Comment by chrisbennet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisbennet | Hacker News Reader

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"Look. In 1970, over 75% of kids in the US were never breastfed, which means they drank milk from BPA containing bottles from day 1. And they turned out fine."

But did they really (turn out ok)?

How common were peanut allergies and obesity before 1970 for example?

I'm not saying that BPA cause peanut allergies or obesity. I am saying that kids are not turning out OK and it's fair to question whether something environmental is causing this.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/jirtle-epigenetics.html

"Jirtle: We have recently demonstrated that exposure of pregnant mice to bisphenol A (BPA), a building block of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins used to make consumer items ranging from water bottles to dental sealants, significantly reduces DNA methylation in Avy mice (Dolinoy et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104: 13056-13061, 2007). This results in the birth of more yellow offspring, mice that become obese and have a higher incidence of diabetes and cancer as adults. Thus, there could be a connection between the increase in plastics in our environment and the rising incidence of obesity in humans. However, such an association will not be able to be demonstrated unequivocally until the expression and function of genes involved in human obesity are shown to be altered by BPA."

People are more overweight these days because they eat 250 note calories per day than people in 1970: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/12/us-weight-life.... Increased caloric intake explains almost all of the rise in obesity: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090508045321.ht.... Why do we eat more than in 1970? For the same reason we buy cars more often, phones more often, have several TV's in each household: we're a consumer culture and we have more resources to consume.

If you want to look for the root cause, look at food businesses and advertising. The Starbucks' of the world that make more profits than the coffee shops of yore by selling higher calorie foods for even higher prices. A coffee and donut at DD has half the calories of a latte and scone at Starbucks.

The "eating more" and "environmental influence" explanations are not mutually exclusive. One could be causing the other--chemicals that mimic hormones could be influencing appetite or satiation, for example.

Yeah we see that careless phrase all the time - "We turned out fine". Except when we didn't. Its observer bias I think.

My Dad used to say "In my day we didn't throw out food when it had mold; we'd just skim it and cook it again!" My sister came back with "Yeah Dad, and in your day people died for no reason."

They almost certainly didn't die from the mold.

That's just semantics. You don't die from smoking either. It increases the risk of several types of cancer. Just like most forms of mold.

Molds that grow on bread or food in the refrigerator are vanishingly unlikely to produce aflatoxin, the carcinogen you're referring to here. The real risk of food-borne illness from moldy kitchen foods are allergic or bacterial.

There are dozens of toxins harmful to humans that can be identified in different types of mold, of which there are many. Some have been known to raise the risk of tumors. One specific example is ocratoxin.

I did not mention aflatoxin because it is bad for you on a whole other level. Fortunately it's not very common.

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