Botulism is extremely rare, though. According to Wikipedia, it's 145 cases anually in the U.S., and 15% of those are foodborne. Compare that to millions of ca

Botulism is extremely rare, though. According to Wikipedia, it's 145 cases anually in the U.S., and 15% of those are foodborne. Compare that to millions of cases each year, in the U.S., of foodborne illness, in general. That's why I'm saying: It's a risk calculation, and government standards on food safety definitely prefer to err on the side of mandating too much processing of food over allowing too much foodborne illness. Maybe, some of those risk calculations need to be revisited, and there needs to be a societal-level debate about how many cases of tummy-ache we are willing to trade off for how many basis points of cancer risk. Incidentally, it stands to reason that the same kinds of things we do to kill off pathogens also kill off a lot of the microorganisms that may be useful to the body. To the extent that we're talking about additives, if we ingest them, then it seems likely that they might also kill off (or inhibit the growth of) useful parts of the microbiome already in the body. Of course, all of this I say in a mode of "cocktail party speculation" rather than peer-reviewed science, but there are just tons of unknown unknowns there, when it comes to the microbiome, and it actually offers one possible action mechanism (surely there are more than one), about how exactly it is that relying mostly on highly processed foods would be unhealthy for you.