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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2509 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 4, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Does anyone know the the vitamin c content of boiled vegetable water? All the studies I find are focusing on the content of the vegetables post-boil, as opposed to the content in the boiled water.

https://healthinasecond.com/wp-content/mediauploads/2016/07/vitamin-table.jpg

My interpretation of what I could find is that vitamin C breaks down in water pretty fast.

Staring at orange juice in confusion...

Googling to try to fix confusion...

Looks like the rate of decay depends very highly on temperature and pH? So in cool acid in a citrus fruit, it's fine; in warm (or boiling!) neutral water in a veggie pot, it's gone?

Yeah, a lot of organic material depends on how its twisted up (conformation), and the shape is governed by a bit from over here being attracted to a bit from over there due to ionic charge, hydrogen bonding, etc.--things that are not standard atom-atom covalent bonds. Those secondary types of linkage either form more easily or get disrupted more easily depending on pH, temperature, and solvent type. Something is "denatured" when its useful twisty conformation is untwisted, which makes it not useful. Depending on the organic material you're talking about, sometimes restoring it to a friendly environment will cause it to re-twist back into its useful conformation, but other times the sticky pieces just glom onto matching sticky bits elsewhere and you just get a mess. (A lot of cooking is based on this process; intentionally denaturing some components of ingredients using acid/heat/water, and then cooling the result into a different state.)

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