Widely-Used Food Additive TBHQ Impairs Immune Responses to Influenza Infection | Hacker News Reader

Widely-Used Food Additive TBHQ Impairs Immune Responses to Influenza Infection

sci-news.com

33 pointsscottie_m9 comments

I always want to see the absolute changes in outcome. Not just relative. No article ever publishes this, and this article doesn't publish either.

Is the effect cumulative, how much time does it take to recover. Will fasting help/harm the effects of the flu under said conditions. I mean, there's so many compounding factors. Also, it's in mice, so may not translate anyway.

Does anyone have any slides or a preprint of this? I've grown quite skeptical of studies like this in general due to poor statistical practice.

I don't immediately see a copy of the paper linked from the article, but it is a study on mice, which doesn't mean the results transfer to humans. The title of the linked article should end with "in mice".

That said, it looks like the study was actually testing the effects of the chemical on specific proteins, which are common between humans and mice, and refers to other related studies that were actually done on humans. The article quotes one of the study authors as saying more work is necessary to actually connect the chemical in question with those proteins. In other words, they are still investigating a plausible pathway to explain how this chemical actually affects immune response in mice. That may or may not transfer to humans.

One thing I found a little concerning is there's no mention of effect size. That is, how did they measure immune response, and what was the actual effect on health? The summary says "more severe weight loss," but how severe? How much longer was the illness?

The article also doesn't explain why this chemical is used in industry. Even if it causes an immuno-suppressive effect, would banning its use cause other problems, like increased food spoilage? What's the trade-off? Without knowing what the chemical is used for, and what the effect size on the mice was, it's hard to come away with any value judgment from this article and the linked summary.

Anyway, sounds like an interesting thing worth following up on, but I wouldn't go around examining your ingredients labels based on this one study.

>One thing I found a little concerning is there's no mention of effect size. That is, how did they measure immune response, and what was the actual effect on health? The summary says "more severe weight loss," but how severe? How much longer was the illness?

Yeah, this was really my big question. Nothing about sample size or effect size.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tert-Butylhydroquinone

It looks like there's a few links in the reference section.

Widely if you eat oily snacks (microwave popcorn, ...) and instant soups. If you mostly cook at home, you're pretty unlikely to be exposed to this.

I'm curious about cumulative effect and how long it takes to undo. Considering that was a lot of what I ate until 3-5 years ago.

No more Recees Peanut Butter Cups (tm) :(

If you are close to a Trader Joe's, their PB cups [0] are better IMHO.

[0]: https://www.traderjoes.com/FearlessFlyer/Article/4208

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