Pseudoscience in advertising that came to mind from a biology test question

There is a question in the unit test paper that requires students to judge whether the given advertising slogans are accurate and scientific.

① This food is made from pure natural grains and does not contain any sugar. Diabetics can also eat it in large quantities with confidence.

② This drink contains a variety of inorganic salts, which can effectively replenish the energy consumed by the human body during exercise.

③This nutritional product contains all 21 essential amino acids needed by the human body.

④ This oral liquid is rich in calcium, iron, zinc, selenium and other trace elements.

What are some obvious scientific errors?

This question is very simple for high school students who have learned the corresponding knowledge. The four statements are not scientific.

In the first sentence, cereals contain a lot of starch, and starch is a polysaccharide.

In the second sentence, inorganic salts are inorganic substances and have no function of replenishing energy.

In the third sentence, there are currently only 8 known essential amino acids required by the human body, and there are 13 other types that can be synthesized by the human body and are non-essential amino acids.

In the fourth sentence, calcium is a macroelement rather than a trace element.

In life, we often see advertisements about health care, medicine, aesthetics, nutrition, etc. In these advertisements, manufacturers make good use of biological knowledge. But are these products really as good as advertised?

Below, we will use the knowledge of high school biology to debunk the pseudoscience in several advertisements.

①Nucleic acid health products

"Nucleic acid" is a macromolecule. After macromolecules enter the human body, they must be hydrolyzed into small molecules before they can be absorbed by the body. Obviously, it is better to supplement nucleic acid than to directly supplement it. Small molecules of nucleotides.

In fact, we do not need to supplement additional nucleic acids, because the food we usually eat already contains enough nucleic acids, and nucleic acids can be used many times in the human body, so deliberately supplementing them is purely waste.

②Oxygen supplementation and health care product advertisements

Xiao Hong, a master's degree from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of "Family Medicine", believes that healthy people do not lack oxygen.

Too much oxygen can also cause oxygen poisoning. Excessive oxygen absorption leads to an increase in free oxygen ions and hydrogen peroxide in the body, and these substances themselves cause many kinds of damage to the physiological functions of the human body.

③Skin care product advertisements

Under normal circumstances, the "nutrients" added to cosmetics cannot enter the skin.

The nutrients required for the growth and metabolism of the epidermis are obtained from the blood in the dermis. Therefore, the nutrients needed by the skin are mainly obtained internally, rather than through cosmetics used on the skin surface, so we should be cautious when choosing various nutritional cosmetics. Nutrients added in large quantities in skin care products, no matter what essence or nutrients, are a burden as long as the skin cannot absorb them.

Today, a large number of advertisers try to make their products more persuasive by adding pseudoscientific information to their ads, taking advantage of the fact that the public is confused about some technical terms.

It is not difficult to find that advertisers add many professional terms in biology and some chemical symbols into advertisements to make people feel very professional and scientific.

We can find out through the study of high school biology knowledge that many advertisements are vague in concept, tampering with others, and many are just to fool people.

Biology is the closest to life. As long as we have this awareness and learn to identify pseudoscience in life, we will save a lot of wasted money and reduce a lot of anxiety.