Common food preservative has unexpected effects on the gut microbiome
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
History repeats itself, I guess - we didn't know mercury, lead, asbestos, etc. were poisonous tens/hundreds/thousands of years ago but were using it for their supposed medical and practical properties.
In modern times additive safety to food is a pretty new concept. Safety means observable effects. We don’t look exclusively at the benefits of something (although I don’t know why we wouldn’t look first at our objective before discerning side effects) before approving it as a food additive, there’s actually quite a lot of regulation and research that goes into declaring something safe to add to food.
But thus is the way of knowledge. Until you understand something you can’t assert requirements around it. It’ll be easy to look back with new knowledge and second guess old knowledge, but it’s ill informed to say we don’t regulate food additives on any measure other than benefit.
The benefits are obvious though.
Lead we've known was toxic since antiquity - assigning a slave to a lead smelter in roman times was a well known and quick death sentence.
Asbestos took decades for cancer to show up.
Metallic mercury is pretty harmless in most situations - but can form biological compounds which are extremely deadly, especially when in contact with water sources.
We’re all still walking around after this has been happening for 50+ years. So whatever is going on is relatively subtle no? And likely easy to blame on something else. If it’s even actually a problem.
But the benefit is clear, in the form of less food spoilage, longer expiration dates, etc.
We’ve also survived numerous ecological collapses, multiple world wars, the extinction of megafauna (and likely caused most of them), and have radically changed our environment and style of living from nomadic groups hunting and gathering across wide open wilderness, to mass agriculture and being mostly urbanized.
If something changes, that doesn’t mean we all die. It doesn’t mean it’s all good, but it doesn’t mean it’s all bad either.
We still don’t actually know what, if any, real difference we’re talking about here either. It’s not like we have a decent baseline data set.
Ignorance doesn’t excuse “us”. So much of the modern world is just a giant experiment—exposing ourselves to an environment which is completely novel wrt. existing data, generational experience, and science. Just winging it! It’s a travesty, really.