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Toggle comments on "All natural food" as an constrained optimisation problem - Less Wrong
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This has a low false negative rate, which is great from a health perspective, but be aware that you will get a lot of false positives using the 'recognizable ingredients' heuristic. Technical names can be fairly intimidating, even for ingredients that you'll find in a home garden. If you notice the same chemical appearing in many places (i.e. Tryptophan), then it might be worth looking it up with a focus in natural occurrences; a mental bank of 'safe' technical-sounding ingredients might increase your dietary range pretty substantially without increasing health risks much at all.
In that case, why are they using the technical name and not the name of the garden plant?
Because the plant itself is not an ingredient, in most cases. But many of the artificially synthesized compounds are identical at the molecular level to those found in garden plants.
This joke is an informative way of putting it.
Yes, but that means they're not including any of the other things that would be in the plants. Also just compounds in plants tend to be embedded in complex structures, that the artificially synthesized compounds aren't.
Ok, so if I were to give you, say all the ingredients listed for an egg, could you make one for me?
Almost certainly not. Could you explain why you think this is a meaningful criterion for health?
I don't know of any evidence supporting the idea that a chemical ingredient becomes more or less healthy if consumed in the presence of other chemical ingredients (except in terms of long-term nutrient deficiencies). Similarly with the arrangement of these ingredients into any larger structure. Sugars can be simple or complex, and these do have dramatic differences in health outcomes, but this is a difference at the molecular level and has little to do with whether they are embedded in a particular pattern. The human digestive system works by breaking down these arrangements, starting with basic chewing, and so I would be surprised to see structural associations as having much in the way of consequence.
(One possible exception in the form of dietary fiber, but as the indigestible portion of our food, it's a bit of a special case.)
Have you looked at these issues at all? It is fairly common that the presence of one substance makes another more bio-available. Pellagra being the most famous example.
Yep!