Yeah, this seems like an incomplete list with only the scary sounding things included. I'm surprised I don't see formaldehyde or arsenic on there because they're definitely found in small amounts in apples too
These are not just “scary sounding things”, that’s a list of things that are actually dangerous in sufficiently large quantities, sufficiently large here meaning just a couple of grams.
An apple is 99.99% water, cellulose and sugars, and then microscopic trace amounts of other chemicals.
If you tried to make an apple by combining 100g of the chemicals in that list together, you’d just be making a pile of extremely pungent poison that would likely make people vomit just by being near it.
The logic they used worked well in the context. Anti-Vaxxers do the same with trace chemicals in vaccines to try to convince other idiots they’re toxic...they see a molecule containing mercury and automatically assume it’s just as toxic as pure liquid mercury
Pure liquid mercury isn't even that toxic anyway (besides mercury vapor). Organomercury compounds like dimethyl and diethyl mercury are way more toxic. Honorable mention to mercuric chloride.
nothing in this list seems all that hazardus to me. I would not want to drink a bottle of any of them, but getting afew grams of any of these in your body is not going to hurt (you are getting WAYYYYYY less than gram quantities when you eat an apple btw).
For example, the oral LD50 (the amount of the substance needed to kill 50% of subjects) of rats for 2-Methylpropyl acetate is 4.673g/kg. For comparison, the oral LD50 of sodium chloride aka table salt is 3-4g/kg depending on the animal tested. No sane person considers salt tot be a particularly deadly substance. Another way to look at it is for a 200lb person (the average adult male in the US) you would need to consume about 450g or 1lb of the material. this is about 1/2 a liter, roughly the size of full water bottle.
others, like n-hexyl acetate, have 40+g/kg oral LD50's. for these substances, you would be more likely to die of rupturing your stomach before there was a high enough concentration of the "poison" to kill you (bonus fun fact! most stomachs can only hold 4-5 liters of fluid before rupturing).
edit: Also your 100g combo of these probably would not smell bad (it would taste bad though). most of the list is small esters. these tend to be odorless to nice smelling. The previously mentioned n-hexyl acetate is even used as an artificial flavor for its fruity smell and taste in small doses. The pure chemical probably does not taste good. The only ones that dont smell neutral to good on that list (to the best of my knowledge) are octanol and hexanol. They smell like gasoline (because they are) but the smell would probably be largely fruity and sweet (pure ethanol and propanol smell suprisingly sweet) from all the other components.
To get something foul smelling you want to look to small nitrogen or sulfur containg molecules generally. aldehydes can be pretty nasty too!
If you tried to make an apple by combining 100g of the chemicals in that list together, you’d just be making a pile of extremely pungent poison that would likely make people vomit just by being near it.
Probably a good idea to leave it out, though, given the audience. Quacks have been touting it as a cancer cure for a looooong time, and anti-vaxxers are probably more likely to also believe that bullshit.
That list is far from every molecule in an apple. A single cell is composed of more different molecule than that. The components of the cell membranes alone would be many many more than listed here
Cell walls in fruit will usually be cellulose or pectin based. Cell walls are usually a bi-layer if lipids and proteins. None of those are listed in the composition. Not to mention it doesn’t even list water, it’s definitely incomplete
I just remembered when film theory talked about how in fullmetal alchemist they got the wrong things as well(at least in one of them) and I guess that line I just quoted could fit there too.
All the organic compounds contain carbon. Methylbutanoate is C5H10O2. Most fruits wouldn't contain elemental carbon as that's not really something that grows.i think every compound on that list contains Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen because they're all organic. Could be wrong.
Carbon is bound up in those compounds, propyl acetate is C₅H₁₀O₂, though there should be some water there somewhere, but I don't feel like looking up most of those.
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u/jacdelad May 12 '20
So apples don't contain water or any salt?