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Comment by 127361 | Hacker News Reader

This and all the other food additives combined together, in our modern Western diet. Yes, discovered while trying to make an insecticide.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/a-chemical-found-i...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2...

Article about Sucralose:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/sweet-nothings

"Over the next year, Hough and Phadnis worked with the British sugar company Tate & Lyle to make more than a hundred chlorinated sugars, finally settling on one that had three chlorine atoms and was about six hundred times as sweet as sugar. “It isn’t of any use as an insecticide,” Hough told me recently. “That was tested.” But it has proved useful as a food. In its pure form, it is known as sucralose. When mixed with fillers and sold in bright-yellow sachets, it’s known as Splenda, the best-selling artificial sweetener in America."

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The majority of plant phytochemicals with properties that are beneficial to human health simply exist to protect plants against insects (i.e functionally they are poisonous insecticides). There is even a theory in pharmacology to explain this precise observation, called hormesis [1]. The type of reasoning you use that relies on the scary affective connotation of WORDS is not a meaningful way to draw scientific conclusions.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18543123/

just because they were combining chemicals to try to make an insecticide doesn't mean the chemical in and of itself is bad.

However between the mass microplastics and a lot of recent food additive additions, and mass sugar, im sure there's something interesting going on.

ALSO could be literally resiedue from pesticides used during farming.

So lots of weirdness, tl;dr we need to invest a fuckton of money into research to find out the actual answer.

IIRC one strategy for insecticides is to entice them to eat things they can't get any energy out of to starve them. Like you could make an excellent completely nontoxic artificial sweetener that killed bugs by them stuffing themselves with it, thinking they're full, and dying of malnutrition.

You would need an awful lot of it over a rationally long period of time though. Also for humans seems to have the opposite effect if anything.

Boric acid is great for killing some kinds of ants, and it is in eyedrops.

Wait till you find out the toxic elements that make up table salt!

Sucralose is an organochlorine compound, in the same class as PVC, pesticides and nerve agents.

Chlorinated organic compounds are found in nearly every class of biomolecules and natural products including alkaloids, terpenes, amino acids, flavonoids, steroids, and fatty acids.

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

When sucralose is heated above 120C (e.g. baked in an oven) it breaks down into harmful organochlorene compounds, such as Polychlorinated Biphenyls similar in toxicity to 2,3,7,8-TCDD.

2,3,7,8-TCDD is one of the most toxic dioxins known.

https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/harmful-compounds-might-be-fo...

I don't understand the uncertainty of this whole article. "It is unclear on the one hand which toxic reaction products are generated in detail and in which quantities they are formed"

Is a microscopic bit of harmful chemical going to do anything? We are exposed to lots of harmful chemicals all the time. Even our cleaning products are harmful.

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

Admittedly I'm not going to go around boiling sucralose and drinking it but I'm also not going to give this much more thought either.

> Is a microscopic bit of harmful chemical going to do anything?

Dioxins are generally a class of chemical where the answer is yes. Even trace amounts are horrifically carcinogenic.

In one instance, six truckloads of 2,3,7,8-TCDD-contaminated waste (not pure TCDD) mixed into used motor oil and spread over the roads of a ~420 acre town as dust control resulted in the entire town having to be permanently evacuated and disincorporated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

Also, more generally, letting catchphrase-driven handwaves from industry about how their dumping is actually ok really isn't a great way to be. Things like dumping of low-level waste (ie not actual uranium or fission products, just ordinary furniture/materials from facilities that are mildly activated) off the coast of california have increasingly been realized to be a mistake. Even "diluted into a whole ocean" (it never is), it turns out it doesn't just go away, and the plumes are in fact both detectable and potentially harmful.

You know what actually is the solution? The complete opposite, concentration and incineration (for dioxins) or permanent containment (high-level nuclear waste).

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/digestion-of-artificial-...

"Further, the team discovered that gut cells exposed to sucralose-6-acetate had increased activity in genes related to oxidative stress, inflammation and carcinogenicity. ‘It’s time to revisit the safety and regulatory status of sucralose, because the evidence is mounting that it carries significant risks,’ warned Susan Schiffman, the study’s corresponding author."

And highly reactive!

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