I was replying to your own claims, but I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population". Its just an unnecessarily extreme phrase for catastrophe, but it is possible. Disease can wipe out a population and novel material exposures can cause novel diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Food safety should not be presumed on theoretical basis, only a long history of consumption can reliably evidence it.
My claim was "they do fine" which, in the context of the question, doesn't mean "there are no side effects".
When a family friend had to have his spleen removed, it put him at somewhat higher risk of infection for the rest of their life, but in the context of him having emergency surgery for a ruptured spleen everyone knew what "he's going to be fine" meant.
> I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population".
I don't think it's ridiculous to worry about in principle. If fact, I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it. But I do think it's basically ridiculous to worry about any particular disease or diet doing it (except possibly maliciously engineered diseases). Diseases and diet changes just never have the extreme mortality rates you'd need to threaten the species.
I read the description "fully synthetic" here as practically specifying a product which can be created by manufacturing process from elements - as the clinical term "elemental diet" also accidentally suggests. Such a product is also what the lead comment supposed was possible as an alternative to agricultural production of food. To me this is the context of "synthetic foods" which we replied under.
From intuition and lack of ever coming across news of an alternative capabilty, I strongly suspect that besides salts and water most of the materials found in medical "elemental" diets ( carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, amino acids, etc) are refined and processed extracts of natural, oops.. grown;) ingredients.
This product guide partially confirms my intuition [1] :
>" Modified cornstarch and maltodextrin derived from corn are two commonly used ingredients in elemental diets. Physicians’ Elemental Diet instead contains tapioca maltodextrin and no modified cornstarch. "
>I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it.
Not enough influential people do for sure, or of less absolute but much less unlikely threats. Oh well, we made it this far, not all bad, at least there is much room for improvement.
Sure, that's a fine criticism to keep in mind. However, I believe the idea is that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones. (The key question was whether truly synthetic diets are nutritially satisfactory, not whether they are economically efficient to produce now...which they are not.) Of course, it's still conceivable that some secret molecule is needed by the body in minute quantities that was insufficiently filtered from the agricultural sources, but at some level of effective purification that worry starts to bleed into homeopathy.
We didnt find any reference to a "truly synthetic diet", so it remains a conceptual talking point which is of unknown economy and unknown capability to produce, yet it has been too easy to confuse the medical diet as evidence of the concept.
> that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
Technically speaking, they are not chemically identical. They are in certain contexts chemically equivalent, subject to 'trace' contamination, bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant. Synthesis can produce materials which are purer (as in simpler) than grown, but it is prohibitively difficult to achieve an exact, indistinguishable configuration of biologically generated materials.
It could be common to regard this distinction between identity and equivalence as pedantic, yet it is wrong and unscientific - the difference in meaning between these terms has categorical consequences to deduction. Loose claims of chemical identity, gloze over the theoretical component of equivalence - which is subject to change. Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes, until they became common knowledge around the 90s. Differentiating phenotypes in chemical terms surely involves advanced notation which I expect neither of us are familiar with. For sure homeopathy is a fanciful placebo based therapy, but even pure chemically speaking "simple" H2O carries perplexing detail at the molecular level[1] Whatever might be theoretically insignificant or not, is subject to ongoing insight and discovery.
> bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant.
Are there specific plausible possibilities in nutritionally required molecules that you are referring to here, or is this just a "no one knows for sure" argument?
> Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes
Did anyone ever actually point to a container of prions and mistakenly describe them as chemically identical? When I said "chemically identical", I did not merely mean the amino acid sequence.
Like, we have x-ray diffraction for this stuff. There is a reason vitamin supplements work to correct vitamin deficiencies. There is just not much room for unknown unknowns here.
> People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past ... they do fine.
We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong. That was my primary goal because it contradicted my other main comment, but I hope you can take that information in, and perhaps think about what lead you to that mistaken confidence. The elemental diet is not fully synthetic - it is mostly grown...
> they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
That object > "they" it doesnt exist yet. It's aspiration, an ideal, supposedly attainable with help from x-ray diffraction and whatever else you might think of, but its not real yet.
As an abstract concept you can talk about fully synthetic food that is chemically identical to food which can only currently be produced with essential and substantial use of non-designed, non-fully comprehended biological entities (lifeforms). What definitely "no one knows for sure" is that humans are capable of arranging that. It might be possible in a few decades time, with help from AI to take care of all of the biological intricacies which are too complicated for humans to grasp.
> Are there specific plausible possibilities
Its about recognizing the likelihood of important surprises - which can not be specified but which the situation is more than complicated enough to continue throwing up, as can be noted many times in the history of modern science. And the importance of not exaggerating the extents of current technological capabilities and understanding. Yes modern capabilities are dazzling and exciting, but still far from sufficient to get presumptuous about natures complexity.
> We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong.
No, we just didn't find citations.
It sounds like you're more interested in proving me wrong, and giving a well-worn lecture about scientific modesty, than in telling me something new, so I don't think there's much to be gained from continuing.
Yet again it is not true that we didn't find citations - I did for you. This avoidance and complaining about being given a worn out lecture really seems like bad faith. I wouldn't say that but you left our previous argument saying it to me, on the back of a completely erroneous dismissal of peer reviewed evidence I brought - to show you something new. Ok, better faith next time I hope, and when you can show me something new...
Food safety should not be presumed on theoretical basis, only a long history of consumption can reliably evidence it.