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Comment by iwejfweoifjweif | Hacker News Reader

Aren't most artificial sweeteners only 40-50 years old? Asbestos has been used for 4500 years but only in the past 100 have we realized its dangerous.

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If you buy packaged food from stores, you're regularly consuming dozens of compounds that have been around for a comparable amount of time to sucralose and whose long term effects are comparably poorly known. If you drive a car more than 10 miles a day, your cost benefit analysis would be better spent on figuring out how to reduce that than on trying to mitigate the tiny odds that a randomly singled-out food additive might be causing some marginal health effect.

Also, you can't really compare the way things were vetted for safety over a century ago to how they are vetted today.

I think the point is that vetting is a ongoing process and the asbestos example is one were something has been approved for use over a period and then later in its life-cycle found to have enough negatives to make it not be use. We know more about the moon than the human brain so what truely effects it and how is something we still learn and in that down the line the prospect of things changing and the FDA changing there mind is something that has and does happen and in that we accept there judgment for our safty.

The comparision to vetting safty a centuary ago and now is valid as in 100 years time we will have even better vetting and products in common use today could possibly be banned by the standards in 100 years time. That is also within a humans lifetime (given how long we will be living by then, statisticaly speaking as a trend). So the comparision is whislt not a dierct comparision but one of highlighting how time effects oppinion based upon new data collected over that period. If atifical sweetners still approaved in 100 years time then great, but it is a bet I would not take.

>I think the point is that vetting is a ongoing process and the asbestos example is one were something has been approved for use over a period and then later in its life-cycle found to have enough negatives to make it not be use.

And again, there's just no comparison between the state of science today and the state of science a century ago. For a point of reference, the idea of blinded and randomized trials was a new concept when asbestos first came under suspicion.

The implication that the efficacy of science will improve in the next 100 years comparably to how it did in the last 100 years is spurious. Scientific understanding is being continually refined, but it is not a linear progression. Take the difference between our understanding of the shape of the earth in 800BC vs. 600BC; the model went from a flat earth to a spherical earth. That's a giant leap in 200 years. Then in the next 350 years they nailed down the size of the earth to within about 20% of the true value. An impressive advance, but surely a lesser one. Then, over the next 2250 years, we've gotten a more accurate measurement of the size of the planet, and noticed that it's a bit oblate rather than a perfect sphere. As science advances, the rate of progress slows; that's just how it works.

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