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Comment by MagicMoonlight | Hacker News Reader

It turns out making everything out of toxic plastic and eating garbage food full of random chemicals that were never really tested is a bad idea.

I’m not particularly shocked. This is our century’s lead paint moment. If anyone survives the fertility crisis and the burning and the famine and they can still read and write then they’re going to be wondering what we were thinking. We basically just roll things out as they’re discovered and never stop to think about the consequences. Well here are the consequences.

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Ahhh there's nothing like getting lectured on a Sunday morning by that one person who thinks they knows all the things that no one else knows.

edit: to stay on topic, I find these comments are useless, and do not contribute to the discussion in any way.

It's not backed up with evidence or any kind of data, it's just an opinion, and a hand-wavey one at that.

If "we" already "know" this then why does it fucking keep happening?

Corporations make more money by selling trash.

Most of the things you believe are not backed evidence that you are personally aware of. Each of believes things to be even though we have at best only a heuristic argument to support them.

It is clear to me that the American diet is poison. We add sugar to everything. It’s hard to buy bacon without sugar added. Our bread is more like pastry. When I lived in Germany the diet felt much better. It would not surprise me to find out that part of the rise of cancer is our over engineered food products.

But I think the vast majority of the world "knows"? Poll people on whether they're happy with various chemicals being added or ending up in their food, and the overwhelming majority would oppose it. You might simply claim they're all ignorant. Run that same poll on whether people would approve of dihydrogen monoxide [1] being added to their food, and it'd be right up their on the chopping block for banning.

But I don't think trying to trick people proves much. Obviously things like diisononyl phthalate [2] is not just a scary name for an otherwise innocuous substance. It's a scary name for a scary compound that has indeed been proven to be harmful. Nonetheless people are consuming it in large quantities, and governments are remiss to do anything. And it's just one compound among many.

Companies making billions of dollars off these products (or other products that contain them) have far more time, motivation, and ability to influence or "influence" government officials than literally anybody else. Science can help somewhat, but it's also regularly coopted as a part of the same influence game. Grants, donations, first party science, and more gray-zone areas of influence are all perfectly standard. In any case, things like diisononyl phthalate have been proven harmful in countless studies. It doesn't matter.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_parody

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diisononyl_phthalate

We don't know the mechanism. It could be sitting on our asses for all we know. Or, more plausibly, lots more anal sex (which is great for a few reasons - we know how to stop viruses and more sex is good).

We have more homework to do.

> Or, more plausibly, lots more anal sex

That's not "ringing true" for me. Is there evidence of this?

> It turns out making everything out of toxic plastic

We've been doing this since the 50's. It should have surfaced much earlier.

This is absolutely not true. In the 1950's food was packaged in glass or paper. Polymer science was in its infancy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware

At-home food storage was switching to plastic in the 50s.

Fair point. Still, I think the reference point for plastic ubiquity comes quite a while after the 1950s. Plus, there are many different types of polymers and plasticizers and processed food is exposed to plastic at many points during its production and packaging. I would expect to find very different microplastic concentrations in leftovers from a home-cooked meal stored in a 1950's tupperware container and a modern frozen lasagna (or whatever) microwaved in its own plastic packaging.

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