do go and have a look – it’s a little-read favourite) and he often brings me home-grown fruit and vegetables.

What follows is an inevitable disagreement about storage, specifically, my habit of putting everything in the fridge.

In my defence, modern houses rarely have pantries (boo) and we don’t even have a garage. We do have a shed, but it’s at the bottom of our poorly-lit, somewhat muddy garden. Do I want to traipse out there on a cold, dark, autumn evening? No, I do not. So the fabled “cool, dark place” is a bit of problem. My fridge is cool and dark, I have argued, but here’s the thing – turns out, it’s too cool. And quite probably too dark.

This I have learned from the botanist James Wong (@botanygeek on Twitter), whose talk I attended on Monday this week at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. James, it turns out, had a rather similar argument with his Mum, particularly regarding tomatoes.

We should’ve listened to out parents, because they were right. A lot of fruit and vegetables really are better stored outside of the fridge, and for tomatoes in particular “better” actually means “more nutritious”.

Lycopene is a very long molecule with lots of double C=C bonds.

Tomatoes, James explained, contain a lot of a chemical called lycopene. It’s a carotene pigment, and it’s what gives tomatoes their red colour.

Lycopene has lots of double bonds between its carbon atoms which form something chemists call a conjugated system. This has some rather cool properties, one of which is an ability to absorb certain wavelengths of light. Lycopene is especially good at absorbing blue and green wavelengths, leaving our eyes to detect the red light that’s left.

Lycopene absorbs blue and green light, which is why tomatoes appear red.

Tomatoes and lycopene also seem to have a lot of health benefits. There’s some evidence that lycopene might reduce the risk of prostate and other cancers. It also appears to reduce the risk of stroke, and eating tomato concentrate might even help to protect your skin from sun damage (don’t get any ideas, you still need sunblock). Admittedly the evidence is currently a bit shaky – it’s a case of “more research is needed” – but even if it turns out to that the causative relationship isn’t terribly strong, tomatoes are still a really good source of fibre and vitamins A, C and E. Plus, you know, they taste yummy!

But back to the fridge. Surely they will keep longer in the fridge, and the low temperatures will help to preserve the nutrients? Isn’t that how it works?

Well, no. As James explained, once tomatoes are severed from the plant they have exactly one purpose: to get eaten. The reason, from the plant’s point of view, is that the critter which eats them will hopefully wander off and – ahem – eliminate the tomato seeds at a later time, somewhere away from the parent plant. This spreads the seeds far and wide, allowing little baby tomato plants to grow in a nice, open space with lots of water and sun.

For this reason once the tomato fruit falls, or is cut, from the tomato plant it doesn’t just sit there doing nothing. No, it carries on producing lycopene. Or rather, it does if the temperature is above about 10 oC. Below that temperature (as in a fridge), everything more or less stops. But, leave a tomato at room temperature and lycopene levels increase significantly. Plus, the tomato pumps out extra volatile compounds – both as an insect repellant and to attract animals which might usefully eat it – which means… yes: room temperature tomatoes really do smell better. As if that weren’t enough, chilling tomatoes can damage cell membranes, which can actually cause them to spoil more quickly.

In summary, not only will tomatoes last longer out of the fridge, they will actually contain more healthy lycopene!

Anecdotally, once I got over my scepticism and actually started leaving my tomatoes on my windowsill (after years of refrigeration) I discovered that it’s true. My windowsill tomatoes really do seem to last longer than they used to in the fridge, and they almost never go mouldy. Of course, it’s possible that I might not be comparing like for like (who knows what variety of tomato I bought last year compared to this week), but I urge you to try it for yourself.

James mentioned lots of other interesting bits and pieces in his talk. Did you know that sun-dried shiitake mushrooms are much higher in vitamin D? Or that you can double the amount of flavonoid you absorb from your blueberries by cooking them? (Take that, raw food people!) Storing apples on your windowsill is likely to increase the amount of healthy polyphenols in their skin, red peppers are better for you than green ones, adding mustard to cooked broccoli makes it more nutritious, and it would be much better if we bought our butternut squash in the autumn and saved it for Christmas – it becomes sweeter and more flavoursome over time.

In short, fascinating. Who wants to listen to some “clean eater” making it up as they go along when you can listen to a fully-qualified botanist who really knows what he’s talking about? Do check out the book, How to Eat Better, by James Wong – it’s packed full of brilliant tidbits like this and has loads of recipes.

And yes, Dad: you were right.

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Hazardous homeopathy: ‘ingredients’ that ought to make you think twice

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Would you take a medicine made with arsenic? Or deadly nightshade? Lead? Poison ivy?

You’d ask some serious questions first, at least, wouldn’t you? Is it definitely safe? Or, more accurately, are the odds better than even that it will make me better without causing horrible side-effects? Or, you know, killing me?

There ARE medicines that are legitimately made from highly toxic compounds. For example, the poison beloved of crime writers such as Agatha Christie, arsenic trioxide, is used to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia in patients who haven’t responded to other treatments. Unsurprisingly, it’s not without risks. Side-effects are unpleasant and common, affecting about a third of patients who take it. On the other hand, acute promyelocytic leukemia is fatal if untreated. A good doctor would talk this through with a patient, explain both sides, and leave the final choice in his or her properly-informed hands. As always in medicine, it’s a question of balancing risks and benefits.

Would you trust something with no proven benefit and a lot of potential risk? There are, it turns out, a swathe of entirely unregulated mixtures currently being sold in shops and online which clearly feature the substances I listed at the beginning. And more. Because they are all, supposedly, the starting materials in certain homeopathic remedies.

Homeopaths like to use unfamiliar, usually Latin-based, names which somewhat disguise the true nature of their ingredients. Here’s a short, but by no means comprehensive, list. (You might find remedies labelled differently but these are, as far as I can tell, the most common names given to these substances.)

If you haven’t heard of some of these, I do urge you to follow the links above, which will largely take you pages detailing their toxicology. Spoiler: the words “poison”, “deadly” and “fatal” feature heavily. These are nasty substances.

There are some big ironies here, and I’m not referring to the metal. For example, a common cry of anti-vaccinationists is that vaccines contain animal tissues – anything and everything from monkey DNA to dog livers. But many also seem to be keen to recommend homeopaths and courses of homeoprophylaxis – so-called “homeopathic vaccines” – which use bodily fluids such as pus and blood as starting materials.

Now, at this point I’m sure some of you are thinking, hang on a minute: aren’t you always telling us that “the dose makes the poison“? And aren’t homeopathic remedies diluted so much that none of the original substance remains, so they’re just placebos?

Yes, I am, and yes, they are.

Does anyone test homeopathic remedies to make sure there’s nothing in them….?

In THEORY. But here’s the problem: who’s testing these mixtures to make sure that the dilutions are done properly? And how exactly are they doing that (if they are)?

One technique that chemists use to identify tiny quantities of substance is gas chromatography (GC). This is essentially a high-tech version of that experiment you did at school, where you put some dots of different coloured ink on a piece of filter paper and watched them spread up the paper when you put it in some water.

GC analysis is brilliant at identifying tiny quantities of stuff. 10 parts per million is no problem for most detectors, and the most sensitive equipment can detect substances in the parts per billion range. Homeopathy dilutions are many orders of magnitude higher than this (30c, for example, means a dilution factor of 1060), but this doesn’t matter – once you get past 12c (a factor of 1024) you pass the Avogadro limit.

This is because Avogadro’s number, which describes the number of molecules in what chemists call a “mole” of a substance, is 6×1023. For example, if you had 18 ml of water in a glass, you’d have 6×1023 molecules of H2O. So you can see, if you’ve diluted a small sample by a factor of 1024 – more than the total number of molecules of water you had in the first place – the chances are very good that all you have is water. There will be none of the original substance left. (This, by the way, is of no concern to most homeopaths, who believe that larger dilutions magically produce a stronger healing effect.)

What if the sample ISN’T pure water after it’s been diluted?

If you carried out GC analysis of such a sample, you should find just pure water. Indeed, if you DIDN’T find pure water, it should be cause for concern. Potassium cyanide, for example, is toxic at very low levels. The lethal dose is is only 0.2-0.3 grams, and you’d suffer unpleasant symptoms long before you were exposed to that much.

So what if the dilutions somehow go wrong? What if some sample gets stuck in the bottle? Or on the pipette? Or a few dilution steps get skipped for some reason?

Are these largely unregulated companies rigorously quality-checking their remedies?

Well, maybe. It’s possible some producers are testing their raw materials for purity (ah yes, another question: they CLAIM they’re starting with, say, arsenic, but can we be certain?), and perhaps testing the “stability” of their products after certain periods of time (i.e. checking for bacterial growth), but are they running tests on the final product and checking that, well, there’s nothing in it?

And actually, isn’t this a bit of a conflict? If the water somehow “remembers” the chemical that was added and acquires some sort of “vibrational energy”, shouldn’t that show up somehow in GC analysis or other tests? If your tests prove it’s pure water, indistinguishable from any other sample of pure water, then… (at this point homeopaths will fall back on arguments such as “you can’t test homeopathy” and “it doesn’t work like that”. The name for this is special pleading.)

A warning was issued in the U.S. after several children became ill.

Am I scaremongering? Not really. There’s at least one published case study describing patients who suffered from arsenic poisoning after using homeopathic preparations. In January this year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about elevated levels of belladonna (aka deadly nightshade) in some homeopathic teething products. Yes, teething products. For babies. This warning was issued following several reports of children becoming ill after using the products. The FDA said that its “laboratory analysis found inconsistent amounts of belladonna, a toxic substance, in certain homeopathic teething tablets, sometimes far exceeding the amount claimed on the label.”

Now, admittedly, I’m based in the U.K. and these particular teething remedies were never readily available here. But let’s just type “homeopathy” into the Boots.com (the British high-street pharmacy) website and see what pops up… ah yes. Aconite Pillules, 30c, £6.25 for 84.

What happens if you search for “homeopathy” on the Boots.com website?

Have you been paying attention lovely readers? Aconite is…. yes! Monkshood! One of the most poisonous plants in the garden. Large doses cause instant death. Smaller doses cause nausea and diarrhea, followed by a burning and tingling sensation in the mouth and abdomen, possibly muscle weakness, low blood pressure and irregular heartbeat.

I must stress at this point that there is no suggestion, absolutely none whatsoever, that any of the products for sale at Boots.com has ever caused such symptoms. I’m sure the manufacturers check their preparations extremely carefully to ensure that there’s absolutely NO aconite left and that they really are just very small, very expensive, sugar pills.

Well, fairly sure.

In summary, we seem to be in a situation where people who proclaim that rigorously-tested and quality-controlled pharmaceuticals are “toxic” also seem to be happy to use unregulated homeopathic remedies made with ACTUALLY toxic starting materials.

I wonder if the new “documentary” about homeopathy, Just One Drop, which is being screened in London on the 6th of April will clarify this awkward little issue? Somehow, I doubt it. Having watched the trailer, I think it’s quite clear which way this particular piece of film is going to lean.

One last thing. Some homeopathic mixtures include large quantities of alcohol. For example, the Bach Original Flower Remedies are diluted with brandy and contain approximately 27% alcohol (in the interests of fairness, they do also make alcohol-free versions of some of their products and, as I’ve recently learned, they may not be technically homeopathic). Alcohol is a proven carcinogen. Yes, I know, lots of adults drink moderate quantities of alcohol regularly and are perfectly healthy, and the dose from a flower remedy is minuscule, but still, toxins and hypocrisy and all that.

There are cheaper ways to buy brandy than Bach Flower Remedies.

Amusingly, the alcohol in these remedies is described an “inactive” ingredient. It’s more likely to be the only ACTIVE ingredient. And since Flower Remedies retail for about £7 for 20 ml (a mighty £350 a litre, and they’re not even pure brandy) may I suggest that if you’re looking for that particular “medicine” you might more wisely spend your money on a decent bottle of Rémy Martin?

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Is it possible to give up sugar completely?

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It’s January, a month that’s traditionally marked by cold weather, large credit-card bills and, of course, an awful lot of highly questionable health stuff. Juicing, detox, supplements… it’s all good fun. Until someone gets hurt.

"Refined" sugar is almost entirely made up of a molecule called sucrose.

“Refined” sugar is almost entirely made up of a molecule called sucrose.

One substance that regularly gets a bashing is sugar, particularly so-called “refined” sugar. We’re told it’s toxic (it’s not), it’s more addictive than cocaine (it isn’t) and we should definitely all be trying to give it up.

Now, before I go any further with this, a word about healthy eating. I’m not a dietician. I don’t even claim to be a nutritionist (although I could, if I wanted). However, I think I’m on fairly safe ground if I say that we should all be striving for a healthy, balanced diet. That is, a diet containing a broad range of foods, plenty of fruits and vegetables, healthy amounts of protein and some good fats.

A lot of people have diets that fall short of this ideal. Cutting back on foods which contain a lot of added sugar (cakes, chocolate, fizzy drinks, etc) and eating more vegetables and fruits is a good, and sensible, course of action.

The problem is that bit of common-sense advice doesn’t sell books or make an interesting TV show. It’s all a bit boring and, worse, it’s freely available. Compelling entertainment needs to be more exciting, more dramatic, more… extreme.

Which brings us to ITV’s Sugar Free Farm.

Page 81 of the current issue of Radio Times tells us that the celebrities face a "completely sugar-free regime".

Page 81 of the current issue of Radio Times tells us that the celebrities face a “completely sugar-free regime”.

This is actually the second series of this show, which first aired last year. According to the 7-13th January 2017 issue of the Radio Times:

“Seven celebrities who admit to terrible diets succumb to a few weeks of hard farm labour and a completely sugar-free regime (so no white carbs or fruit, let alone chocolate).”

Hm. Now, I’ve written about sugar more than once before, but to save clicking back and forth, here’s another quick summary:

Sugar is not one thing. The chemistry of sugars is quite complicated, but a human being trying to understand the food they eat probably needs to be aware of three main types, namely: glucose, fructose and sucrose.

180px-Glucose_chain_structure

glucose

Glucose is the sugar that all your cells need. Not having enough glucose in your bloodstream is called hypoglycaemia, and the result is seizure, coma and ultimately death. This isn’t a risk for healthy people without pre-existing conditions (like diabetes, for example) because evolution has put some clever safety-nets in place. First, our bodies are extremely efficient at carrying out the necessary chemistry to turn the molecules we eat into the molecules we need. Should that fail, our bodies are very good at storing nutrients to use in times when our diet doesn’t supply them. If you don’t eat glucose, your body will break down other foods to produce it, then it’ll start on your glycogen stores, move on to fat stores, and eventually start breaking down protein (i.e. the stuff in your muscles). This means that unless you stop eating completely for a fairly long period of time, you’ll survive.

Still, I think it’s important to emphasise the point: glucose is essential for life. The suggestion that this substance is “toxic” and thus should be completely eliminated from our diets is really, when you think about it, a bit odd.

Sucrose ("refined sugar") is a unit of glucose joined to a unit of fructose

Sucrose (“refined sugar”) is a unit of glucose joined to a unit of fructose

Ah but, I hear some people saying, no one is saying that glucose is toxic! They’re talking about refined sugar!

Fine. So what’s “refined” sugar? In simple terms, it’s pure sucrose. And sucrose is just a molecule made from a unit of glucose stuck to a unit of fructose. As I said, our bodies are really good at breaking up the molecules we eat into the molecules we need: our cells can’t use sucrose for energy, so all that happens is that it more or less instantly gets broken up into glucose and fructose.

Refined sugar is, basically, half glucose and half fructose, and it’s no more dangerous or “toxic” than either of those substances. And while I’m here, “natural” sugar options are little different: honey, for example, contains similar ratios of fructose and glucose.

200px-Skeletal_Structure_of_D-Fructose

Fructose

Allrighty then, what’s fructose? Fructose is another simple sugar, and it’s the one that plants produce. For that reason it’s sometimes called “fruit sugar”.

Our cells can’t use fructose for energy, either. But, same thing again: if you eat it your body will still use it. In this case, your liver does the heavy lifting; changing fructose into glucose and other substances, some of which are fats. On the one hand, this is a slower process so you don’t get the blood sugar spike with fructose that you get with glucose. On the other, some of the fructose you eat inevitably ends up being converted into fat.

As I mentioned, fructose is the sugar in plants. It’s found in almost all plant-based foods. For example, the USDA food composition database tells us that 100 g of carrots contains about 0.6 g of fructose. Perhaps surprisingly, broccoli contains slightly more: about 0.7 g per 100 g. Iceberg lettuce contains even more, at 1 g per 100 g, whereas green peas contain a mere 0.4 g.

Even a really small glass of fruit juice contains about 150 g.

Even a small serving of fruit juice usually contains at least 150 g.

None of this comes close to fruit. Apples contain about 6 g of fructose per 100 g, grapes 4 g and bananas 5 g. Dried fruit, as you’d expect, has considerably higher amounts by weight – because the water’s gone. Juices have similar amounts of fructose per unit of weight but, of course, you tend to drink a lot more than 100 g of juice at a time.

Now we understand why “Sugar Free Farm” has banned fruit. But this is why I have a problem with the title: you CAN’T eat an entirely “sugar-free” diet, unless all you eat is meat, fish, eggs and dairy products like cream and butter (but not milk, which contains lots of another sugar: lactose). This would be a far from healthy diet, seriously lacking in fibre as well as a host of vitamins and minerals (even “phase 1” or the “induction” period of the controversial Atkins diet isn’t quite this extreme).

The show hasn’t aired yet, and I admit I didn’t watch it last year, so I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing. But I seriously doubt it – it would be unethical and irresponsible. Plus, the words “white carbs” in the listings blurb make me suspicious. Why specify “white”? Are whole grains included? And what about pulses? Whole grain foods might be relatively low in fructose and glucose before you put them in your mouth, but as soon as saliva hits them the starch they contain is broken down into…. glucose. By the time you swallow that chewed-up food, it contains sugar.

In summary, Sugar Free Farm is almost certainly not sugar free. What they appear to have set up is a place where sugars are restricted and foods with added sugar are banned, and then mixed that with lots of outdoor activities (the celebrities are also expected to work on the farm).

Most people would lose weight following such a regime, because it’s likely that calories in are going to be lower than calories out. It’s a simple calorie deficit.

give-up-sugarWhat bothers me is that the show might go on to conclude that we should all “give up” sugar to lose weight – and some people might misinterpret that and end up embarking on an unbalanced, unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable diet – when in fact the results are simply due to calorie deficit.

There’s no need to try to give up sugar. Cut down, yes, but you can eat some sweet foods and still manage a calorie deficit. In fact you probably should: fruit in particular has lots of nutrients, including fibre. Besides, such a diet will probably be a lot more sustainable in the long term.

Unfortunately, “Eat Fewer Calories And Do Some Exercise Farm” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

EDIT, 11th Jan 2017

Well, the first episode aired last night. No, the diet is not “zero sugar”. It’s very low in sugar, yes, but there are sugars. They used milk (contains lactose), ate wholemeal bread, brown rice and oats (all of which are broken down into glucose) and ate a variety of vegetables which, as I mentioned above, all contain small amounts of sugar. In fact, on their very first morning they eat a strange granola mixture made with sweet potato. The USDA food database tells me that sweet potato contains about 0.4 g of fructose, 0.5 g of glucose, 3.3 g of maltose AND 1.4 g of sucrose per 100 g. Yep. Sucrose. The stuff in “refined” sugar.

There was much talk of “detox” and “detoxing” from sugar. Sigh. That’s not a thing. Most worryingly of all, poor Peter Davison (he was “my” Doctor, you know) was carted off in an ambulance on the second day, suffering with dizzy spells. Everyone immediately started talking about how dreadful it was that “sugar” had caused this. There was only one, in passing, comment shown suggesting that perhaps the 65-year-old might have something else wrong with him. In fact, it turned out that he had labyrinthitis, an inner-ear condition. It’s usually viral. It’s not caused by “sugar withdrawal”. I’m sure they’ll make that clear in the next episode, right?

Speaking of which, the celebrities are on Sugar Free Farm for 15 days. A safe rate of weight loss is generally considered to be 0.5-1 kg (or 1-2 lb) a week. So they should lose about 2 kg, or 4 lb, on the outside. A snippet was shown at the end of the program in which Alison Hammond said she was “pleased” she’d lost 8 lbs. Whether that was after two weeks or a shorter period of time wasn’t clear, but either way, it’s a lot. It suggests that her diet is/was too low in calories, particularly considering all the extra physical activity.  Perhaps some of her so-called “sugar withdrawal” symptoms were actually simply due to the fact that she wasn’t consuming enough to keep up with her energy needs?

That aside, the diet they followed did seem to be fairly balanced, with plenty of vegetables and adequate healthy fats and protein. They had all been eating huge quantities of sugary foods beforehand, and cutting down is no bad thing. I’m just skeptical about exactly how much of the bad, and indeed the good, can be pinned on sugar.

Still, it made good telly I suppose.

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