The Butter vs. Marjarine debate - Part 1

One of the things I would like to do one day if I ever become a famous (and rich) blogger with plenty of time to do useless things to post on my blog (which isn't likely to happen soon since I tend to leave my blog abandoned for weeks now. Busy me!), is to do little experiments to test out as weird claims made in the numerous chain emails that clutter up my inbox. A good example is the one about the butter vs. marjarine debate , which goes on and on about how crappy marjarine is compared to butter. Supposedly compared to butter, marjarine has less nutritional value, triples the risk of coronary heart disease, was originally used to fatten turkeys but ended up killing them instead, etc, etc.

Unfortunately there is no way I can test any of these claims without doing some elaborate lab tests on the nutritional value of marjarine, or continuously eating it everyday to see if I one day die of heart disease, or go stuff turkeys with marjarine to see if they die. So I'm not going to bother trying to dispute these, unless someone gives me a grant to carry out my experiments (I'd probably use 20% of the money to buy really cheap testing chemicals and equipment while saving the rest for shopping. Bwahaha! Ok, there goes my prospective sponsors...)

But there is one particular statement in the email that reeeaaally gets me questioning the scientific validity of the entire thing:

"Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC."

The part about ONE MOLECULE itself makes the entire sentence meaningless, and if the writer of this email had paid attention in primary school science class, he would realize why. Here's a simple little explanation of what is a molecule to demonstrate my point:


Same as with water, marjarine is made up of molecules, which of course would be a lot more complex. Lots of molecules of marjarine would just make lots of marjarine. So if you have one molecule more of marjerin, it just means you have an itty bitty bit more marjarine. Having more or less molecules doesn't change marjerin into something else like plastic!

My suspicion is that the fella who wrote this email was suffering from a bout of grammatical incorrect-ness, and what he was 'probably' trying to say is "The molecular structure of marjarine is ONE ATOM away from being PLASTIC".

But I mean, if you really wanna go round spamming people with emails like these and freaking people out, then at least get your sentences and science terms straight. -_-

And even IF the writer hadn't fuddled up his words, the statement STILL isn't a valid point against marjarine, because lots of stuff in this world has similar molecular structures but their chemical properties are different, but it doesn't mean if one thing is hazardous, the other thing with a similar molecular structure is equally as hazardous.

Case in point, water vs. hydrogen peroxide. Chemical formula for water is H2O (everyone remember my little lesson up there, I hope!), whereas hydrogren peroxide has a chemical formula of H2O2. Which means, only one additional oxygen atom is in each molecule of hydrogen peroxide. Yet we all know clean water is safe for consumption, but if you drink pure or concentrated hydrogen peroxide solution, you are for a bout of mouth blistering, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and probably whole lot of other nasty things. Not quite my drink of choice.

So yeah, I'm really quite bugged by that one little sentence. But yet another part of the infamous email that I was itching to debunk. But since this post is long enough already, I shall continue this in part 2!

The Butter vs. Marjarine debate - Part 1