5 ms·

> We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it se

> We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it seems prudent to assume its a risk until proven otherwise. Then you can calculate whether or not the possible miniscule or nonexistent benefit is worth the potentially miniscule or catastrophic downside. Some might respond that this would hamper progress, but really it would just hamper sales. You can continue to learn things without testing on the general public. And if you can't, then maybe that's no excuse to test it in prod.

Tao3300 4y ago
We already have too many people who won't get life-saving vaccines that will protect others because of "chemicals", and that was before covid.
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  This is probably not a great reading of what you wrote, so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is what I get from your comment: humanity has discovered or invented beneficial uses for some compounds (like for example some of the vaccines that have been developed throughout history), so therefore we should presume the safety of every other novel use of a compound that comes along. Thats not what you mean, right?
  - Tao3300 4y ago
    You must be replying to the wrong comment, because I didn't say anything like that. Next time trust your instinct that you got it wrong.
google234123 4y ago
Just wait until you learn about all the chemicals in a banana https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png
- wizofaus 4y ago
  If they occur in nature, esp. in food, our bodies have had time to adapt to them, so that's a distraction. But even restricted to "man-made chemicals" (that can get into our bloodstream and interact with our cellular biology) it's still an enormous class of substances that it's silly to treat as dangerous-until- proven-otherwise - our scientific understanding is a little more advanced than that.
  - Tao3300 4y ago
    > If they occur in nature, esp. in food, our bodies have had time to adapt to them, so that's a distraction. That's some serious woo and you just pulled it right out of your ass. Infant botulism. Anthrax. Cyanide. Belladonna. Poisonous mushrooms.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      And yes, if manufacturers were creating unnatural quantities of those and polluting the environment with them in a way our bodies couldn't handle, they'd need to be regulated too (some probably are). But the chemicals that naturally occur in food we've been eating for 10s or 100s of 1000s of years aren't the issue here.
  - makomk 4y ago
    That's not a distraction at all. There are plenty of naturally-occuring chemicals in plants that are deadly poisons to humans. Some of them are even naturally present at low levels in food we eat, such as cyanide in some fruits.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      True, but regulating the use of those in human industry is far less of an issue.
wizofaus 4y ago
"Chemicals" is far too ill- defined a term. Even if you define it as a substance that doesn't occur in significant amounts in nature (therefore our bodies have had no chance to adapt to) arguably most chemicals produced (esp. medications) have benefits that easily make the risks/downsides worth it, particularly as there are usually ways of mitigating those risks (which we absolutely need to do more of). It'd be great if we could use ML and super sophisticated simulators to determine ahead of time whether a particular chemical might have unexpected negative side effects were they to reach a certain level of saturation in our environment, and once such technology is available I'd be fully in support of it being mandatory.
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  > arguably most chemicals produced (esp. medications) have benefits that easily make the risks/downsides worth it Without some heavy qualification, this seems unlikely to be true. Maybe if you restrict it to things that have successfully gone through some sort of heavy trials, but even then there are plenty of things that get through with a tiny upside (like the recent alzheimers drug that made headlines). And most things don't make it through trials. If you open it up to any concoction that humans have discovered or whipped up in a lab, hoo boy. Edit: my running definition here would be any kind of compound that we've isolated and attempted to sell.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- amluto 4y ago
  There are some basic tests that could be done: Does it fully degrade in soil and/or seawater in a reasonable time. If it does not, are the components that remain high-molecular-weight polymers or are they small molecules? What happens to it in a mammal body? Does it accumulate or is it excreted or otherwise eliminated? Does it contain harmful elements (which inherently cannot degrade)? Does aging or UV exposure change the answer to #1? Does it contain contaminants that are problematic as above? By these standards, PFOA would massively fail. PTFE might pass by itself but might fail the contaminant test. Historical industrial discharges from fluorochemical plants would fail.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
>>Why don't we want to foster this? Because already people 1. Have profound misunderstanding of what is a "chemical" 2. have profound Ignorance of how very very few things in life are "provably knowingly completely safe" It's not that we would "eliminate a few bad chemicals" with that approach, it's that we would eliminate virtually everything. And let's not start with "let's use natural stuff" and get into silly argument as to how do you define it and how do you prove it safe (as people are also profoundly ignorant on what is "natural" or how provably safe it is). Everything will kill you. You will die. Note that I am not advocating nihilistic approach of "anything goes" / rampant markets / zero oversight, but I'm also not advocating nihilistic approach of "nothing goes". Human body and interactions are mind numbingly complex and I don't know how you demonstrate, conclusively, anything without testing in prod or even then, for given value of "conclusively". I doubt we would leave apples for sale if we tried to decompose them and prove all compounds within it conclusively safe.
- kurthr 4y ago
  People are made of chemicals... and they are bad... so should we remove the chemicals from them? I mean it's snark, but it's as legitimate as "if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes" and you hear that all the time.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Yup. I ask people to point at something not made out of chemicals. 5% of time there's enlightenment. 95% of the time I get a testy "you know what I mean", to which 70% of the time I manage not to respond with "yes, but do you?? "
- ifyoubuildit 4y ago
  Ok, I should clarify. The things that have been around for generations and we haven't yet discovered deal breaking issues in should obviously get a pass (unless something is eventually found of course). When a company comes out with a flashy new product that has a novel use of a compound, we should be skeptical by default, especially if it is something that eventually makes its way onto or into our bodies somehow. I'm not asking for complete safety. I'm just suggesting that we don't presume "safe enough" by default. Apples are fine. When you do some novel shit to that apple before it gets to me, no thanks, I'll wait and see. Whatever the benefit is, its probably not for my sake (it's probably good for margins though), and if it is it's probably not that much better than a plain old apple.
chmod600 4y ago
The problem is that (a) you can't prove something safe, you can merely fail to find harm; and (b) literally everything is a chemical, often it already exists in some form and is used for some purposes, and we reuse it for something else at a larger scale... at large enough scales basically anything is dangerous.
bobthepanda 4y ago
We actually do have an example of a category that is regulated as “deny by default” in the US but not elsewhere! Sunscreen is regulated by the FDA unlike all other cosmetic products, and is considered a cosmetic in Korea, Japan, Canada and Asia. The end result is that there are a lot of new sunscreen formulations no one wants to put through the FDA process despite several attempts at simplification by the FDA and Congress; a new sunscreen chemical hasn’t been approved since the turn of the century. The problem is that the already approved 15 or so chemicals either have side effects of their own, or have bad cosmetic properties (bad texture, bad mixing, leaves white color on skin, etc.). We may actually be exposing people to more risk from skin cancer due to the lack of products that people actually want to apply to their skin daily.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I get the avoision factor, but what do we have to go on to know the safety of the other country’s products if they’re more loosely regulated? It’s not like the FDA requires studies to be done in USA, so it’s hard(er) to argue that this is a case of regulatory capture. It sounds like the evidence base for the non-FDA products isn’t there beyond “people in blank have used it and we can confirm they didn’t immediately die but otherwise we don’t really know”. Meanwhile, I can’t just import a European car and register it, even though it has met almost entirely overlapping safety standards.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    The difference is that we certainly have approved new car safety features in the US in the last 22 years, not all of which were domestic in origin. How many regulatory categories can we speak of that have not allowed any new entries in that time frame? In that time frame some of these ingredients like bemotrizinol have been available to hundreds of millions of people. If there was a risk of something like thalidomide babies here, it would’ve been observable by now.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Thalidomide was fairly straightforward because missing limbs are unusual and immediately obvious, among other issues with those exposed. History of usage doesn’t make something safer than the tested options. And a lot of potential issues aren’t immediately obvious.
jen729w 4y ago
I knocked up this site a bunch of years ago. I should probably update it now that I have half a clue how to do that. https://isitchemicalfree.com/ https://isitchemicalfree.com/

Tao3300 4y ago

We already have too many people who won't get life-saving vaccines that will protect others because of "chemicals", and that was before covid.

ifyoubuildit 4y ago
This is probably not a great reading of what you wrote, so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is what I get from your comment: humanity has discovered or invented beneficial uses for some compounds (like for example some of the vaccines that have been developed throughout history), so therefore we should presume the safety of every other novel use of a compound that comes along. Thats not what you mean, right?
- Tao3300 4y ago
  You must be replying to the wrong comment, because I didn't say anything like that. Next time trust your instinct that you got it wrong.

google234123 4y ago

Just wait until you learn about all the chemicals in a banana https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png

wizofaus 4y ago
If they occur in nature, esp. in food, our bodies have had time to adapt to them, so that's a distraction. But even restricted to "man-made chemicals" (that can get into our bloodstream and interact with our cellular biology) it's still an enormous class of substances that it's silly to treat as dangerous-until- proven-otherwise - our scientific understanding is a little more advanced than that.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  > If they occur in nature, esp. in food, our bodies have had time to adapt to them, so that's a distraction. That's some serious woo and you just pulled it right out of your ass. Infant botulism. Anthrax. Cyanide. Belladonna. Poisonous mushrooms.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    And yes, if manufacturers were creating unnatural quantities of those and polluting the environment with them in a way our bodies couldn't handle, they'd need to be regulated too (some probably are). But the chemicals that naturally occur in food we've been eating for 10s or 100s of 1000s of years aren't the issue here.
- makomk 4y ago
  That's not a distraction at all. There are plenty of naturally-occuring chemicals in plants that are deadly poisons to humans. Some of them are even naturally present at low levels in food we eat, such as cyanide in some fruits.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    True, but regulating the use of those in human industry is far less of an issue.

wizofaus 4y ago

"Chemicals" is far too ill- defined a term. Even if you define it as a substance that doesn't occur in significant amounts in nature (therefore our bodies have had no chance to adapt to) arguably most chemicals produced (esp. medications) have benefits that easily make the risks/downsides worth it, particularly as there are usually ways of mitigating those risks (which we absolutely need to do more of). It'd be great if we could use ML and super sophisticated simulators to determine ahead of time whether a particular chemical might have unexpected negative side effects were they to reach a certain level of saturation in our environment, and once such technology is available I'd be fully in support of it being mandatory.

ifyoubuildit 4y ago
> arguably most chemicals produced (esp. medications) have benefits that easily make the risks/downsides worth it Without some heavy qualification, this seems unlikely to be true. Maybe if you restrict it to things that have successfully gone through some sort of heavy trials, but even then there are plenty of things that get through with a tiny upside (like the recent alzheimers drug that made headlines). And most things don't make it through trials. If you open it up to any concoction that humans have discovered or whipped up in a lab, hoo boy. Edit: my running definition here would be any kind of compound that we've isolated and attempted to sell.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
amluto 4y ago
There are some basic tests that could be done: Does it fully degrade in soil and/or seawater in a reasonable time. If it does not, are the components that remain high-molecular-weight polymers or are they small molecules? What happens to it in a mammal body? Does it accumulate or is it excreted or otherwise eliminated? Does it contain harmful elements (which inherently cannot degrade)? Does aging or UV exposure change the answer to #1? Does it contain contaminants that are problematic as above? By these standards, PFOA would massively fail. PTFE might pass by itself but might fail the contaminant test. Historical industrial discharges from fluorochemical plants would fail.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

>>Why don't we want to foster this? Because already people 1. Have profound misunderstanding of what is a "chemical" 2. have profound Ignorance of how very very few things in life are "provably knowingly completely safe" It's not that we would "eliminate a few bad chemicals" with that approach, it's that we would eliminate virtually everything. And let's not start with "let's use natural stuff" and get into silly argument as to how do you define it and how do you prove it safe (as people are also profoundly ignorant on what is "natural" or how provably safe it is). Everything will kill you. You will die. Note that I am not advocating nihilistic approach of "anything goes" / rampant markets / zero oversight, but I'm also not advocating nihilistic approach of "nothing goes". Human body and interactions are mind numbingly complex and I don't know how you demonstrate, conclusively, anything without testing in prod or even then, for given value of "conclusively". I doubt we would leave apples for sale if we tried to decompose them and prove all compounds within it conclusively safe.

kurthr 4y ago
People are made of chemicals... and they are bad... so should we remove the chemicals from them? I mean it's snark, but it's as legitimate as "if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes" and you hear that all the time.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Yup. I ask people to point at something not made out of chemicals. 5% of time there's enlightenment. 95% of the time I get a testy "you know what I mean", to which 70% of the time I manage not to respond with "yes, but do you?? "
ifyoubuildit 4y ago
Ok, I should clarify. The things that have been around for generations and we haven't yet discovered deal breaking issues in should obviously get a pass (unless something is eventually found of course). When a company comes out with a flashy new product that has a novel use of a compound, we should be skeptical by default, especially if it is something that eventually makes its way onto or into our bodies somehow. I'm not asking for complete safety. I'm just suggesting that we don't presume "safe enough" by default. Apples are fine. When you do some novel shit to that apple before it gets to me, no thanks, I'll wait and see. Whatever the benefit is, its probably not for my sake (it's probably good for margins though), and if it is it's probably not that much better than a plain old apple.

chmod600 4y ago

The problem is that (a) you can't prove something safe, you can merely fail to find harm; and (b) literally everything is a chemical, often it already exists in some form and is used for some purposes, and we reuse it for something else at a larger scale... at large enough scales basically anything is dangerous.

bobthepanda 4y ago

We actually do have an example of a category that is regulated as “deny by default” in the US but not elsewhere! Sunscreen is regulated by the FDA unlike all other cosmetic products, and is considered a cosmetic in Korea, Japan, Canada and Asia. The end result is that there are a lot of new sunscreen formulations no one wants to put through the FDA process despite several attempts at simplification by the FDA and Congress; a new sunscreen chemical hasn’t been approved since the turn of the century. The problem is that the already approved 15 or so chemicals either have side effects of their own, or have bad cosmetic properties (bad texture, bad mixing, leaves white color on skin, etc.). We may actually be exposing people to more risk from skin cancer due to the lack of products that people actually want to apply to their skin daily.

Scoundreller 4y ago
I get the avoision factor, but what do we have to go on to know the safety of the other country’s products if they’re more loosely regulated? It’s not like the FDA requires studies to be done in USA, so it’s hard(er) to argue that this is a case of regulatory capture. It sounds like the evidence base for the non-FDA products isn’t there beyond “people in blank have used it and we can confirm they didn’t immediately die but otherwise we don’t really know”. Meanwhile, I can’t just import a European car and register it, even though it has met almost entirely overlapping safety standards.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  The difference is that we certainly have approved new car safety features in the US in the last 22 years, not all of which were domestic in origin. How many regulatory categories can we speak of that have not allowed any new entries in that time frame? In that time frame some of these ingredients like bemotrizinol have been available to hundreds of millions of people. If there was a risk of something like thalidomide babies here, it would’ve been observable by now.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Thalidomide was fairly straightforward because missing limbs are unusual and immediately obvious, among other issues with those exposed. History of usage doesn’t make something safer than the tested options. And a lot of potential issues aren’t immediately obvious.

jen729w 4y ago

I knocked up this site a bunch of years ago. I should probably update it now that I have half a clue how to do that. https://isitchemicalfree.com/ https://isitchemicalfree.com/