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I am currently reading the book "The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Life" by Randall Fitzgerald. It detai

by wppick 8y ago

I am currently reading the book "The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Life" by Randall Fitzgerald. It details the crazy amount of synthetic or toxic chemicals in our daily lives, pesticides on our food, and a list of other pollutants to the body. Just from reading that this article it doesn't surprise me, and I would be surprised if this trend doesn't continue and accelerate. The poorest Americans are deceived into a false sense of wealth by being able to purchase cheap, synthetic, and toxic alternatives to quality products that only the well off can likely afford. Everything from natural furniture, organic foods, natural material clothing, cosmetics and care products, and medicine are much more costly than their toxic, cheap alternatives. This will also increase the divide between the wealth and the poor since the brain is affected by the chemicals that we are exposed to resulting in lack of concentration, poor memory, irritability, impulsiveness, and even the resulting gut bacteria affects the brain through the vagus nerve. The poorest Americans also have jobs, and live in areas which expose them to more pollutants than the wealthy, and the bigger issue is that a lot of these people don't even realize that this is an issue. Trust in institutions like the FDA, aggressive marketing by corporations like deceitful labeling of foods to try and make them "sound" healthy, and general lack of education make them super vulnerable and at the whims of the highly education, profit-obsessed, shareholder-serving, psychology-understanding, resource-rich, lobbying elite

nradov 8y ago
Synthetic doesn't imply toxic or harmful.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  "Synthetic doesn't imply toxic or harmful." No, but it does imply unknown. The big misconception IMO is that people think "natural" implies safe or known.
  - nradov 8y ago
    How does synthetic imply unknown?
    - Shorel 8y ago
      Many chemical substances that are not occurring in nature mean that living tissues have had no evolutionary time (many generations) to adapt to them. Could be beneficial, could be harmful.
nwah1 8y ago
There are certainly issues of this sort. I've seen references to "environmental racism" where poor neighborhoods like Altgeld Gardens in Chicago are built on top of reclaimed landfills, and the water pipes are all made of lead. And Camden, New Jersey had very similar problems being a site of major industrial pollution. On the other hand, the upper middle class obsession with purity and organic stuff verges on neuroticism and New Age mysticism. Much of the panic over chemicals involves only trace amounts. Like how formaldehyde in vaccines is extremely tiny compared to formaldehyde in pears, yet it is used as a reason not to vaccinate. Or how sea salt has been replacing iodized salt, even though rates of iodine deficiency in the West are rising, and this is a major problem for cognitive development.
- wppick 8y ago
  One of the arguments in the book I mentioned was that yes the trace amounts are "safe", but in some cases the body cannot detox certain synthetic chemicals, so they build up in the body until they reach a level that begins to cause health issues
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    Broadly, this corresponds to the use "threshold model" and "linear no-threshold model" in toxicology, which describe whether the risk/harm from a substance has a safe 'cliff' or declines smoothly down to 0 dose. It's well understood that carcinogens are LNT hazards. The old quip that "even breathing causes cancer" is literally true, so there's no such thing as a safe dose of a carcinogen, just an acceptable dose. (Interestingly, effectively-safe doses decline as lifespans - and therefore cumulative risk - rise.) Increasingly, we seem to be finding that non-carcinogenic risks which have been filed under 'threshold' are actually LNT threats for which the low-end risk gets lost in other noise. I'm not particularly sold on the 'synthetic' framing here, though. Lead exposure is almost certainly LNT at least in childhood. Copper and zinc are linked to Alzheimer's in some uncertain-but-suspicious way. While endocrine disruptors like BPA are synthetic, they're acting on the same pathways as 'natural' disruptors like phytoestrogens. 2.5nm particulate pollution now appears to be not only carcinogenic but also development-inhibiting; the primary sources are man-made but the primary agents (NOx, SO2) are naturally occurring at much lower doses. Very broadly, I do expect many thing we're exposed to today will eventually be viewed as horrible errors like leaded gasoline (if hopefully less severe). But I'm not sure 'synthetic' is a meaningful metric, and I'm not sure bioaccumulation of the compound is actually a very common pathway relative to accumulative damage.

by wppick 8y ago

nradov 8y ago

Synthetic doesn't imply toxic or harmful.

bryanlarsen 8y ago
"Synthetic doesn't imply toxic or harmful." No, but it does imply unknown. The big misconception IMO is that people think "natural" implies safe or known.
- nradov 8y ago
  How does synthetic imply unknown?
  - Shorel 8y ago
    Many chemical substances that are not occurring in nature mean that living tissues have had no evolutionary time (many generations) to adapt to them. Could be beneficial, could be harmful.

nwah1 8y ago

There are certainly issues of this sort. I've seen references to "environmental racism" where poor neighborhoods like Altgeld Gardens in Chicago are built on top of reclaimed landfills, and the water pipes are all made of lead. And Camden, New Jersey had very similar problems being a site of major industrial pollution. On the other hand, the upper middle class obsession with purity and organic stuff verges on neuroticism and New Age mysticism. Much of the panic over chemicals involves only trace amounts. Like how formaldehyde in vaccines is extremely tiny compared to formaldehyde in pears, yet it is used as a reason not to vaccinate. Or how sea salt has been replacing iodized salt, even though rates of iodine deficiency in the West are rising, and this is a major problem for cognitive development.

wppick 8y ago
One of the arguments in the book I mentioned was that yes the trace amounts are "safe", but in some cases the body cannot detox certain synthetic chemicals, so they build up in the body until they reach a level that begins to cause health issues
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Broadly, this corresponds to the use "threshold model" and "linear no-threshold model" in toxicology, which describe whether the risk/harm from a substance has a safe 'cliff' or declines smoothly down to 0 dose. It's well understood that carcinogens are LNT hazards. The old quip that "even breathing causes cancer" is literally true, so there's no such thing as a safe dose of a carcinogen, just an acceptable dose. (Interestingly, effectively-safe doses decline as lifespans - and therefore cumulative risk - rise.) Increasingly, we seem to be finding that non-carcinogenic risks which have been filed under 'threshold' are actually LNT threats for which the low-end risk gets lost in other noise. I'm not particularly sold on the 'synthetic' framing here, though. Lead exposure is almost certainly LNT at least in childhood. Copper and zinc are linked to Alzheimer's in some uncertain-but-suspicious way. While endocrine disruptors like BPA are synthetic, they're acting on the same pathways as 'natural' disruptors like phytoestrogens. 2.5nm particulate pollution now appears to be not only carcinogenic but also development-inhibiting; the primary sources are man-made but the primary agents (NOx, SO2) are naturally occurring at much lower doses. Very broadly, I do expect many thing we're exposed to today will eventually be viewed as horrible errors like leaded gasoline (if hopefully less severe). But I'm not sure 'synthetic' is a meaningful metric, and I'm not sure bioaccumulation of the compound is actually a very common pathway relative to accumulative damage.