Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Gee, I don't know if this artificial chemical (that no other species consumes) is toxic.

Let me consume it everyday.

Radium, too was deemed safe to suck on. Thalidomide, perfectly safe. Hormone replacement therapy, perfectly safe...

The safety of these (Thalidomide, HRT) were also backed by studies.

I find safety studies very suspect unless there's years of experience, especially if there is money to be made by someone.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it -- Upton Sinclair

View on HN

Sweeteners have been researched quite extensively. If there are problems with regular typical consumption, the effect size is very small.

Small as in "the alternatives are most likely worse" or as in "you are consuming already a dozen other things that are known to be more problematic by an order of magnitude and you should focus on them instead".

While I'm most familiar with evaluating pharmaceuticals, the same principles apply to food additives. The issue arises that certain adverse effects occur infrequently or only after an extended interval from the time of exposure. Safety of drugs, food additives, et.al., are evaluated in relatively small premarketing samples. For uncommon (or delayed) effects to become evident it requires a much larger population to be exposed to the drug or additive.

"Years of experience" means an increasingly larger population has been subject to use of the compound. It may take 10's of millions of exposures for the problems to become clear enough to elicit action.

A surprising number of drugs (and food additives) have been used for decades before their adverse effects were recognized and the offenders removed from the market.

We should regard initial or early claims of safety as preliminary statements. Indeed skepticism is warranted. Ongoing monitoring/reevaluation is necessary. Certainly utmost caution is needed before allowing products to be widely used.

Hormone replacement therapy is perfectly safe.

The unsafe reputation came from a flawed study of far older, women.

IMHO the inventors should win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Non sequitur. Lots of studies examining the toxicity of artificial sweetners. The body of evidence shows null distribution.

"lots of studies" also showed other things like smoking were ok once upon a time.

The few times I've looked in depth at the studies about the safety of a particular thing, I have found that each study has at least one obvious major flaw that makes the study not necessarily support the conclusion. You could have 10 such studies or 100 and say that lots of studies show that X is safe or Y is dangerous, and the conclusion could be wrong.

This especially common when there's a financial incentive for the people doing or controlling the study to get the result they want, which there usually is. Or for studies that don't get the desired result to not be published.

> "lots of studies" also showed other things like smoking were ok once upon a time.

Such as?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/003335490512000215

That's not at all supportive of the claim that was made. All it does is support that Tobacco companies attempted to discredit science suggesting it was bad. Which was never in question.

It is however not "lots of studies" saying that opposite, that smoking is in fact ok for you. Which was the claim that was made. It would be fantastic if someone could point me in the direction of all these "lots of studies" where these studies are credible, indepedent scientific studies showing that smoking was ok for you.

> "lots of studies" also showed other things like smoking were ok once upon a time.

Some of the same scientists who were paid off by the tobacco industry to lie to the public about the safety of cigarettes are now working for the food industry to convince the public that food additives are safe.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...

More skepticism than usual seems reasonable.

I'm guessing the downvotes are for the tone of your comment and not the substance. What you say is true.

Most safety studies are paid for by entities that will profit if the study shows the thing to be safe. It's important to look at incentives.

I think you are right and the Upton Sinclair quote might have cut too close to home.

This is also a very different problem to solve. Especially in the face of regulatory capture.

An alternative model, where the owner/proposer owns complete liability of dangers and damages proved in the future, is also not fully satisfactory.

I think some shared ownership of liability is the best solution but no business will touch it.

Privatisation of profit socialization of liability is where things are at.

>> I'm guessing the downvotes are for the tone of your comment and not the substance. What you say is true.

> I think you are right and the Upton Sinclair quote might have cut too close to home.

I think you might be taking the wrong lesson from GP. While they were agreeing with you on the substance, they were pointing out that your way of presenting your point was undercutting your message.

Your response comes off as roughly, "Yeah, the truth hurts," which continues that tonal problem GP was talking about.

I feel bad that you got downvoted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com