Go look at videos from the 70s before we began ingesting chemicals and tons of calories. Everyone is half the size with 99% less body fat.
You’re going to have to be more specific than “chemicals” unless you’re asserting that humans had fusion cells.
The fake lie answers that they will give might include zero calorie sweeteners because people hate the idea that you can "have your cake and eat it too" (no meta-pun intended).
Substances which are artificially synthesized or heavily processed which are added to food. For the purpose of this definition, ingredients which have a long history of use such as salt, alcohol, fermented foods, smoking, etc. are excluded.
Of course the purpose of this definition is to serve as a generalization in order to facilitate discussion. I'm certain that there are exceptions where modern additives are probably fairly obviously harmless such as vitamin/mineral fortification. Likewise there are traditional ingredients that we now know can be harmful such as alcohol, excessive salt, smoke, etc.
Now the food is causing long-term issues in some people, but the American medical system introduces a lot of friction towards chronic medical issues. These issues are underreported, therefore there isn’t a lot of money available to reaearch them. And the time between cause and effect is, well, decades before we have clinical diagnostics to allow us to say “you specifically need to eat less salt”.
Now we can slap regulations on the companies involved in food production to revise the levels of sodium in food. I’m not sure we know what the optimal levels are. But it will probably cost them millions of dollars factoring in food waste, changes to established shipping / storage guidelines, possibly even force them to change companies to deliver product faster or pull their product from certain retailers who find it no longer profitable to receive shipments given the low volume they can sell before the product is unsafe to sell.
But it’s only really possible to have the discussion of what the right solution is if the specific objection is stated. If someone is concerned about GMOs, the driving issue may be more related to where they can be grown, size of the product, crop vulnerability to disease, avoiding excessive use of herbicides or pesticides, adapting to ecological changes, and so forth.
Sure in like-minded folks, chemicals may be understood to mean artificial sweeteners, pesticides, GMOs, HFCS, etc. but it’s unclear which they’re objecting to or even what agricultural sub-industry they’re criticizing.
Heck even high amounts of sodium in the American diet is criticized, but strip it out entirely and you’ve got a different set of problems now.
Most likely each change was done for a reason that improved either the cost-effectiveness or the appeal of food, or solved issues relating to storage, availability, changing ecologically factors, vulnerability to plant disease, malnutrition, etc.
It’s just not constructive to say something that’s so generic that it evaluates to “food could have healthier ingredients” or even “food could have more natural ingredients”. It’s just handwaving a bunch of supply chain issues as if people are just choosing to be arseholes.
It’s like taking potshots at tech for centralizing personal information into databases that keep getting compromised for identity theft. Yeah, there are issues with that paradigm, but that’s not to say that solving the issue is as simple as decentralizing all information storage - that introduces another set of issues (eg are end users really going to have sufficient cybersecurity chops to not lose their data themselves instead of a third-party).
It’s easy to complain about the solution when you aren’t familiar with the constraints that keep it from being perfect.
There's a clear context here. You're rejecting context and screaming, "chemicals!"
Purposely misinterpreting what people say is the worst way to argue.
1. https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.
Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.
Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.
Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.
And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.
Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.
On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!
And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.
So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.
So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.
So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.
Also, chemistry? As a subject? Incredibly pedantic. The exception is the rule for practically everything.
There are formulations of medications that are selecting for this one shape of the particular molecule which has otherwise identical composition. And that may determine insurance coverage.
If you don’t want to have pedantic discussions, organic chemistry is not going to be a pleasant topic for you.
Odds are none or very few of the people on hacker news are farmers or chemists deeply involved with the agricultural industry, but I imagine this would come across about as favorably as a hacker news perspective on farmers complaining about the way apps on their phone work. Or complaining that computer nerds have ruined John Deere tractors by making them impossible to repair.
Ie it’s going to totally lack any sense of nuance about the business, politics, and logistical constraints involving the existing solutions.
Trust in scientists have plummeted in the last few years because of very good reasons (vaccine mandates, for one). Trust is hard to build back up, so if you want the trust back, you will have to do the decades long hard work of building it back up instead of complaining about it. It's not coming back just because you complain about it.
Also, there is no need to stop using the word just because it can be used in arguments to make unfalsifiable claims. Talk about the claims instead; it's silly to talk about the word.
You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
Whatever you’re talking about has been ingested by millions or billions of people, so I don’t think it’s “naive” to assume a certain degree of safety for…whatever you’re talking about in American food.
Yeah, America’s health profile is different than other countries and we have a high rate of obesity, but only to a certain extent. We don’t have a whole lot of people who walk into McDonald’s and then drop dead after having the fries.
There’s a degree of reasonableness between “we should assume nothing is wrong” and “we should throw our food economy into chaos by outlawing ‘chemicals’ until we can have a two-generation double-blind randomly controlled study of every single one to prove safety.”
And this would probably have to include herbicides and pesticides which might get taken up or broken down by the plants, or which trace amounts might still exist on the product if it isn’t properly prepared, etc.
It’s a dead-end proposal because you can’t shut down food production to that degree without, you know, starving people and causing the collapse of modern society. Which, I’m just spitballing here, is probably going to have worse acute effects than all those “chemicals” put together.
So clearly you need to prioritize what you think is causing harm, and I suspect that’s exactly what relevant research is doing.
Reminds me of a particularly sassy medical paper:
> Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459
If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.