If you believe otherwise, I'm happy to ready any high quality studies you can find. Pleaes don't just cherry pick a few studies, be careful in doing your review.
the history of flame retardants is instructive https://ww2.kqed.org/science/2013/11/21/its-official-toxic-f... if industry/government had been required to prove these things safe beforehand we would have never exposed the population them in the first place.
If one wanted they could surely distill many chemicals in isolation from these naturally occurring fruits and vegetables that in concentration would have many concerning health effects. The fact that many don't worry about this is largely because this research program has not been attempted.
Point being, there is no reason to hold any of these chemicals to a standard higher than that of a strawberry - that is, we can give people a bunch of strawberries and say any negative effect is below some acceptable level. And, in fact, we have found many "natural" foods containing absurdly high levels of arsenic and other dangerous compounds, and that has affected their preparation for consumption. The scientific process has in this way even outperformed the naturalism heuristic.
ah yes, the logic that brought us Silent Spring and the children happily playing and breathing in clouds of "safe" DDT gas.
if it's from a plant or animal, it can still be plenty harmful, but at least there's a history of use without major effects. not the case with industrial chemicals...
If you ask someone “Which do you think is safer: artificial vanilla or vanilla extract?” they’ll often prefer the “natural” one. But vanilla extract contains exactly the same chemical (vanillin) in addition to hundreds of other compounds, many of which are known to be irritants, hepatotoxins, and carcinogens—in high enough doses.
Of course, it’s much harder to break people of the misconception that the provenance of a chemical (synthetic or natural) matters. There seems to be some kind of innate protective disgust reaction at work. For instance, I’ve had conversations with people who say they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to drink a glass of water if they knew it was purified from sewage. By the same token, they will drink some water that’s been imbued with some healing power by a homeopath.
If one uses contrived arguments like the one about vanilla extract, then I can see why.
What I was getting at is that in my experience, people are generally pretty open to rational discussion about that, but not about the underlying visceral squeamishness and distrust.
That is, it’s not about being right or wrong, but making people think more deeply about a topic that I care about.
Something I used to do that did make people defensive & dismissive was to try to be technically correct, shit like “everything is chemicals”—which is true, but that’s not the meaning of “chemicals” under discussion, so it’s just smug and pedantic.
Vanilla is definitely a trick question that exploits a blindspot - tell people about the difference and then ask the question, that's the interesting discussion.
Also, to be fair to that homeopath... their axioms are flawed but disgust at purified sewage is self-consistent with their beliefs ("less is more" and all that). I'd probably refuse too, but on the basis of numerous studies showing sewage treatment doesn't adequately remove pharmaceutical waste.
And there are definitely a lot of good examples to choose from—I’ve tended to go with vanilla because a lot of people are familiar with the fact that it comes in synthetic & extract forms, but aren’t clear on the difference, and may just as well prefer the synthetic because it’s cheaper or the extract because it tastes better to them.
This feels like an accidental trick question :-)
For me personally, I know I'll prefer vanilla extract (or rather, actual vanilla shoots) simply because it tastes much better -- precisely because of the impurities. I know it isn't what you asked at all, but since the question is meant to uncover emotions: I'm having a hard time taking my emotional preference for natural vanilla aroma out of my reply.
It would be better to use an example where people don't have a strong preference for one of the choices for unrelated reasons. Unfortunately I can't think of an example right now.
Now of course this is just an indicator and not a rule, but it's a pretty good indicator if you've got nothing else to go on. If you told me that humans have been ingesting some particular chemical as food for millions of years, I'm going to feel fairly safe, whereas if you told me that some artificial chemical just passed FDA trials, I'm going to be much more skeptical. Many substances that have appeared even in full FDA drug trials to be benign had very negative consequences.
BPA is a perfect example. It has a very strong affinity for estrogen receptors. If BPA had been in the environment for millions of years, the estrogen receptor would have changed shape to not bind to BPA, but BPA is a new substance, so evolution hasn't had time to adapt to an environment with BPA in it.
Now, we get to how to rationally deal with all of this. We get a lot of benefit from artificial substances, but they can also cause harm. We have to have reasonable cost/benefit calculations. The FDA at least has something like a reasonable framework, where you go from phase I to II to III, and then postclinical surveillance, each step having a greater potential risk with more people under less supervision, and a greater potential reward, after we have data for a smaller group.
This sort of thing doesn't exist with industrial chemicals that aren't specifically designed to be ingested, and that's reasonable. If every industrial chemical had to go through FDA approval, we wouldn't have a modern world. However, even chemicals that aren't designed to be ingested do get ingested. For things like endocrine disruptors, even tiny quantities can have significant biological effects, and it's easy to ingest microgram quantities of any chemical we make millions of tons of per year. There should be a lot more scrutiny on chemicals that have endocrine effects, there should be a lot more scrutiny on chemicals that have contact with food or children are likely to put in their mouths, and there should be more scrutiny on chemicals that are produced in very large quantities. Chemicals like BPA and Phthalates hit all three.
The problem is that most of the people publicly involved in the debate are either the crazy hippie type that thinks everything should be banned, or the American Chemistry Council that thinks nothing should be restricted in any way. There is a large silent majority that wants reasonable regulation so that their boys don't have deformed penises.
That's incorrect. We've coevolved with many of the foods we eat. Things like strawberries and broccolli have been, more or less, with us for thousands of years. While it may be true that there are harmful components of those foods, we know that eating them is at least not making us worse off than we were. When introducing some new chemical, we really have no idea what its effects might be. And we have no, in principle, reason to assume those effects are benign. We've had a very very long time to adjust to the organic components of most foods.
Unless you can pinpoint all the causal factors of a relationship, there is no other option I have heard of other than the scientific process, i.e. testing, calculating, re-testing, calculating, retesting...etc that could provide us with knowledge about the relationship between cause and effect. And obviously, it will be wrong sometimes, hence the need to re-test, but there is no better option.
If anything, we need more actual scientific process, meaning using our newfound computing capabilities to open up data so that all experiments can be vetted for accuracy and differing populations tested, etc.
That's why data should be free, in order to let this testing happen. Of course we have limited resources to do testing, so there must be some triage involved somehow, but that has nothing to do with the scientific process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefauver_Harris_Amendment
This is after the FDA blocked approval of thalidomide, pointing to insufficient testing:
In refusing to approve thalidomide earlier, many thousands of patients died horribly agonizing deaths. Thalidomide was actually tested quite intensively however the company that did it "lost" the records that showed harm to pregnant women.
The whole story is far more complicated, and involves chiral mixtures, pregnancy tests, and a lot more subtleties that belie the simple narrative.
the compounds that've been in strawberries for thousands of years are somewhat known items and lower risk than ones invented yesterday or even 20 years ago in a Dupont/Monsanto laboratory. The issue is that we have a business and political system that is highly incentivized to start adding contrived and novel substances to the environment at a massive scale and speed never before seen in nature. In recent times it's all to easy to introduce excess carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors into most homes or kill off large number worlds of honeybees. The effects merit careful consideration and regulation.
Our diet of fruits and vegetables has been refined through thousands of years of trial and error, and the result is that we eat a tiny fraction of available plants. It's arrogant to dismiss that history.
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As I get older, more grumpy: The single most disappointing, surprising thing to me has been the persistent, tenacious, aggressive, recurring amnesia, credulity, and willful ignorance.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 1,000 more times, yes please, sir, may I have another. (h/t frat hazing scene in Animal House.)
I really thought people would get smarter over time. From operant conditioning, if nothing else.
Lead in gasoline, cigarettes, BPA, CO2, freon, etc, etc. With every new outrage, the peanut gallery pipes up with the same old dumb ass excuses. And inevitably, the perpetrators KNEW, for DECADES, they were doing harm and actively suppress the knowledge. Merchants of Doubt. Rinse, lather, repeat.
But, no, not this time. You can't just assume the same bad guys with the same incentives would LIE to us. Again.
I'm shocked, shocked you'd suggest anyone would put profits before people.
As someone who's been here for over a decade (and had this account nearly that long), I can assure you this is normal behavior for the forum.
I didn't say anything about my wishes. I just welcomed a new(ish) user.
GP asserted that some scary chemicals cause problems (no sarcasm intended; I find phthalates and bisphenols a bit scary myself), but provided no supporting evidence. dehkn asked for evidence. Pretty simple right?
they do this all the time in the pharma space.
just arrange experiments on mice where they're subjected to higher and higher levels of whatever chemical until they're subjected to a level several orders of magnitude beyond any realistic hypothetical human exposure. then you cut up all the mice and see if they're different from unexposed mice.
(It's tedious to post supporting studies on every post, so there's nothing nefarious about claims being initially unsupported.)
I do agree that the "be careful..." comment is perhaps open to being interpreted as snarky, though it's always hard to infer the intent in a forum such as this.
When public health issues are concerned, the burden of proof is on the ones saying exposure does not present any risks worth worrying about. The FDA doesn't usually come in with the approach that we should just try everything out and see how it goes.
If you disagree, have you got any proof that these aren't the causes? Otherwise I guess it's start removing Jane Austen novels from the libraries.
If you come up with some kind of new petrochemical food-item to mimic tofu they’ll want you to get some pre-market approval first. If you’re starting up a new large food business, you’re also going to be subject to inspection to make sure your processes are safe and you’re not adulterating your products, intentionally or unintentionally, with stuff that might not be safe.
I'm just working to save time by making people who make outrageous claims do the work to produce supporting evidence. I'm really tired of people (especially non-scientists) citing articles they haven't read or aren't qualified to evaluate.
If you can reproduce the experiment, so that approximately the same data comes out, but the paper turns out false, that can only be because the paper makes a flawed interpretation of the data.
But that has nothing to do with reproducibility; you can tell that a flawed conclusion is made from some data without reproducing the process which produces the data.
If the analysis is correct and the empirical results can be reproduced, then the research is true. Or something like that.
Not really.
I know what you mean but that's not the same as what you are saying.
You mean consistently and reliably over a large number of studies.
Just picking articles at random, I don't have time for a full literature review for Hacker News, but the evidence taken in totality is overwhelming:
1. BPA (and related chemicals) activate estrogen receptors, causal study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28407500 This has been repeatedly demonstrated.
2. Direct human effects, correlational study: Working in a factory with BPA makes you impotent: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/dep381.pdf
3. Direct human effects, correlational study: BPA exposure by parents, especially mothers leads to reduced anogenital distance in children: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21987463
4. Direct human effects, correlational: BPA and other EDCs are associated with penile defects: http://www.acmt.net/_Library/PEHSU_Webinars/Is_Hypospadias_A...
5. Human ingestion routes, correlational: Blood BPA levels are highest occupationally among cashiers (thermal receipts), and people who eat a lot of canned vegetables (plastic can liners): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21205581
There are loads more where that came from. You've got a very direct mechanism of action, clear effects in animal models, and correlational studies showing people who are exposed to larger quantities show clear medical problems. You have clear, understandable routes of ingestion, and correlational data that shows that people who are exposed more to those routes of ingestion have more in their blood. I suppose you can complain that the human studies are correlational, but you can't legally perform a blinded study on this, because we know that BPA is harmful, and you won't get it past an IRB. Maybe you formed your opinion on this in the nineties or 2000s when only the hippies were trading out their nalgene bottles, but the science has come a long way, and the hippies were right. Phthalates are a very similar story.