5 ms·

> 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 hum

by 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
      - kelipso 2y ago
        Your argument is something like if it doesn't work 100% perfectly, then don't try it at all. No need to go whole hog, there is a perfectly fine list of banned chemicals published by the EU right next door. We should start with that.
- QuadrupleA 2y ago
  Every molecule in your body is a chemical.
  - kelipso 2y ago
    A statement that does not say anything. Don't even know why you would bother posting this.
    - QuadrupleA 2y ago
      It's the literal definition of a chemical. Your body is a metabolic machine made of chemicals and performing all kinds of metabolic chemistry. People hysterical about "chemicals" and "toxins" are almost always uneducated and unspecfic about which ones they mean. Plenty of manufactured chemicals are nontoxic or even good for us. And plenty are bad for us. So we won't get any improvement health-wise by making a vague blanket boogeyman term like "chemicals". Learn some chemistry, educate yourself, and be part of the solution rather than just a ignorant voice adding to the noise.
      - kelipso 2y ago
        This is a reductive and simplistic viewpoint. You are basically looking at a dictionary definition and trying to argue from that. You are not in 8th grade anymore and you are not talking to people who have just learned the definition of the word chemical anymore. Level up the conversation and learn that the sense of a word changes under different context, for a start.
- mmiyer 2y ago
  "chemicals are those ingredients with scary names" is not a useful definition - unless you think foods containing 3-Methylbutanal are problematic (bananas [1]). You have to be more specific, otherwise you end up deriding ingredients based on how they sound rather than how safe they are. HFCS for example, is 55% fructose and 45% glucose while regular sugar is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. So since fructose might be worse for the body (although this is disputed and it might be that glucose is worse), HFCS might be a little worse but it really is the quantities of sugar that matter than the kind. 1. https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredients-of-an-all-natural-banana/ https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
  - kelipso 2y ago
    Of course it means added chemicals. You cannot be this pedantic and still have a normal conversation. Well...you can but it's very annoying.
    - spease 2y ago
      Casual conversations are not about the technical aspects of food production and distribution that has been refined for thousands of years. Also, chemistry? As a subject? Incredibly pedantic. The exception is the rule for practically everything. There are formulations of medications that are selecting for this one shape of the particular molecule which has otherwise identical composition. And that may determine insurance coverage. If you don’t want to have pedantic discussions, organic chemistry is not going to be a pleasant topic for you. Odds are none or very few of the people on hacker news are farmers or chemists deeply involved with the agricultural industry, but I imagine this would come across about as favorably as a hacker news perspective on farmers complaining about the way apps on their phone work. Or complaining that computer nerds have ruined John Deere tractors by making them impossible to repair. Ie it’s going to totally lack any sense of nuance about the business, politics, and logistical constraints involving the existing solutions.
      - kelipso 2y ago
        I skimmed all of that but I gather you are saying don't talk about food production unless you are an expert or you want to be pedantic or some bullshit like that. Everyone eats food, everyone can influence food production in one way or another, whether through grocery habits or local or national politics. There is absolutely no way I would want to be associated with such a limiting viewpoint such as yours.
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).

by 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
    - kelipso 2y ago
      Your argument is something like if it doesn't work 100% perfectly, then don't try it at all. No need to go whole hog, there is a perfectly fine list of banned chemicals published by the EU right next door. We should start with that.
QuadrupleA 2y ago
Every molecule in your body is a chemical.
- kelipso 2y ago
  A statement that does not say anything. Don't even know why you would bother posting this.
  - QuadrupleA 2y ago
    It's the literal definition of a chemical. Your body is a metabolic machine made of chemicals and performing all kinds of metabolic chemistry. People hysterical about "chemicals" and "toxins" are almost always uneducated and unspecfic about which ones they mean. Plenty of manufactured chemicals are nontoxic or even good for us. And plenty are bad for us. So we won't get any improvement health-wise by making a vague blanket boogeyman term like "chemicals". Learn some chemistry, educate yourself, and be part of the solution rather than just a ignorant voice adding to the noise.
    - kelipso 2y ago
      This is a reductive and simplistic viewpoint. You are basically looking at a dictionary definition and trying to argue from that. You are not in 8th grade anymore and you are not talking to people who have just learned the definition of the word chemical anymore. Level up the conversation and learn that the sense of a word changes under different context, for a start.
mmiyer 2y ago
"chemicals are those ingredients with scary names" is not a useful definition - unless you think foods containing 3-Methylbutanal are problematic (bananas [1]). You have to be more specific, otherwise you end up deriding ingredients based on how they sound rather than how safe they are. HFCS for example, is 55% fructose and 45% glucose while regular sugar is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. So since fructose might be worse for the body (although this is disputed and it might be that glucose is worse), HFCS might be a little worse but it really is the quantities of sugar that matter than the kind. 1. https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredients-of-an-all-natural-banana/ https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
- kelipso 2y ago
  Of course it means added chemicals. You cannot be this pedantic and still have a normal conversation. Well...you can but it's very annoying.
  - spease 2y ago
    Casual conversations are not about the technical aspects of food production and distribution that has been refined for thousands of years. Also, chemistry? As a subject? Incredibly pedantic. The exception is the rule for practically everything. There are formulations of medications that are selecting for this one shape of the particular molecule which has otherwise identical composition. And that may determine insurance coverage. If you don’t want to have pedantic discussions, organic chemistry is not going to be a pleasant topic for you. Odds are none or very few of the people on hacker news are farmers or chemists deeply involved with the agricultural industry, but I imagine this would come across about as favorably as a hacker news perspective on farmers complaining about the way apps on their phone work. Or complaining that computer nerds have ruined John Deere tractors by making them impossible to repair. Ie it’s going to totally lack any sense of nuance about the business, politics, and logistical constraints involving the existing solutions.
    - kelipso 2y ago
      I skimmed all of that but I gather you are saying don't talk about food production unless you are an expert or you want to be pedantic or some bullshit like that. Everyone eats food, everyone can influence food production in one way or another, whether through grocery habits or local or national politics. There is absolutely no way I would want to be associated with such a limiting viewpoint such as yours.

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).