6 ms·
Just goes to show how little the FDA can even imagine to protect us against.
by stmfreak 9y ago
Just goes to show how little the FDA can even imagine to protect us against.
- dboreham 9y agoIs this more or less "foreseeable" than speculative execution side channel timing attacks?
- Gibbon1 9y agoIf this is true, that confirms suspicious I've had that particular things in our diet can cause issues with gut flora. It's problematic for people because we have very little control over what gets added, and some additives end up everywhere.
- taeric 9y agoI thought modern views on ulcers confirmed that view. Does it not?
- Gibbon1 9y agoI apparently had a south east Asian protozoan that I picked up in the late 1980's. Stomach issues went away after a 6 week course of a rather nasty anti-protozoan. That the issue would wax and wane and I was intolerant to dairy. But not after is what made me consider that. So not just that some bug can mess you up, but that some bugs may well prefer certain chemicals in our diet. Eat a particular food and whatever starts growing and pumping out toxins or proteins your immune system has issues with.
- bitexploder 9y agoI don't know about food science, but... In infosec for a while. Not surprised at all about the recent side channels. Spectre / Meltdown are novel, but not new. Edit: I bet for people in the right field of medicine/research this is interesting but not a big surprise.
- slack3r 9y agoIn general, the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. A comment is too short to summarize the reasons why, but I would refer interested people to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Inadequate Equilibria ― there is a 50 page dialogue between two humans and an alien visitor on the FDA.
- smallnamespace 9y ago> the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. It seems more accurate to say it does both simultaneously, or that it mis-regulates. It fails to regulate some things that it should have (such as this), and it regulates other things that are better left alone. And we should expect any noisy estimator to do that in general: there are always going to be both false positives and false negatives. One thing we should be careful about though is to distinguish between arguments over the relative propensity of either, vs. the relative weighting that should be given to each. E.g. sometimes people say 'no, the FDA over-regulates rather than under-regulates', when what they really mean is that the find that specific instances of over-regulation to be very harmful, while they think that the examples of under-regulation can be ignored.
- c3534l 9y ago> In general, the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. I STRONGLY disagree. The FDA is underfunded and only looks into a tiny minority of cases deemed worth their effort. Walk into a "health" food store and look at how many unregulated drugs are on the shelf. They put out fires more often than they prevent them.
- notadoc 9y ago> In general, the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. In general, the FDA under-regulates dramatically.
- Daishiman 9y agoEliezer Yudkowsky is neither a bromatologist nor a pathologist, so as far as I' concerned his speculation on the subject has minimal value.
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
- QAPereo 9y agoIt also goes to show that Soylent was (before 1.5 at least) a bad idea. I wonder if it still is, given that they switched one disaccharide (trehalose) for another (isomaltulose).
- mirimir 9y agoWell, it could protect us by making all synthetic ingredients illegal. Because there's no way to really know that some novel ingredient is safe. But that ain't gonna happen.
- refurb 9y agoYou realize there are a number of naturally occurring chemicals that are deadly as well right?
- dmoy 9y agoNonsense! Now let me go eat this small jar of apple seeds I have saved up from a month of an-apple-a-day.
- gonzo 9y agoProbably won’t hurt an otherwise healthy adult. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318706.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318706.php
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 9y agoAnd people have learned not to eat them, through trial and error. Just as we're learning not to eat trehalose ;)
- mikeash 9y ago“[Trehalose is] a disaccharide made up of two glucose molecules linked with a sturdy α,α-1,1-glucoside bond, and it’s naturally found in low levels in some bacteria, fungi, plants, and invertebrates.” Oops.
- mirimir 9y agoSure, but who eats enough of those things to get enough to be problematic? Virtually all of the trehalose in food products is synthetic.
- mmagin 9y agoIt gets worse. Apparently you can pass this off as "natural flavor" in the US: http://nagaseamerica.com/news_release/treha-trehalose-available-as-a-natural-flavor-through-improved-production-process/ http://nagaseamerica.com/news_release/treha-trehalose-availa...
- kijin 9y agoFood labeling in the US is a joke. Find a country with stricter regulations and see how the same product is labeled there. You'll find all the shady ingredients and percentages that were either missing or only vaguely specified in the US version.
- sjg007 9y agoRight but in this case trehalose is global..
- morsch 9y agoSpecifically, as far as I can tell, this is how trehalose has to be labelled in the EU (article 2): http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32001D0721 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A3...