5 ms·

Go look at videos from the 70s before we began ingesting chemicals and tons of calories. Everyone is half the size with 99% less body fat.

dyauspitr 2y ago
Also in 1970, 33% of the global population was malnourished. That number is less than 8% now.
- Arn_Thor 2y ago
  Apples and oranges. We can produce a lot of food without turning all of it into ultra-processed products stuffed with high-fructose corn syrup.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  Nice. This is a bad faith argument as we can attempt progress safely without poisoning the entire planet -- within the laws we pay for of course.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    I think the point I’m making is we can’t really. Organic farming would potentially halve the world’s food output.
spease 2y ago
> Go look at videos from the 70s before we began ingesting chemicals You’re going to have to be more specific than “chemicals” unless you’re asserting that humans had fusion cells.
- kelipso 2y ago
  No you don't. Every knows what "chemicals" mean unless you insist on being annoyingly pedantic. Purposely misinterpreting what people say is the worst way to argue.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    I don't know what "chemicals" means. Are you talking about preservatives, artificial colors/flavors, artificial sweeteners, certain natural fats, processed fats, contaminants, environmental chemicals, microplastics? I could go on. Saying "chemicals" is just a way to make an unfalsifiable claim. If someone shows evidence that, let's say, aspartame is harmless it's possible to just move the goalposts to the other "chemicals" because the list is nearly endless.
    - kelipso 2y ago
      It's all of those things. Yes the list is nearly endless and by default they all should be considered harmful to humans. Also, there is no need to stop using the word just because it can be used in arguments to make unfalsifiable claims. Talk about the claims instead; it's silly to talk about the word. You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
      - spease 2y ago
        > You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective. Whatever you’re talking about has been ingested by millions or billions of people, so I don’t think it’s “naive” to assume a certain degree of safety for…whatever you’re talking about in American food. Yeah, America’s health profile is different than other countries and we have a high rate of obesity, but only to a certain extent. We don’t have a whole lot of people who walk into McDonald’s and then drop dead after having the fries. There’s a degree of reasonableness between “we should assume nothing is wrong” and “we should throw our food economy into chaos by outlawing ‘chemicals’ until we can have a two-generation double-blind randomly controlled study of every single one to prove safety.” And this would probably have to include herbicides and pesticides which might get taken up or broken down by the plants, or which trace amounts might still exist on the product if it isn’t properly prepared, etc. It’s a dead-end proposal because you can’t shut down food production to that degree without, you know, starving people and causing the collapse of modern society. Which, I’m just spitballing here, is probably going to have worse acute effects than all those “chemicals” put together. So clearly you need to prioritize what you think is causing harm, and I suspect that’s exactly what relevant research is doing. Reminds me of a particularly sassy medical paper: > Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute. https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459 https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/ https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
- harimau777 2y ago
  I think that you could probably put together a reasonable working definition of something like: Substances which are artificially synthesized or heavily processed which are added to food. For the purpose of this definition, ingredients which have a long history of use such as salt, alcohol, fermented foods, smoking, etc. are excluded. Of course the purpose of this definition is to serve as a generalization in order to facilitate discussion. I'm certain that there are exceptions where modern additives are probably fairly obviously harmless such as vitamin/mineral fortification. Likewise there are traditional ingredients that we now know can be harmful such as alcohol, excessive salt, smoke, etc.
  - spease 2y ago
    What I would imagine happens is that some food producer realizes that a lot of their product is going to waste and they have intermittent reports of food poisoning. So they add salt to be able to continue selling the same volume of product. This also may make the product more flavorful. Seems like a win all around to them. Now the food is causing long-term issues in some people, but the American medical system introduces a lot of friction towards chronic medical issues. These issues are underreported, therefore there isn’t a lot of money available to reaearch them. And the time between cause and effect is, well, decades before we have clinical diagnostics to allow us to say “you specifically need to eat less salt”. Now we can slap regulations on the companies involved in food production to revise the levels of sodium in food. I’m not sure we know what the optimal levels are. But it will probably cost them millions of dollars factoring in food waste, changes to established shipping / storage guidelines, possibly even force them to change companies to deliver product faster or pull their product from certain retailers who find it no longer profitable to receive shipments given the low volume they can sell before the product is unsafe to sell. But it’s only really possible to have the discussion of what the right solution is if the specific objection is stated. If someone is concerned about GMOs, the driving issue may be more related to where they can be grown, size of the product, crop vulnerability to disease, avoiding excessive use of herbicides or pesticides, adapting to ecological changes, and so forth.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  There are a wide array of problems from plastics to herbicides and pesticides related to consumption. There's also the sustainability issue as laid out in this article. It's unclear what your contention is other than you might not like general statements about "chemicals". It's not possible to enumerate every issue. You're statement isn't contributing anything.
  - spease 2y ago
    Everything we eat is “chemicals” that is broken down chemically to be turned into energy (edit: and structural purposes). Sure in like-minded folks, chemicals may be understood to mean artificial sweeteners, pesticides, GMOs, HFCS, etc. but it’s unclear which they’re objecting to or even what agricultural sub-industry they’re criticizing. Heck even high amounts of sodium in the American diet is criticized, but strip it out entirely and you’ve got a different set of problems now. Most likely each change was done for a reason that improved either the cost-effectiveness or the appeal of food, or solved issues relating to storage, availability, changing ecologically factors, vulnerability to plant disease, malnutrition, etc. It’s just not constructive to say something that’s so generic that it evaluates to “food could have healthier ingredients” or even “food could have more natural ingredients”. It’s just handwaving a bunch of supply chain issues as if people are just choosing to be arseholes. It’s like taking potshots at tech for centralizing personal information into databases that keep getting compromised for identity theft. Yeah, there are issues with that paradigm, but that’s not to say that solving the issue is as simple as decentralizing all information storage - that introduces another set of issues (eg are end users really going to have sufficient cybersecurity chops to not lose their data themselves instead of a third-party). It’s easy to complain about the solution when you aren’t familiar with the constraints that keep it from being perfect.
    - whoitwas 2y ago
      The main constraint to a solution is the size and scale of chemical companies who lobby to create rules in their favor. There's no practical solution to this problem, the best we can do is educate people to live and consume sustainably.
    - 2y ago
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  What they meant should have written was "tons of refined sugar". That's the chemical that makes you fat, through making your food over-calorized while not leading your body to realize you need to stop eating. The fake lie answers that they will give might include zero calorie sweeteners because people hate the idea that you can "have your cake and eat it too" (no meta-pun intended).
bluerooibos 2y ago
> chemicals and tons of calories If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Also in 1970, 33% of the global population was malnourished. That number is less than 8% now.

Arn_Thor 2y ago
Apples and oranges. We can produce a lot of food without turning all of it into ultra-processed products stuffed with high-fructose corn syrup.
whoitwas 2y ago
Nice. This is a bad faith argument as we can attempt progress safely without poisoning the entire planet -- within the laws we pay for of course.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I think the point I’m making is we can’t really. Organic farming would potentially halve the world’s food output.

spease 2y ago

> Go look at videos from the 70s before we began ingesting chemicals You’re going to have to be more specific than “chemicals” unless you’re asserting that humans had fusion cells.

kelipso 2y ago
No you don't. Every knows what "chemicals" mean unless you insist on being annoyingly pedantic. Purposely misinterpreting what people say is the worst way to argue.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  I don't know what "chemicals" means. Are you talking about preservatives, artificial colors/flavors, artificial sweeteners, certain natural fats, processed fats, contaminants, environmental chemicals, microplastics? I could go on. Saying "chemicals" is just a way to make an unfalsifiable claim. If someone shows evidence that, let's say, aspartame is harmless it's possible to just move the goalposts to the other "chemicals" because the list is nearly endless.
  - kelipso 2y ago
    It's all of those things. Yes the list is nearly endless and by default they all should be considered harmful to humans. Also, there is no need to stop using the word just because it can be used in arguments to make unfalsifiable claims. Talk about the claims instead; it's silly to talk about the word. You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
    - spease 2y ago
      > You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective. Whatever you’re talking about has been ingested by millions or billions of people, so I don’t think it’s “naive” to assume a certain degree of safety for…whatever you’re talking about in American food. Yeah, America’s health profile is different than other countries and we have a high rate of obesity, but only to a certain extent. We don’t have a whole lot of people who walk into McDonald’s and then drop dead after having the fries. There’s a degree of reasonableness between “we should assume nothing is wrong” and “we should throw our food economy into chaos by outlawing ‘chemicals’ until we can have a two-generation double-blind randomly controlled study of every single one to prove safety.” And this would probably have to include herbicides and pesticides which might get taken up or broken down by the plants, or which trace amounts might still exist on the product if it isn’t properly prepared, etc. It’s a dead-end proposal because you can’t shut down food production to that degree without, you know, starving people and causing the collapse of modern society. Which, I’m just spitballing here, is probably going to have worse acute effects than all those “chemicals” put together. So clearly you need to prioritize what you think is causing harm, and I suspect that’s exactly what relevant research is doing. Reminds me of a particularly sassy medical paper: > Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute. https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459 https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/ https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094 https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
harimau777 2y ago
I think that you could probably put together a reasonable working definition of something like: Substances which are artificially synthesized or heavily processed which are added to food. For the purpose of this definition, ingredients which have a long history of use such as salt, alcohol, fermented foods, smoking, etc. are excluded. Of course the purpose of this definition is to serve as a generalization in order to facilitate discussion. I'm certain that there are exceptions where modern additives are probably fairly obviously harmless such as vitamin/mineral fortification. Likewise there are traditional ingredients that we now know can be harmful such as alcohol, excessive salt, smoke, etc.
- spease 2y ago
  What I would imagine happens is that some food producer realizes that a lot of their product is going to waste and they have intermittent reports of food poisoning. So they add salt to be able to continue selling the same volume of product. This also may make the product more flavorful. Seems like a win all around to them. Now the food is causing long-term issues in some people, but the American medical system introduces a lot of friction towards chronic medical issues. These issues are underreported, therefore there isn’t a lot of money available to reaearch them. And the time between cause and effect is, well, decades before we have clinical diagnostics to allow us to say “you specifically need to eat less salt”. Now we can slap regulations on the companies involved in food production to revise the levels of sodium in food. I’m not sure we know what the optimal levels are. But it will probably cost them millions of dollars factoring in food waste, changes to established shipping / storage guidelines, possibly even force them to change companies to deliver product faster or pull their product from certain retailers who find it no longer profitable to receive shipments given the low volume they can sell before the product is unsafe to sell. But it’s only really possible to have the discussion of what the right solution is if the specific objection is stated. If someone is concerned about GMOs, the driving issue may be more related to where they can be grown, size of the product, crop vulnerability to disease, avoiding excessive use of herbicides or pesticides, adapting to ecological changes, and so forth.
whoitwas 2y ago
There are a wide array of problems from plastics to herbicides and pesticides related to consumption. There's also the sustainability issue as laid out in this article. It's unclear what your contention is other than you might not like general statements about "chemicals". It's not possible to enumerate every issue. You're statement isn't contributing anything.
- spease 2y ago
  Everything we eat is “chemicals” that is broken down chemically to be turned into energy (edit: and structural purposes). Sure in like-minded folks, chemicals may be understood to mean artificial sweeteners, pesticides, GMOs, HFCS, etc. but it’s unclear which they’re objecting to or even what agricultural sub-industry they’re criticizing. Heck even high amounts of sodium in the American diet is criticized, but strip it out entirely and you’ve got a different set of problems now. Most likely each change was done for a reason that improved either the cost-effectiveness or the appeal of food, or solved issues relating to storage, availability, changing ecologically factors, vulnerability to plant disease, malnutrition, etc. It’s just not constructive to say something that’s so generic that it evaluates to “food could have healthier ingredients” or even “food could have more natural ingredients”. It’s just handwaving a bunch of supply chain issues as if people are just choosing to be arseholes. It’s like taking potshots at tech for centralizing personal information into databases that keep getting compromised for identity theft. Yeah, there are issues with that paradigm, but that’s not to say that solving the issue is as simple as decentralizing all information storage - that introduces another set of issues (eg are end users really going to have sufficient cybersecurity chops to not lose their data themselves instead of a third-party). It’s easy to complain about the solution when you aren’t familiar with the constraints that keep it from being perfect.
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    The main constraint to a solution is the size and scale of chemical companies who lobby to create rules in their favor. There's no practical solution to this problem, the best we can do is educate people to live and consume sustainably.
  - 2y ago
Der_Einzige 2y ago
What they meant should have written was "tons of refined sugar". That's the chemical that makes you fat, through making your food over-calorized while not leading your body to realize you need to stop eating. The fake lie answers that they will give might include zero calorie sweeteners because people hate the idea that you can "have your cake and eat it too" (no meta-pun intended).

bluerooibos 2y ago

> chemicals and tons of calories If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.