> 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. Whate

> 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