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Comment by d-e-r-e-k | Hacker News Reader

While your comment is true, it is reductive. While celery seed does in fact contain nitrates which are turned into nitrites, it’s the next step that’s important. Unlike synthetic sodium nitrite, celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.

The subtle differences in how our bodies process synthetic vs natural ingredients significantly impacts our bodies and health.

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>celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.

This just sounds like post hoc justification. There's hardly any vitamin C in celery seeds[1][2]. Broccoli has 5x the vitamin C per 100g, despite much of it being water. Moreover, if the point is that vitamin C protects against nitrates, why not add vitamin C directly, rather than doing it in a roundabout way by adding celery seeds which also happen to contain vitamin C?

[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170920/nutrients

[2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170379/nutrients

Maybe because people still want to eat food. The culture of trying to re-engineer life is not it.

>The culture of trying to re-engineer life is not it.

What does this even mean? Cured meats (via nitrates or celery seeds) is already an engineered product.

I’m in no way implying or arguing celery seeds contain a great amount of vitamin C. There are of course many foods that contain more vitamin C than celery seeds. I’m stating that the naturally occurring vitamin C in celery seeds is the key difference between natural and synthetic nitrites.

I guess for me it just comes down to going back to basics. Why use multiple synthetic ingredients if a natural alternative exists. There are thousands of synthetic chemicals in the American food supply and we just don’t entirely know how they’re affecting our bodies.

>I’m stating that the naturally occurring vitamin C in celery seeds is the key difference between natural and synthetic nitrites

The original comment was about products being misleadingly labeled "nitrate free". The fact that celery seeds might have some mitigating vitamin C doesn't change this, any more than it would still be misleading to label with synthetic nitrates added as "nitrate free" if they also added vitamin C to it. Therefore I still think the tidbit about celery seeds containing vitamin C is post hoc justification. The rest of your comment also seems to confirm this, you think that celery seeds is intrinsically better than nitrates, because it's "natural".

why have the bacon at all when you could just eat straight protein powder or soylent though?

if you get both the nitrates and vitamin c from the cellery seeds, why bother going through the industrial processes for making the nitrates and vitamic c separate, possibly also from celery seeds, only to put them back together at the end?

It's almost certainly cheaper to synthesize nitrates and vitamin C separately than to farm celery seeds.

>possibly also from celery seeds

It's not. Like MSG (the white crystal kind), vitamin C is produced by microbes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Productio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstein_process

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