Hacker News Reader

Comment by scohesc | Hacker News Reader

It is both amazing and horrifying that we live in a world where we look first at the benefits (oh look, these preservatives allow us to keep food for longer!), but don't look or even consider the side effects (oh, maybe these preservatives are killing our microbiome) - granted, I'm sure when the preservatives were created and start to be used, we didn't really know much, if anything about gut microbiomes.

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.

View on HN

The need to preserve food and feed a planet of people has existed for as long as humans have. The technical ability and knowledge of the micro biome of the gut is extraordinarily new areas of research. We barely know anything about it still.

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.

How would we know the side effects without a lot of time? The gut biome is notoriously hard to monitor.

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.

I would have thought that adding antibiotic compounds to food might have an effect on the bacterial ecosystem in our gut. Does that seem unexpected?

‘Something happens’ != ‘specific harm’.

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.

How long has it been since we discovered the existence and the importance of the gut microbiome ?

I'm always amazed at how surprised people seem to be when it's found that a biological system has complicated effects that weren't obvious at first glance. Given the nature of how they're evolved my working assumption is that every component of biological system is impactful in some way and messing with them will likely result in unexpected consequences.

Sure.

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.

> - granted, I'm sure when the preservatives were created and start to be used,

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.

You also have to weigh against things spoiling.

Radium!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com