Eat White Sugar, Dummies!

White sugar

We've lost count of how many times our researchers have run across lousy answers at eHow.com. We're pretty certain it's over a thousand, because we have a huge backlog of DotD candidates with URLs in that domain and the Leaf Group's niche sites to which they're being moved. Most of the time the answers suffer from the eHowian's lack of knowledge, but today we'll feature an example of an interesting class of answers: the more or less correct answer to the wrong question. Freelancer Stacy Zogheib's take on the question "What Chemicals Does White Sugar Have?" is a case in point. Rather than providing the simple answer – because it's only one word, and therefore wouldn't meet the site's minimum word count – Stacy wrote a detailed discussion of the process of making white sugar... oops.

The answer, in case anyone's still interested, is that white sugar is 99.96% sucrose.  Zogheib, on the other hand, wants to tell her readers that white sugar is processed using some pretty nasty chemicals, including

Sulfur Dioxide Phosphoric Acid Calcium Hydroxide Polyacrylamides ...all of which, according to Stacy, are horrible poisons and/or carcinogens – except for sulfur dioxide, which is responsible for acid rain. Does that mean white sugar will make your coffee acidic, we wonder? Oh, and she missed diatomaceous earth: again, oops. While Zogheib clearly spent some time rewording a discussion of sugar manufacture, although we found it odd that she did not mention that much much of the white sugar consumed in North America comes from sugar beets, not sugar cane; she still didn't answer the question. Even the granola types of Mother Earth News, in their exposé of the evils of white sugar, don't say that the stuff is full of impurities; just evil.

As is fairly common at the site we alternately call the "mother lode of internet misinformation" and a "major source of internet stupidification," eHow.com's contributor got so caught up in making certain that she met her word count that she didn't answer the question. Nope: the word "sucrose" does not appear within the article (nor does dextrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, maltose, or any other -ose). We think that's more than enough justification for awarding the Dumbass of the Day to Stacy!

copyright © 2016-2022 scmrak

DD - CHEMISTRY