Talk:Preservative

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Correct information

Took following phrase out:

note on security: can anybody edit this? How do you know the information given here is correct or even honest?

Your question is the same as "how can you trust what someone is saying or has written in a book, or a newspaper?" You use some other sources to see if there is a concensus on the specific topic. Search wikipedia for a subject you think you know enough about and read it. What do you think about the content ? G.K.

Health Concerns

I am a science graduate and read this section. It has too many personal opinions, such as 'major studies' or 'become controversial'. The references given were often news articles, which are NOT scientific sources. I have removed large sections of the text, but I expect them to return. Please can an expert come and sort it out. My feeling is that the person who wrote it has a clear agenda against preservatives citing very dubious sources to prop up the claim they are unhealthy, when there is no proper conclusive evidence to support this. I did leave in section saying that they may cause allergy, or anaphylactic shock... as hypersensitivity is always likely when a human ingests peptides so almost goes without saying. I feel I improved it slightly, but much more work needs to be done. Its important misinformation is not given to the public. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.105.76.223 (talk) 13:33, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sulfites

Reference to 'sulfites (sulfur dioxide, sodium bisulfate, potassium hydrogen sulfate)' are incorrect. Correct would be 'sulfites (sulfur dioxide, sodium bisulfite, potassium hydrogen sulfite)'. The latter two are lower oxidation states of sulfur, and act as antioxidants. The sulfates are not antioxidants. User: Ian H. Gibson

ok here is my opinion. preservatives are ok. but they need to make it harm free so that it cant do anything bad to harm our bodies. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.131.194.158 (talk) 08:57, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sulfur Dioxide not a preservative? You might want to further read there buddy.

Here read this.

As a preservative

Sulfur dioxide is sometimes used as a preservative for dried apricots, dried figs, and other dried fruits owing to its antimicrobial properties, and it is sometimes called E220 when used in this way. As a preservative, it maintains the colorful appearance of the fruit and prevents rotting. It is also added to sulfured molasses. ~Wikipedia — Preceding unsigned comment added by StormKat34 (talk • contribs) 02:35, 26 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In the table it says ”Sulfites E220-E227”. It should be E220-E228 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.52.32.111 (talk) 13:04, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Incomprehensible

This is complete incomprehendable, crap, please simplify the article to make it very understandable for the average human.

Incomprehensible? That's because you're an uneducated Liberal.~StormKat34

Contraception

In various foreign languages, preservative is also a name given to contraception, such as condoms. I'm not sure if such a term has ever been used in English, but it might be helpful to point out that this is a common false friend that occurs a lot in erroneous translations. ADM (talk) 13:04, 7 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I just added a "not to be confused with" in any case :) --Λeternus ^(talk) 14:40, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Natural food preservatives....

See Talk:Sodium benzoate#Info about the topic of natural food preservatives --222.67.213.216 (talk) 08:55, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Salts uses.

Salt is a natural preservative. Enough to preserve would be I expct a full pack. Equivalent now of four to five bags of todays packs of salt. that is an estimate of course. As a condiment it is added as a flavour or additive to food. Also acts to preserve food. such as fish when fishermen bring their catch in from their days out fishing. and adds the fish to crates or vats. The salt can be dissolved and dried out. many schools test this theory also labroratory scientists.

Editing redundancies

There are a couple of redundant phrases that I've altered, but I am open to input if people think these statements could be further improved. I've changed the opening sentence from A preservative is a natural or synthetic substance or chemical that is added to products... to A preservative is a naturally occurring or synthetic substance that is added to products... In this case chemical and substance are effectively synonymous, and I fear that chemical is used here to capitalize on the common fear and misconception that chemicals are always bad. However, if people feel that chemical should be retained, that's fine, but I don't think we need to use both chemical and substance since in this instance they basically mean the same thing.

I also changed the second sentence of the Preservatives in food section from Preservatives may be antimicrobial preservatives, which inhibit the growth of bacteria and fungi and mold growth... to Preservatives may be antimicrobial preservatives, which inhibit the growth of bacteria or fungi, including mold... and added links to fungi and mold. Mold are fungi, so I felt this was redundant. Any thoughts? I think this article needs a lot of work but I just thought I would fix a couple of small things for now. Myceteae (talk) 23:32, 12 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You may know their relation already, not everyone reading will know that yet. Mold seems a more commonly used term, a possibility is to have both mentioned and only one link Whitebox (talk) 15:20, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Health Concerns -- Misleading

I added the tag "misleading." I clicked on the second link given in the citation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17825405

From reading the abstract, it appears that this study doesn't conclusively prove that the preservatives caused the hyperactivity. In this study, the hyperactivity could have been caused by either the artificial color or the preservative.

The sentence in the article, as written, is technically correct, but misleading:

"children exhibited increased hyperactivity after consuming drinks containing sodium benzoate or artificial food color and additives."

This sentence misleads the reader to think that preservatives cause hyperactivity. Just by virtue of including this sentence in an article about preservatives, the reader's attention is drawn to the preservatives in this sentence.

Really, this study shouldn't even be mentioned in an article about preservatives, because it doesn't prove anything that is specific to preservatives.

Split the content?

The article now focusses almost entirely on food preservation. Would it make more sense to move the food preservation content to food preservation, which currently redirects to this title? This would be consistent with the way that the topic of wood preservation is handled: a brief summary in this article and a full separate article for details. ChemNerd (talk) 11:25, 14 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article is very very broad. I dont know what to do really. It could almost become a disambiguation page that directs readers to different types of preservation. We have what looks like a good article Food preservation that overlaps heavily. --Smokefoot (talk) 14:08, 14 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I completely missed the fact that there was an existing article. In my first comment I thought I was linking to the redirect at food preservative, not the existing article at food preservation. Thanks Smokefoot for working on merging the similar content from the two articles. ChemNerd (talk) 19:22, 14 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for raising this issue in the first place. I hope that I did not go overboard. In any case, I think that what most readers want is a site that lists food additives and some commentary on each. That remains to be done. --Smokefoot (talk) 21:23, 14 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Based on the lead, this seems to the a WP:Broad-concept article, but it is lacking on information about preservatives that are not intended for food. I think that the specifics on food preservatives belong in food preservation, while leaving general coverage about what is a food preservative and general mechanisms. —Ost (talk) 18:26, 18 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]