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This and all the other food additives combined together, in our modern Western diet. Yes, discovered while trying to make an insecticide. https://www.medicalne

by 127361 3y ago

This and all the other food additives combined together, in our modern Western diet. Yes, discovered while trying to make an insecticide. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/a-chemical-found-in-common-artificial-sweetener-may-cause-dna-damage-cancer https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/a-chemical-found-i... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2213903 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2... Article about Sucralose: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/sweet-nothings https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/sweet-nothings "Over the next year, Hough and Phadnis worked with the British sugar company Tate & Lyle to make more than a hundred chlorinated sugars, finally settling on one that had three chlorine atoms and was about six hundred times as sweet as sugar. “It isn’t of any use as an insecticide,” Hough told me recently. “That was tested.” But it has proved useful as a food. In its pure form, it is known as sucralose. When mixed with fillers and sold in bright-yellow sachets, it’s known as Splenda, the best-selling artificial sweetener in America."

Justsignedup 3y ago
just because they were combining chemicals to try to make an insecticide doesn't mean the chemical in and of itself is bad. However between the mass microplastics and a lot of recent food additive additions, and mass sugar, im sure there's something interesting going on. ALSO could be literally resiedue from pesticides used during farming. So lots of weirdness, tl;dr we need to invest a fuckton of money into research to find out the actual answer.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  IIRC one strategy for insecticides is to entice them to eat things they can't get any energy out of to starve them. Like you could make an excellent completely nontoxic artificial sweetener that killed bugs by them stuffing themselves with it, thinking they're full, and dying of malnutrition.
  - Engineering-MD 3y ago
    You would need an awful lot of it over a rationally long period of time though. Also for humans seems to have the opposite effect if anything.
wvenable 3y ago
Wait till you find out the toxic elements that make up table salt!
- 127361 3y ago
  Sucralose is an organochlorine compound, in the same class as PVC, pesticides and nerve agents.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    Chlorinated organic compounds are found in nearly every class of biomolecules and natural products including alkaloids, terpenes, amino acids, flavonoids, steroids, and fatty acids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organochlorine_chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organochlorine_chemistry
    - 127361 3y ago
      When sucralose is heated above 120C (e.g. baked in an oven) it breaks down into harmful organochlorene compounds, such as Polychlorinated Biphenyls similar in toxicity to 2,3,7,8-TCDD. 2,3,7,8-TCDD is one of the most toxic dioxins known. https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/harmful-compounds-might-be-formed-when-foods-containing-the-sweetener-sucralose-are-heated.pdf https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/harmful-compounds-might-be-fo...
      - wvenable 3y ago
        I don't understand the uncertainty of this whole article. "It is unclear on the one hand which toxic reaction products are generated in detail and in which quantities they are formed" Is a microscopic bit of harmful chemical going to do anything? We are exposed to lots of harmful chemicals all the time. Even our cleaning products are harmful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison Admittedly I'm not going to go around boiling sucralose and drinking it but I'm also not going to give this much more thought either.
xk_id 3y ago
The majority of plant phytochemicals with properties that are beneficial to human health simply exist to protect plants against insects (i.e functionally they are poisonous insecticides). There is even a theory in pharmacology to explain this precise observation, called hormesis [1]. The type of reasoning you use that relies on the scary affective connotation of WORDS is not a meaningful way to draw scientific conclusions. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18543123/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18543123/
latchkey 3y ago
Boric acid is great for killing some kinds of ants, and it is in eyedrops.

by 127361 3y ago

Justsignedup 3y ago

just because they were combining chemicals to try to make an insecticide doesn't mean the chemical in and of itself is bad. However between the mass microplastics and a lot of recent food additive additions, and mass sugar, im sure there's something interesting going on. ALSO could be literally resiedue from pesticides used during farming. So lots of weirdness, tl;dr we need to invest a fuckton of money into research to find out the actual answer.

colechristensen 3y ago
IIRC one strategy for insecticides is to entice them to eat things they can't get any energy out of to starve them. Like you could make an excellent completely nontoxic artificial sweetener that killed bugs by them stuffing themselves with it, thinking they're full, and dying of malnutrition.
- Engineering-MD 3y ago
  You would need an awful lot of it over a rationally long period of time though. Also for humans seems to have the opposite effect if anything.

wvenable 3y ago

Wait till you find out the toxic elements that make up table salt!

127361 3y ago
Sucralose is an organochlorine compound, in the same class as PVC, pesticides and nerve agents.
- wvenable 3y ago
  Chlorinated organic compounds are found in nearly every class of biomolecules and natural products including alkaloids, terpenes, amino acids, flavonoids, steroids, and fatty acids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organochlorine_chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organochlorine_chemistry
  - 127361 3y ago
    When sucralose is heated above 120C (e.g. baked in an oven) it breaks down into harmful organochlorene compounds, such as Polychlorinated Biphenyls similar in toxicity to 2,3,7,8-TCDD. 2,3,7,8-TCDD is one of the most toxic dioxins known. https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/harmful-compounds-might-be-formed-when-foods-containing-the-sweetener-sucralose-are-heated.pdf https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/harmful-compounds-might-be-fo...
    - wvenable 3y ago
      I don't understand the uncertainty of this whole article. "It is unclear on the one hand which toxic reaction products are generated in detail and in which quantities they are formed" Is a microscopic bit of harmful chemical going to do anything? We are exposed to lots of harmful chemicals all the time. Even our cleaning products are harmful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison Admittedly I'm not going to go around boiling sucralose and drinking it but I'm also not going to give this much more thought either.

xk_id 3y ago

The majority of plant phytochemicals with properties that are beneficial to human health simply exist to protect plants against insects (i.e functionally they are poisonous insecticides). There is even a theory in pharmacology to explain this precise observation, called hormesis [1]. The type of reasoning you use that relies on the scary affective connotation of WORDS is not a meaningful way to draw scientific conclusions. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18543123/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18543123/

latchkey 3y ago

Boric acid is great for killing some kinds of ants, and it is in eyedrops.