Why do people have such a bias against using mice these days? You need to start somewhere, you aren't going to jump to all human studies for every single idea for an experiment.
That doesn't make the research invalid, but a certain bias against the ultimate applicability of animal studies is not only reasonable but empirically supported.
It was later discovered the harmful metabolite does not occur in humans. But the regulations still didn’t get rolled back. Enjoy your fake root beer.
Edit: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030048...
I imagine the MDMA connection helps keep it banned, sure.
It seems there are some other causes for concern with safrole that have not been disconfirmed in humans though. I'm seeing stuff about possible neurotoxity and immune effects as well.
But yeah I'm sure no one is eager to lighten regulations anyway given the MDMA connection.
https://cpdb.thomas-slone.org/pdfs/herp.pdf
Ask yourself why you’re specifically invested in this chemical being harmful even though the actual scientific evidence and its prodigious use over thousands of years by indigenous peoples indicates that it is harmless.
You are speaking like someone who values science, but your primary goal seems to be to reinforce an unscientific regulation. Is it so painful to consider that you (and the scientific establishment) were just wrong about this?
Please cite your sources, since you are making claims contrary to established research.
I don't appreciate you suggesting I have some kind of ulterior motive or bias. I don't care if sassafras oil is legal or not, it doesn't matter to me.
I do value science, and the fact that a culture has used a substance for a long time does not somehow preclude the notion that it could have toxic effects. Unless you want to argue that ethanol can't damage your liver either. Nor does the ruling out of one toxic effect preclude other mechanisms of toxicity.
Induction of neuronal apoptosis in mice: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17188719/
Inhibition of (human!) immune system: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12608906/
None of these seem related to the metabolite that doesn't appear in humans.
Thanks to your links, I found a better summary of the current health research on safrole:
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerpreventionresearch/article/8/...
If you search within that for safrole, a very thorough summary with many citations is provided. I’ve come away better informed, and will continue making root beer with confidence (the health concerns listed are slight; almost everything is similarly “dangerous”).
It doesn’t preclude it, but it absolutely suggests that a reasonable default assumption is that it is safe when used the same way.
Note that I’m not talking about some obscure, minor use. Hoja Santa, for instance, is used very widely across southern and central Mexico for wrapping food (infusing it with safrole), in soups, beverages, etc. It’s a beloved, signature flavor.
In this case, I found that many native food plants which contain safrole (like sassafras and hoja santa) are inaccurately labeled and disregarded as “toxic”. This is ignorant misinformation, and the people who are familiar with those plants and use them every day trust scientists less as a result of their demonstrable ignorance.
It's a problem of bad journalism coupled with lazy readership, aka "scientists dicover..." articles.
This is a deeper problem than mice or science "journalism". There is some fundamental asymmetry in people's desire for information vs their capacity to understand information.
Kind of like how I'm not a programmer or business owner but... here I am.
Perhaps it was the mixed messaging from the CDC in 2020, or the hesitancy to investigate lab origins. I know people who have gone full circle on both issues as their ideology evolved. People are primed to find "the reason" not to trust a scientific result they don't like and animal analogs are low hanging fruit you can grab without reading more than a sentence of a paper.