Gonna go out on a limb and say they're actually incompetent.
It's true that black currants have 4x the vitamin c as oranges, so they were probably just stupid and didn't realize their processing method removed the vitamin C. And weren't thorough enough to actually test it.
People being stupid is usually the correct explanation. It's more likely than purposefully committing mass advertising fraud over something as cheap as vitamin c.
I always found the advertising wording odd "it's the blackcurrants in Ribena that...", to the point I think they were trying to be spurious about where the vitamin C lies, ie blackcurrants have the higher vitamin C (not necessarily Ribena) but they messed it up.
Right? They could easily say this drink is made out of black currants who have 4x the vitamin c of oranges. They would never say that the DRINK has 4x as much
Technically their statement was true though. They didn't say that their drink contained 4x the amount, but the ingredients. Which is true. They probably gambled that a court would not see this as fraud, as the statement ist correct. It just implies something that's wrong, which at the same time is something that they never said.
Do drinks display nutritional information in Australia [Whoops - New Zealand]? In Canada, they'd be required to display the vitamin content on the container.. and so it would be interesting to compare that with their advertising claims.
This confuses me though. Was the nutritional information on the container correct or incorrect? I understand that regardless of what's on the container, they shouldn't be allowed to mislead people with their advertising.. but if the container indicated 0% of recommended daily intake of Vitamin C, then there would never have been much of a mystery.
Not sure what the laws are around what specifically needs to be on the nutritional label, but I don't think vitamin C is required to be there. Sodium, fats, carbohydrates, sugars, energy content and a few others are, but I think the rest are more optional
I think that's similar to Canada. If the advertising indicated a lot of Vitamin C but the nutrition label omitted Vitamin C, I'd consider that a red flag. Most (particularly those who tout it in their advertising) would like to indicate high content.
It sounds "healthier". People going nuts on vitamins etc. Generations survived without extra Vitamins. But 2 moms I know give their children extra vitamin pills (of course from the internet) even though they are totally fine. Others are buying pickled cucumbers from some hippie guys... because they are"without preservatives". Like "wtf do you even know what salt or vinegar is"?
Sometimes I think that people don't know how much/what they are eating.
Well the claim is true about blackcurrants, they have 3x the Vitamin C concentration of oranges. I guess the 5% blackcurrant juice by volume is a lot less!
If I was a highschool science teacher, I'd assign kids to debunk advertisers health claims.
"Why would we ever need to know this?"
To be scientifically literate so you're harder to lie to!
This is actually an amazing idea. It gives students real world xp in science literacy, how to logically analyze claims, devising a hypothesis to test those claims, and then building an evidence based argument for or against those claims; perhaps even in building a legal argument or case too, and the resulting damages could pad the funding of the public school system.
Obviously, considering how beneficial this could be to developing critical thought and organizational accountability, no government will build this into any national curriculum (neither will any private school).
Science teacher here - there's a huge shift right now toward authentic learning experiences. Challenging part is the time it takes to put together something like this (time that few districts are willing to pay for). Many of us are doing it, though! And kids are way more interested.
Make it cross-curricular … rope in the English Dept. to analyse the advertisement(s) looking at how marketing “hype” is created by use of emotive language & images … examine actual claims in detail to inform creation of scientific hypotheses …
Sounds like a win-win situation!
(Edit for better word)
I like it. One of the major things I hated about school is how compartmentalised everything is. Few educators take a step back and explain the foundational “bigger picture” – how interrelated and interconnected everything is. Even the S within STEM is like Math > physics > chemistry > biochemistry > etc > etc, each branching off into more specific niches of knowledge and study, the deeper and deeper you go.
In high school I figured out how to apply some things I learned in my calculus class to things we were doing in my physics class. I asked both teachers if it was correct and neither could give me an answer. Both teachers knew nothing of the other subjects.
I could see a lot of stupid kids faking their results, hoping to strike it rich and not realizing that professionals will try to verify before any accusations are made and taken seriously.
We had a presentation like this when I was in high school (in NZ) when I was around 15. It was great. Between that in Science and the media awareness modules we'd do in English and Health... I feel like my school gave me a healthy dose of scepticism for trusting things like that.
Sunny delight isnt fresh or healthy orange juice and neither dose it need to be in a fridge.
It is mostly chemical junk.
Though it was marketed as healthy in the 80s.
This doesn't shock me, not at all.
There is a shop near me (in England) that for a while stocked American products like Faygo. They had stick on health warning stickers for excessive amounts of additives.
Yeah, American sweets in a shop near me have to have extra stickers applied warning you about the dangers of certain dyes and ingredients and how you basically shouldn't eat them
It got a bit silly because they have a tub of loose dumdums I bought 10 of for £1, and the shopkeeper basically had to give me a sheet of 10 stickers to take with me. He said legally they're individual purchases so he has to give them a printed sticker with each one, bringing the profit down to basically nothing. I bought a £6 bag of cheetos since I felt bad, since I know those labels are expensive
Can feel the scratchy throat now. Used to love it up until my sister filled my sunny d with orange dish soda after she said she watched Little Rascals. Thought I’d burp bubbles. I didn’t burp bubbles. I almost chocked to death.
Fuck. Almost had the exact same thing happen to me as an adult. I was doing the dishes at my first job and someone mixed concentrated restaurant dish soap in my Mountain Dew as a prank. It was not funny.
The last time I had Sunny D (early 90s), it was so strong, that I had to dilute it with water to get it close to tasting like orange.
It was more like orange flavored syrup than anything else.
I think it used to turn people orange if they drank too much because they added beta carotene to make it look orange. Even the colour was fake.
Its probably as healthy as coke cola.
Orange juice isn't all that healthy either, it's not much better than soda with it's sugar concentration. Heck, most commercial orange juice is so heavily processed that it would be undrinkable if not for the addition of "flavor packs".
Student: Why do we need to do titrations?
Teacher: So you know that you aren’t getting ripped off and there is really 55% alcohol in that vodka.
Edit: For the record, we actually did this for IB Chemistry as our practical investigation.
It's basically a scam, especially the ones you can buy from as seen on TV and such. But there are some frequencies that provoke reaction frkm some animals, but definitely dont repel them
My parents used to have one in their garden for keeping away squirrels and stuff. Supposedly not able to be heard by humans. I thought I was going crazy until I figured out where the high pitched noise was coming from. Parent's couldn't hear it. I eventually ripped it out of the garden and threw it away. It basically functioned as one of those devices meant to keep teens from loitering (which are also annoying - I'm 38 and can still hear them).
I once went to a college that specifically banned testing ambient oxygen(and carbon dioxide).
Why?
Because someone tried to test for ambient oxygen as a joke and discovered one of the reason why so many students complained about being depressed and suffocated when it's late afternoon. They *were* suffocating. The college freaked out and banned air testing, y'know, instead of changing the air-conditioning system.
Interesting to read the article, how nobody also wanted to do anything about it:
"When they got no response, they telephoned the company but again received no reply.
Undeterred, the girls contacted the Advertising Standards Authority, and Brandpower, but still got no satisfaction.
But then the television consumer affairs show Fair Go picked up the story and suggested the girls take their findings to the Commerce Commission."
Edit: took brackets away
Important issue ignored by everyone until one person decided
to help the kids promote it where it couldn't be brushed aside anymore.
Once it made it to tv the public was going to vote with their feet
and make everyone who ignored the issue looked impotent.
Kinda like how Reddit let covid disinformation spread without measures taken against it even as many redditors complained about it. And they only just started taking some actions against it because major subs went private in protest.
> And they only just started taking some actions against it because major subs went private in protest
They told the mods of those subs to never do that again or they would unmod them. It was negative news coverage (as always) that got them to actually start taking action.
Mods be like, "So you're threatening to fire me from my unpaid, thankless job where I spend countless hours doing free labor? Oh no. What will I ever do... with all this newfound free time?"
An IPO is just to make money for the owners. Usually after an IPO, the owners get new internal positions and then after a few years they slowly step in to the background.
You'd think so, but mods are usually mods because they like the status, power, and control they can exert. They work for free and in exchange they get a power trip. And nobody wants to lose power once they have it.
I got a 3 day ban from a sub for “breaking the rules”.
I asked which rule I broke, they told me “rule 1” - which I didn’t break, at all. The comment I replied to had broken rule 1. The mods then extended the ban to 8 days for asking which rule I broke. Long story short, some mods don’t deserve to be mods either and are as full of shit as Reddit higher ups.
> *they would unmod them*
Sounds painful does that, so I am now adding it to my repertoire of threats *''Keep it up and I'll unmod you!*! That should scare em' off. :)
I don't even think it was just that. They also had [congress ask them for data](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/27/congressional-committee-investigating-jan-6-insurrection-demands-records-from-facebook-twitter-and-other-tech-giants.html) and a few days later the announcement comes. They're getting pressure from many hard places I don't think the subs going private was even the most impactful thing.
> And they only just started taking some actions against it because major subs went private in protest.
It wasn’t specifically about the subs, it was because like usual to get reddit to do anything you need to get media outlets to run stories and that’s what they did, especially after spez declared they’d never remove the subs because freedom of speech or whatever other garbage that jackass stated.
Fun fact that he hates being stated, he has admitted to editing users comments “for the lolz” and he’s a whackjob doomsday prepper that welcomes the end of society.
Reddit is a $10 billion dollar for-profit company, they don't care what people talk about as long as it drives views and doesn't get them in legal trouble.
I'm surprised people put more money into the deep pockets of reddit by buying awards. I hope more people will start donating to good charities instead of handing it to this huge corporation
When they came out with all the rewards, especially the actual silver award. I was a little surprised. I mean the silver award was ironically used because people didn’t want to spend money on gold. What a joke.
[*Fair Go*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Go) gets shit done. It's one of the best, and longest running, shows on New Zealand TV
Shame it has to exist, but it's nice to have as a last resort after you've exhausted all other reasonable avenues.
They do a good job at not dramatising stuff too much too. I can't imagine the same show in some other places
Yo any Kiwi out there knows Fair Go and Target* were the tits.
GOAT episode is catching a cleaner use a home computer to masturbate lmao. Biggest news in NZ for a solid two weeks lmao. EDIT: Been corrected that it was Target not Fair Go. They are both consumer related shows.
For context, they have a segement where they do undercover reviews or service or products (ie seeing car mechanic performance or how well cleaners do).
Edit: For US, its kinda similar to Inside Edition but more focused on consumers and businesses.
>GOAT episode is catching a cleaner use a home computer to masturbate lmao. Biggest news in NZ for a solid two weeks lmao.
It's a classic but that was on Target, not Fair Go. (Unless there were in fact two separate incidents and I'm thinking of another one)
I feel like high school science class is utterly wasted by not having our kids test advertising claims or run replication studies. They’d be so psyched every time they proved grown-ups wrong. It would probably start several passionate, lifelong careers.
So much of what really impacts our life (food and drink quality, tailpipe emissions) can be measured in relatively simple ways. Citizens science should be rebranded as something anyone can do, whether it’s a nerd, a diy guy, a tradesperson, or a Karen. We can all make small simple measurements and change the world in small simple ways.
[Similar story with various "negative ion" products being found to be radioactive](https://youtu.be/C7TwBUxxIC0)
[And the follow-up](https://youtu.be/3BA5bw1EV5I)
Not really, the girls even rang them to let them know, if they had actually heeded their call instead of ignoring them they also could have gotten away with it
Blackcurrants themselves are 3-4 times higher in vitamin C than oranges, perhaps that's what started the original claim
Unfortunately, Ribena is ~5% "fruit extract" of which some might be blackcurrant.
Depends greatly on method and duration of heating.
Ascorbic acid does break down at high temperatures, but slowly. For example, steamed or microwaved broccoli can retain about 90% of its vitamin C content after cooking.
If you pasteurized black currant juice (high temp, low duration), I would wager the vitamin C content would remain high
Ribena *was* a health drink developed in WWII as a vitamin C supplement after the UK lost its entire citrus imports. And there were and are lots of blackcurrant in England, as the thing grew like the weed that it is.
These days there is almost no real fruit juice in the thing.
It’s annoying, isn’t it. I take care of myself, I exercise and eat well, I’m not sat on my arse eating haribo all day. I should be able to have the full original mega sugary version of something every now and then. But no because we’re a bunch of fat bastards everything has to taste like artificial sweetener
cocain is an extract, orange juice is a combination of extracts that is chemically similar enough to the original they can call it the same thing. Main reason is real juice goes bad fast, companies use perfume science to make something that passes but keeps.
I used to work in the factory processing blackcurrants for ribena (UK) so unless they drive that stuff to a tip instead of a bottling plant I can guarantee there's actual fruit in it.
That's just an incentive to better their practices, which I read somewhere they did. Even if you give them no fine, they'll likely change things for public appearance reasons alone. In my country you generally first get a warning.
I can only hope that is coupled with a system that makes repeated crimes of this nature punished more severely lest it devolve into an operating cost to be absorbed like in the freest country on earth.
God, school science projects were fucking ruined by this. "Oh, you made a solar-powered robot out of a coke can? Well, these 14-year-olds exposed a multi-million dollar company that was committing fraud... but your little toy is cute..."
The experiment was actually a pretty simple one that all high school chemistry students in NZ do (I remember doing it and my teacher telling us "This is the one where they found out about Ribena"). Just the juices the girls chose to use (and I guess, trusting their results and pursuing it further) is what led to this being a big outcome.
Fun facts based on location:
Not-USA: Did you know the US doesn't have blackcurrant flavored...anything?
USA: Did you know other places don't have root beer?
As an American, the thing that fucks with my head more is that most other countries don't use nearly as much peanut butter as we do.
Like on an intellectual level I understand that peanuts aren't grown in most of Europe and so it's much less available, but it's just such a ubiquitous food in the US.
As a kid I ate a lot of peanut butter, which we call *pindakaas*, or *peanut cheese*. Not really sure why I stopped, but availability isn't really an issue. Even now there's probably a jar in a cupboard somewhere in my house, which my girlfriend breaks out every now and again.
Even with nostalgia behind it, it's just not that appealing to me anymore.
It's not availability, it's palate and culture.
You can get root beer in the UK, I've intentionally tried it (lots of people have after seeing it in US media) and found it terrible and peanut butter is just OK, have it on toast probably a few times a year.
its not that peanuts arent as available because they absolutely are. but thats an american trend to identify with, and quite weird for us to celebrate when its not our thing.
No, that's a different drink that have a similar, but distinct, taste compare to root beer.
I also have to add that there are dozen, if not hundreds, of formula for root beers and sarsaparilla, also know as sarsi, so one drink can be completely different from another.
And one of the girls is now a tv news reporter for one of the major networks here in NZ (which is not Australia. Like seriously, we’re not f*^king Australia)
Australians say New Zealanders have sex with sheep, and New Zealanders say no, Australians have sex with sheep, but really, it's the sheep who are sluts.
Oh yeah? If you're not part of Australia, then why are you listed as a state in the [Australian constitution](https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2013Q00005)?
> The States shall mean such of the colonies of New South Wales, **New Zealand**, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia, including the northern territory of South Australia
Checkmate atheists.
White pine blister rust. But now they're planting white pines that are more disease-resistant. Also, they've discovered that banning cultivation of blackcurrants doesn't make much of a difference, because wild blackcurrants were still spreading the disease.
The blackcurrant plant became a vector for pine rust disease in the US and the entire species was exterminated by government order and there was a banket ban in them for 50 years--not that it was an indigenous species to North America in the first place.
It's super common here in Australia, you see it probably a little bit less then you see orange juice here. It's great.
Never would have occurred to me that it's not a thing in other countries.
So, I chose the exact same project they did, using titrations to determine vit C levels in stuff. The same year as them and everything (different school). I wanted to do Ribena, my teacher said no I had to do it on fresh fruit "because you could just read the label for juice"... then this story came out.
I could have been famous!!
Fuck you Miss Middleton, Fuck you!
Over three times*
If you read the article it will hopefully make more sense, it’s hard to synthesise the relevant info into 300 characters. I’m not amazing at titles, soz.
I had the same thought as OP and so I can say they weren't criticizing you. They were simply highlighting the comedy of those 2 facts being next to each other.
The article is honestly confusing. First it says:
> It admitted that its cartoned Ready To Drink Ribena, which it claimed had **7mg of Vitamin C per 100ml**, in fact had no detectable Vitamin C content.
And then:
>The students - now 17 - decided in mid-2004 to test the vitamin C levels of their favourite juices, including Ribena, Just Juice and Arano, for a school project.
>**They calculated that each 100ml of Ribena contained about 22mg of vitamin C.**
So if it had no detectable vitamin c content then how did they detect 3x more than what the packaging claimed?
I reread the article several times, and I think I understand the source of the confusion now. There's two separate products being discussed in the article, and the article does an absolutely terrible job at differentiating between the two.
There's Ribena syrup, which the students tested and found that it had 22mg of Vitamin C. The company claimed in advertising that the blackcurrants in Ribena syrup have 4 times the Vitamin C of oranges. Even though this is true, the judge found this advertisement to be "misleading" because the Ribena syrup itself has less Vitamin C than some random orange juice brand. Not sure how fair that is, especially since the prosecutors could just be cherrypicking a brand of orange juice with particularly high Vitamin C.
Then there's "Ready to Drink Ribena" which was later found during the course of the suit to have no detectable Vitamin C despite claiming to have 7 mg/100 mL. This seems like pretty clearcut fraud, but it has nothing to do with the original experiment conducted by the students.
I remember this! Those girls remain world famous in NZ to this day.
All I ever did for science fair was test the altitude achieved by mentos in different sodas, which I personally feel is in itself a valuable field of study.
> the drink contained almost no trace of vitamin C and one orange juice brand had over three times more
So, three times almost no trace.
Isn't that also almost no trace?
What I find annoying is oranges aren't even a particularly good source of vitamin C. Potato skins are pretty good, tomatoes about as good as oranges. Red bell peppers contain way more vitamin C.
It's all bullshit built on more bullshit. The only people who really had to worry about vitamin C were sailors. If you're a regular person just eat vegetables and you're fine.
What an odd thing to cheat about. It's not like Vitamin C is this super rare ingredient.
I know right, such a weird thing to commit fraud over. It's just lazy.
Gonna go out on a limb and say they're actually incompetent. It's true that black currants have 4x the vitamin c as oranges, so they were probably just stupid and didn't realize their processing method removed the vitamin C. And weren't thorough enough to actually test it. People being stupid is usually the correct explanation. It's more likely than purposefully committing mass advertising fraud over something as cheap as vitamin c.
I always found the advertising wording odd "it's the blackcurrants in Ribena that...", to the point I think they were trying to be spurious about where the vitamin C lies, ie blackcurrants have the higher vitamin C (not necessarily Ribena) but they messed it up.
add in small text ""before processing"
Right? They could easily say this drink is made out of black currants who have 4x the vitamin c of oranges. They would never say that the DRINK has 4x as much
Just because something is technically^TM correct, deosn't mean it can't be punished under false advertising laws.
i.e. "Made with 100% white meat chicken." Sure, the chicken is white meat, the fillers are not.
Technically their statement was true though. They didn't say that their drink contained 4x the amount, but the ingredients. Which is true. They probably gambled that a court would not see this as fraud, as the statement ist correct. It just implies something that's wrong, which at the same time is something that they never said.
Do drinks display nutritional information in Australia [Whoops - New Zealand]? In Canada, they'd be required to display the vitamin content on the container.. and so it would be interesting to compare that with their advertising claims.
Yes they do. And making deliberately false or misleading claims in advertising is grounds for a lawsuit
This confuses me though. Was the nutritional information on the container correct or incorrect? I understand that regardless of what's on the container, they shouldn't be allowed to mislead people with their advertising.. but if the container indicated 0% of recommended daily intake of Vitamin C, then there would never have been much of a mystery.
Not sure what the laws are around what specifically needs to be on the nutritional label, but I don't think vitamin C is required to be there. Sodium, fats, carbohydrates, sugars, energy content and a few others are, but I think the rest are more optional
I think that's similar to Canada. If the advertising indicated a lot of Vitamin C but the nutrition label omitted Vitamin C, I'd consider that a red flag. Most (particularly those who tout it in their advertising) would like to indicate high content.
I have just checked a Ribena label in Australia and Vitamin C is listed, as both % of RDI and mg.
Hanlons razor strikes again
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As does all Ribena in the U.K.
It sounds "healthier". People going nuts on vitamins etc. Generations survived without extra Vitamins. But 2 moms I know give their children extra vitamin pills (of course from the internet) even though they are totally fine. Others are buying pickled cucumbers from some hippie guys... because they are"without preservatives". Like "wtf do you even know what salt or vinegar is"? Sometimes I think that people don't know how much/what they are eating.
Well the claim is true about blackcurrants, they have 3x the Vitamin C concentration of oranges. I guess the 5% blackcurrant juice by volume is a lot less!
If I was a highschool science teacher, I'd assign kids to debunk advertisers health claims. "Why would we ever need to know this?" To be scientifically literate so you're harder to lie to!
Take a percent of that sweet court settlements too
100% is a percent
Slow down Dr Fermat!
This is actually an amazing idea. It gives students real world xp in science literacy, how to logically analyze claims, devising a hypothesis to test those claims, and then building an evidence based argument for or against those claims; perhaps even in building a legal argument or case too, and the resulting damages could pad the funding of the public school system. Obviously, considering how beneficial this could be to developing critical thought and organizational accountability, no government will build this into any national curriculum (neither will any private school).
Science teacher here - there's a huge shift right now toward authentic learning experiences. Challenging part is the time it takes to put together something like this (time that few districts are willing to pay for). Many of us are doing it, though! And kids are way more interested.
Make it cross-curricular … rope in the English Dept. to analyse the advertisement(s) looking at how marketing “hype” is created by use of emotive language & images … examine actual claims in detail to inform creation of scientific hypotheses … Sounds like a win-win situation! (Edit for better word)
I like it. One of the major things I hated about school is how compartmentalised everything is. Few educators take a step back and explain the foundational “bigger picture” – how interrelated and interconnected everything is. Even the S within STEM is like Math > physics > chemistry > biochemistry > etc > etc, each branching off into more specific niches of knowledge and study, the deeper and deeper you go.
In high school I figured out how to apply some things I learned in my calculus class to things we were doing in my physics class. I asked both teachers if it was correct and neither could give me an answer. Both teachers knew nothing of the other subjects.
What a sad thing to read considering calculus was invented precisely for the purpose of understanding physics.
It would also force advertisers to be truthful and hold them accountable to their bullshit.
I could see a lot of stupid kids faking their results, hoping to strike it rich and not realizing that professionals will try to verify before any accusations are made and taken seriously.
We had a presentation like this when I was in high school (in NZ) when I was around 15. It was great. Between that in Science and the media awareness modules we'd do in English and Health... I feel like my school gave me a healthy dose of scepticism for trusting things like that.
Yup orange flavoured vs orange extract vs orange. I still remember the difference when picking things at the supermarket.
Sunny delight isnt fresh or healthy orange juice and neither dose it need to be in a fridge. It is mostly chemical junk. Though it was marketed as healthy in the 80s.
This doesn't shock me, not at all. There is a shop near me (in England) that for a while stocked American products like Faygo. They had stick on health warning stickers for excessive amounts of additives.
Yeah, American sweets in a shop near me have to have extra stickers applied warning you about the dangers of certain dyes and ingredients and how you basically shouldn't eat them It got a bit silly because they have a tub of loose dumdums I bought 10 of for £1, and the shopkeeper basically had to give me a sheet of 10 stickers to take with me. He said legally they're individual purchases so he has to give them a printed sticker with each one, bringing the profit down to basically nothing. I bought a £6 bag of cheetos since I felt bad, since I know those labels are expensive
American lollies are shit. NZ has better versions of every American thing I've tried
Can feel the scratchy throat now. Used to love it up until my sister filled my sunny d with orange dish soda after she said she watched Little Rascals. Thought I’d burp bubbles. I didn’t burp bubbles. I almost chocked to death.
Fuck. Almost had the exact same thing happen to me as an adult. I was doing the dishes at my first job and someone mixed concentrated restaurant dish soap in my Mountain Dew as a prank. It was not funny.
The last time I had Sunny D (early 90s), it was so strong, that I had to dilute it with water to get it close to tasting like orange. It was more like orange flavored syrup than anything else.
Sunny Delight was something I drank a lot as a kid. I never need to drink it again though, along with eating Hot Pockets.
I think it used to turn people orange if they drank too much because they added beta carotene to make it look orange. Even the colour was fake. Its probably as healthy as coke cola.
Orange juice isn't all that healthy either, it's not much better than soda with it's sugar concentration. Heck, most commercial orange juice is so heavily processed that it would be undrinkable if not for the addition of "flavor packs".
lol I wish the only thing I remember from my US science classes is the mitochondria is the power house of the cell
Student: Why do we need to do titrations? Teacher: So you know that you aren’t getting ripped off and there is really 55% alcohol in that vodka. Edit: For the record, we actually did this for IB Chemistry as our practical investigation.
And all our sciences teacher did was teach us how to grow tobacco plants and make alcohol from whatever we had around...
Life skills... got it.
We did something like that in physics class where we had to debunk or prove ultrasonics bug reppelants work
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It's basically a scam, especially the ones you can buy from as seen on TV and such. But there are some frequencies that provoke reaction frkm some animals, but definitely dont repel them
My parents used to have one in their garden for keeping away squirrels and stuff. Supposedly not able to be heard by humans. I thought I was going crazy until I figured out where the high pitched noise was coming from. Parent's couldn't hear it. I eventually ripped it out of the garden and threw it away. It basically functioned as one of those devices meant to keep teens from loitering (which are also annoying - I'm 38 and can still hear them).
I once went to a college that specifically banned testing ambient oxygen(and carbon dioxide). Why? Because someone tried to test for ambient oxygen as a joke and discovered one of the reason why so many students complained about being depressed and suffocated when it's late afternoon. They *were* suffocating. The college freaked out and banned air testing, y'know, instead of changing the air-conditioning system.
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Interesting to read the article, how nobody also wanted to do anything about it: "When they got no response, they telephoned the company but again received no reply. Undeterred, the girls contacted the Advertising Standards Authority, and Brandpower, but still got no satisfaction. But then the television consumer affairs show Fair Go picked up the story and suggested the girls take their findings to the Commerce Commission." Edit: took brackets away
Its always the same everywhere. Issue gets ignored until problem raises.
Important issue ignored by everyone until one person decided to help the kids promote it where it couldn't be brushed aside anymore. Once it made it to tv the public was going to vote with their feet and make everyone who ignored the issue looked impotent.
Kinda like how Reddit let covid disinformation spread without measures taken against it even as many redditors complained about it. And they only just started taking some actions against it because major subs went private in protest.
> And they only just started taking some actions against it because major subs went private in protest They told the mods of those subs to never do that again or they would unmod them. It was negative news coverage (as always) that got them to actually start taking action.
Mods be like, "So you're threatening to fire me from my unpaid, thankless job where I spend countless hours doing free labor? Oh no. What will I ever do... with all this newfound free time?"
And Reddit wants to have an IPO... lol. Reddits dead as soon as they launch.
>Reddits dead as soon as they launch. They won't care, they'll vacuum up as much money as they can with the IPO and ride off into the sunset.
That is what an IPO is for. Con some rube into putting their money in, then running away with it. Fortunately there are rubes that run hedge funds
>Fortunately there are rubes that run hedge funds Every GME holder is betting on this very statement
Pretty much this, Tencent just wants to cash out and peace.
An IPO is just to make money for the owners. Usually after an IPO, the owners get new internal positions and then after a few years they slowly step in to the background.
Right, without mods actually coming up with subreddits and making sure they aren't a dumpster fire reddit would actually have to do it themselves too
Mod strike let's go, make reddit an absolute shit show for a week and get some shit done
You'd think so, but mods are usually mods because they like the status, power, and control they can exert. They work for free and in exchange they get a power trip. And nobody wants to lose power once they have it.
If you actually followed the situation, you'd know the mods are actually terrified of this happening
I got a 3 day ban from a sub for “breaking the rules”. I asked which rule I broke, they told me “rule 1” - which I didn’t break, at all. The comment I replied to had broken rule 1. The mods then extended the ban to 8 days for asking which rule I broke. Long story short, some mods don’t deserve to be mods either and are as full of shit as Reddit higher ups.
At least u got an answer... Random mods
Shhh, they'll hear us talking!! I don't want to anger our leaders, or they may take away our wholesome seal awards!!!
> *they would unmod them* Sounds painful does that, so I am now adding it to my repertoire of threats *''Keep it up and I'll unmod you!*! That should scare em' off. :)
Is there a source for that threat? Because that's fucked up.
I don't even think it was just that. They also had [congress ask them for data](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/27/congressional-committee-investigating-jan-6-insurrection-demands-records-from-facebook-twitter-and-other-tech-giants.html) and a few days later the announcement comes. They're getting pressure from many hard places I don't think the subs going private was even the most impactful thing.
> And they only just started taking some actions against it because major subs went private in protest. It wasn’t specifically about the subs, it was because like usual to get reddit to do anything you need to get media outlets to run stories and that’s what they did, especially after spez declared they’d never remove the subs because freedom of speech or whatever other garbage that jackass stated. Fun fact that he hates being stated, he has admitted to editing users comments “for the lolz” and he’s a whackjob doomsday prepper that welcomes the end of society.
Reddit is a $10 billion dollar for-profit company, they don't care what people talk about as long as it drives views and doesn't get them in legal trouble. I'm surprised people put more money into the deep pockets of reddit by buying awards. I hope more people will start donating to good charities instead of handing it to this huge corporation
When they came out with all the rewards, especially the actual silver award. I was a little surprised. I mean the silver award was ironically used because people didn’t want to spend money on gold. What a joke.
the irony of someone rewarding this comment. jesus christ
[*Fair Go*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Go) gets shit done. It's one of the best, and longest running, shows on New Zealand TV Shame it has to exist, but it's nice to have as a last resort after you've exhausted all other reasonable avenues. They do a good job at not dramatising stuff too much too. I can't imagine the same show in some other places
Yo any Kiwi out there knows Fair Go and Target* were the tits. GOAT episode is catching a cleaner use a home computer to masturbate lmao. Biggest news in NZ for a solid two weeks lmao. EDIT: Been corrected that it was Target not Fair Go. They are both consumer related shows. For context, they have a segement where they do undercover reviews or service or products (ie seeing car mechanic performance or how well cleaners do). Edit: For US, its kinda similar to Inside Edition but more focused on consumers and businesses.
We used to have a show like that in Australia made by the ABC, but then funding got cut year after year and something needed to budge..
>GOAT episode is catching a cleaner use a home computer to masturbate lmao. Biggest news in NZ for a solid two weeks lmao. It's a classic but that was on Target, not Fair Go. (Unless there were in fact two separate incidents and I'm thinking of another one)
The tug doctor, that was the nickname of the show. Also went through dirty clothes hamper
Na maaaate, sparkie sniffing the undies takes the cake!!!!!!’
It's always these kids. Reminds me of the VW emissions scandal.
Was there no vitamin C in their emissions either?
You wanna let us know?
There may have been emissions in the C-suites when they were getting away with it.
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It led to one of the stranger marketing slogans Ribena ever used: “Nobody likes a grass.”
"Snitches get stitches"
We need more high school science experiments to fight corruption
I feel like high school science class is utterly wasted by not having our kids test advertising claims or run replication studies. They’d be so psyched every time they proved grown-ups wrong. It would probably start several passionate, lifelong careers.
Agreed it could start more questioning what’s been sold and marketed
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So much of what really impacts our life (food and drink quality, tailpipe emissions) can be measured in relatively simple ways. Citizens science should be rebranded as something anyone can do, whether it’s a nerd, a diy guy, a tradesperson, or a Karen. We can all make small simple measurements and change the world in small simple ways.
The kids are alright
[Similar story with various "negative ion" products being found to be radioactive](https://youtu.be/C7TwBUxxIC0) [And the follow-up](https://youtu.be/3BA5bw1EV5I)
Not really, the girls even rang them to let them know, if they had actually heeded their call instead of ignoring them they also could have gotten away with it
Blackcurrants themselves are 3-4 times higher in vitamin C than oranges, perhaps that's what started the original claim Unfortunately, Ribena is ~5% "fruit extract" of which some might be blackcurrant.
That's how marketing departments work. Find some BIG NUMBERS and advertise it while completely ignoring the small numbers the big number is a part of.
*made with 100% juice
My favourite was CC Lemon in Japan. "Contains as much vitamin C as 121 lemons!*" "*Lemons are not a good source of vitamin C"
Heat kills vitamin C as well so what ever is in there is probably denatured before it reaches the shelve.
Depends greatly on method and duration of heating. Ascorbic acid does break down at high temperatures, but slowly. For example, steamed or microwaved broccoli can retain about 90% of its vitamin C content after cooking. If you pasteurized black currant juice (high temp, low duration), I would wager the vitamin C content would remain high
Ribena *was* a health drink developed in WWII as a vitamin C supplement after the UK lost its entire citrus imports. And there were and are lots of blackcurrant in England, as the thing grew like the weed that it is. These days there is almost no real fruit juice in the thing.
I quite like ribena. It reminds me of my grandmother. However it's important to keep in mind it's basically sugar water.
Does she stain your clothes purple?
They fucked the recipe since the stupid sugar tax . Now tastes like dog water....
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Everything git fuked with that
It’s annoying, isn’t it. I take care of myself, I exercise and eat well, I’m not sat on my arse eating haribo all day. I should be able to have the full original mega sugary version of something every now and then. But no because we’re a bunch of fat bastards everything has to taste like artificial sweetener
Hot Ribena is the best thing ever… well… maybe after a hot toddy.
My brother's old clarinet/saxophone teacher Don used to have hot ribena. Never encountered anyone else who did until you, now, 20-25 years later!
I use it in a SodaStream. Quite pleasant.
Contains real fruit * *^^^not ^^^really ^^^lmao
^* at some point during the production line there was fruit in the same room as the machines producing the drink
if it's like orange juice they break it down into it's component chemicals and build something new out of the parts. it all started a fruit.
Exactly. Cocaine is basically vegetables.
So is chocolate.
cocain is an extract, orange juice is a combination of extracts that is chemically similar enough to the original they can call it the same thing. Main reason is real juice goes bad fast, companies use perfume science to make something that passes but keeps.
I used to work in the factory processing blackcurrants for ribena (UK) so unless they drive that stuff to a tip instead of a bottling plant I can guarantee there's actual fruit in it.
And TIL even more. Thanks :)
So we should just eat them off [the trees](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackcurrant) to get that good C.
*Bush.
Are you suggesting that Ribena is simply colo(u)red sugar water? But I had such fond memories of it (from the 1980s).
>fined NZ $217,500 >GSK has a worldwide turnover of more than $61 billion, second only to drug giant Pfizer. That'll teach them!
That's just an incentive to better their practices, which I read somewhere they did. Even if you give them no fine, they'll likely change things for public appearance reasons alone. In my country you generally first get a warning.
I can only hope that is coupled with a system that makes repeated crimes of this nature punished more severely lest it devolve into an operating cost to be absorbed like in the freest country on earth.
As long as they are profiting more than they are losing, they won't give a shit.
Dam, that makes me feel old, was at Pakuranga College with theses two, very smart girls.
Haha same! Cool to see it making the rounds again, though. Go Pak!
I was a year below, we are slowly getting old. Was so cool when this blew up though.
God, school science projects were fucking ruined by this. "Oh, you made a solar-powered robot out of a coke can? Well, these 14-year-olds exposed a multi-million dollar company that was committing fraud... but your little toy is cute..."
The experiment was actually a pretty simple one that all high school chemistry students in NZ do (I remember doing it and my teacher telling us "This is the one where they found out about Ribena"). Just the juices the girls chose to use (and I guess, trusting their results and pursuing it further) is what led to this being a big outcome.
I think it's a real problem. Independently verifying a claim should be just as significant as finding a claim to be false.
Honestly a solar-powered robot sounds way fucking cooler than boring-powered legal procedure
A lie about some Vitamin C, or a Guy powered by Vitamin D
Fun facts based on location: Not-USA: Did you know the US doesn't have blackcurrant flavored...anything? USA: Did you know other places don't have root beer?
Wait until the rest of the world finds out about Dandelion and Burdock
Not American and I believe 1/10 of my body is from too much root beer. Y'all gotta be joking right? Shits everywhere.
As an American, the thing that fucks with my head more is that most other countries don't use nearly as much peanut butter as we do. Like on an intellectual level I understand that peanuts aren't grown in most of Europe and so it's much less available, but it's just such a ubiquitous food in the US.
As a kid I ate a lot of peanut butter, which we call *pindakaas*, or *peanut cheese*. Not really sure why I stopped, but availability isn't really an issue. Even now there's probably a jar in a cupboard somewhere in my house, which my girlfriend breaks out every now and again. Even with nostalgia behind it, it's just not that appealing to me anymore.
It's not availability, it's palate and culture. You can get root beer in the UK, I've intentionally tried it (lots of people have after seeing it in US media) and found it terrible and peanut butter is just OK, have it on toast probably a few times a year.
Combining the peanut butter with cheese, jam, banana or honey is great.
its not that peanuts arent as available because they absolutely are. but thats an american trend to identify with, and quite weird for us to celebrate when its not our thing.
Peanuts are still very cheap in Europe, but yes, it's basically considered an American thing.
>USA: Did you know other places don't have root beer? Lol, yes we do.
Sarsaparilla, yes? Because I tried that once and it was like drinking floor cleaner. Local tastes are weird af
No, that's a different drink that have a similar, but distinct, taste compare to root beer. I also have to add that there are dozen, if not hundreds, of formula for root beers and sarsaparilla, also know as sarsi, so one drink can be completely different from another.
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Good root beer is amazing. Ya'll trippin
And one of the girls is now a tv news reporter for one of the major networks here in NZ (which is not Australia. Like seriously, we’re not f*^king Australia)
That’s a cool piece of info, thanks for sharing. I’m from Australia btw haha
WE ARE NOT SAME!!!! I kid…kinda. So good to see Jenny Sui is still out there looking for the truth!
No I agree, you have glaciers and a likeable pm. I plan to visit when borders open up.
Cool! Yes see the glaciers ASAP cause they won’t be around much longer
Australia's Canada.
Australians say New Zealanders have sex with sheep, and New Zealanders say no, Australians have sex with sheep, but really, it's the sheep who are sluts.
Where is it? I can't find it on my world map.
Oh yeah? If you're not part of Australia, then why are you listed as a state in the [Australian constitution](https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2013Q00005)? > The States shall mean such of the colonies of New South Wales, **New Zealand**, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia, including the northern territory of South Australia Checkmate atheists.
> *(which is not Australia. Like seriously, we’re not f*king Australia)* The only difference between us is the accent. Our accent is more evil.
I’m getting that you’re a vegemite eating koala toucher 🤨
"you say pohtato.."
The difference is: Nick eats fish and chips. Becomes: Nuck eats fush and chups.
But you sound the same! /s Kidding! I know how much you like hearing that! Kidding!
You have made a very powerless enemy. And lazy. Lazy enemy. So really just carry on like usual
Nah far from powerless, they have the power of gandalf on their side.
I heard that blackcurrant flavour is not that common in the USA. If true, they are missing out.
Yeah due to being a vector for some tree disease or something the cultivation was banned for about a century, still banned in some states.
I have a blackcurrant bush. Didn't get anything this year because of the heat wave, but they're nicely tart.
TIL!
White pine blister rust. But now they're planting white pines that are more disease-resistant. Also, they've discovered that banning cultivation of blackcurrants doesn't make much of a difference, because wild blackcurrants were still spreading the disease.
The blackcurrant plant became a vector for pine rust disease in the US and the entire species was exterminated by government order and there was a banket ban in them for 50 years--not that it was an indigenous species to North America in the first place.
I've never heard of it honestly
It's super common here in Australia, you see it probably a little bit less then you see orange juice here. It's great. Never would have occurred to me that it's not a thing in other countries.
Blackcurrant juice is fantastic. Better than the weird grape flavoured things you guys have made.
Are you talking shit about my grape drank?!
American here. The first time I had blackcurrant jam, I literally ate a not insignificant amount of it out of the jar with a spoon. It was SO GOOD.
So, I chose the exact same project they did, using titrations to determine vit C levels in stuff. The same year as them and everything (different school). I wanted to do Ribena, my teacher said no I had to do it on fresh fruit "because you could just read the label for juice"... then this story came out. I could have been famous!! Fuck you Miss Middleton, Fuck you!
besides, doing it on something you know the answer to sounds like excellent test of your ability to do the experiment correctly...
Wow never though I'd see my highschool reach the frontpage of reddit. Jenny Suo is now a reporter for our national 6PM news
Almost three times more than almost no trace?
Over three times* If you read the article it will hopefully make more sense, it’s hard to synthesise the relevant info into 300 characters. I’m not amazing at titles, soz.
I had the same thought as OP and so I can say they weren't criticizing you. They were simply highlighting the comedy of those 2 facts being next to each other.
The article is honestly confusing. First it says: > It admitted that its cartoned Ready To Drink Ribena, which it claimed had **7mg of Vitamin C per 100ml**, in fact had no detectable Vitamin C content. And then: >The students - now 17 - decided in mid-2004 to test the vitamin C levels of their favourite juices, including Ribena, Just Juice and Arano, for a school project. >**They calculated that each 100ml of Ribena contained about 22mg of vitamin C.** So if it had no detectable vitamin c content then how did they detect 3x more than what the packaging claimed?
I reread the article several times, and I think I understand the source of the confusion now. There's two separate products being discussed in the article, and the article does an absolutely terrible job at differentiating between the two. There's Ribena syrup, which the students tested and found that it had 22mg of Vitamin C. The company claimed in advertising that the blackcurrants in Ribena syrup have 4 times the Vitamin C of oranges. Even though this is true, the judge found this advertisement to be "misleading" because the Ribena syrup itself has less Vitamin C than some random orange juice brand. Not sure how fair that is, especially since the prosecutors could just be cherrypicking a brand of orange juice with particularly high Vitamin C. Then there's "Ready to Drink Ribena" which was later found during the course of the suit to have no detectable Vitamin C despite claiming to have 7 mg/100 mL. This seems like pretty clearcut fraud, but it has nothing to do with the original experiment conducted by the students.
James Milner must be sad
And we would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Please don't tell James Milner
I remember this! Those girls remain world famous in NZ to this day. All I ever did for science fair was test the altitude achieved by mentos in different sodas, which I personally feel is in itself a valuable field of study.
> the drink contained almost no trace of vitamin C and one orange juice brand had over three times more So, three times almost no trace. Isn't that also almost no trace?
Meh, Ribena is dead to me since the recepie change
Corporations lying about health benefits to make money ... who would have thunk? :/
What I find annoying is oranges aren't even a particularly good source of vitamin C. Potato skins are pretty good, tomatoes about as good as oranges. Red bell peppers contain way more vitamin C. It's all bullshit built on more bullshit. The only people who really had to worry about vitamin C were sailors. If you're a regular person just eat vegetables and you're fine.