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Your rules are good but this: >Palmitic acid is in everything. Should have no effect on our judgement regarding its safety. Probably the story of our times se

Your rules are good but this: >Palmitic acid is in everything. Should have no effect on our judgement regarding its safety. Probably the story of our times seen from the future will be how we failed to account for extremely widespread use of very minorly dangerous products. See stuff like microplastics which took a couple decades to go from research to ban. Take the famous example from Fight Club: >The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. ... If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. Except we've moved even one degree from that now, think of a variable Y which is the cost to even figure out what B is. If you're a company selling a dangerous product you don't just have to consider X, you can also factor in Y as a proxy for long/hard entities will have to fight just to figure out the harm you're doing. So we should think about both sides of the coin, that the research is good enough to show there is an effect but also that we're not increasing Y to completely unreasonable amounts.

smsm42 5y ago
It's not everything like microplastics. It's everything like everything. Palmitic acid is one of the most common fatty acids. Cocoa butter is 25% PA. Cow milk is 30% PA. Chicken is 20% PA. In human milk, 25% of its fat content is PA. Olive oil has tons of it too, so do soy oil and sunflower oil (and probably any vegetable oil you've eaten). But if you don't eat anything at all, human body is still about 2% PA - as I said, it's a very common chemical compound. To quote Wikipedia: Palmitic acid, or hexadecanoic acid in IUPAC nomenclature, is the most common saturated fatty acid found in animals. If it were dangerous for animals, there would be no animals left living. It's not like microplastics that are exogenous. It's part of what living organisms are made of. Instead, what happened is probably some kind of p-hacking - they gave this compound, lots of it to be sure, to lots of poor mice to which they gave cancer previously, and in some of them the cancer got worse, because it's cancer. So they wrote down which cancers those mice had, and declared that they linked the compound to "spread of cancer in mice". Easy peasy. Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030881469700160X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952327819301279 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095232781... https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/240227/1/fatty-acids-composition-of-meat-of-five-native-chicken-gallus-gallus-ecotypes-of-benin-reared-under-organic-or-conventional-system.pdf https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/240227/1/fatty-acids-c... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682332/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682332/

smsm42 5y ago

It's not everything like microplastics. It's everything like everything. Palmitic acid is one of the most common fatty acids. Cocoa butter is 25% PA. Cow milk is 30% PA. Chicken is 20% PA. In human milk, 25% of its fat content is PA. Olive oil has tons of it too, so do soy oil and sunflower oil (and probably any vegetable oil you've eaten). But if you don't eat anything at all, human body is still about 2% PA - as I said, it's a very common chemical compound. To quote Wikipedia: Palmitic acid, or hexadecanoic acid in IUPAC nomenclature, is the most common saturated fatty acid found in animals. If it were dangerous for animals, there would be no animals left living. It's not like microplastics that are exogenous. It's part of what living organisms are made of. Instead, what happened is probably some kind of p-hacking - they gave this compound, lots of it to be sure, to lots of poor mice to which they gave cancer previously, and in some of them the cancer got worse, because it's cancer. So they wrote down which cancers those mice had, and declared that they linked the compound to "spread of cancer in mice". Easy peasy. Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030881469700160X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952327819301279 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095232781... https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/240227/1/fatty-acids-composition-of-meat-of-five-native-chicken-gallus-gallus-ecotypes-of-benin-reared-under-organic-or-conventional-system.pdf https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/240227/1/fatty-acids-c... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682332/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682332/