“You Won’t Believe Where Silly Putty Is Hiding In Your Food.” So begins one of the Food Babe’s attempts to shock us about how the food industry is poisoning us. This time the target of the wild rant is the oil that McDonald’s and other fast food establishment use for frying. That’s where Silly Putty is lurking, apparently just waiting to gum up our insides. Except that it’s not. There is no Silly Putty in oil or in anything that we eat. What we have here is another example of classic vaniharism.
Frying oil does sometimes contain polydimethylsiloxane , a chemical with a name that twists Vani’s tongue and is therefore deemed to be dangerous. At a concentration of 2 parts per million it prevents the oil from foaming over. Polydimethylsiloxane is a “silicone” which is a general term for compounds that contain -Si-O-Si- atom groupings in their molecular structure. But the properties of silicones vary depending on their specific structure. To use an analogy, “alcohol” is a general term for compounds that have the –O-H grouping, but there is a huge difference in the toxicity of ethanol, CH3CH2OH, which is what we drink, and methanol, CH3OH, which is lethal if consumed.
Polydimethylsiloxane is a clear liquid that when reacted with boric acid changes into a solid that we know as Silly Putty. This happens because the long molecules of polydimethylsiloxane are linked together iby boron into a three dimensional array with totally novel properties. This “cross-linked” silicone polymer is not present in any food. And the polydimethylsiloxane that is present is inert and non-toxic. Furthermore, even if Silly Putty were present, it wouldn’t be a problem in terms of toxicity. Untold number of kids have smeared it all over their face and mouth with no consequence. Of course one of Vani’s favourite fright techniques is to connect some ingredient in our food supply to a non-food use and imply that it is therefore dangerous. Just imagine the fuse she would try to light on learning that the glycerol added to breakfast cereals as a humectants is also used to make nitroglycerine.
