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> 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.




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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


Why do you say everything is chemicals like it's some sort of gotcha? That's very obvious.

There's a clear context here. You're rejecting context and screaming, "chemicals!"


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.


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.


"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/ingredie...


Could be worse! You might have ingested some dihydrogen monoxide!


What’s great about this comment is how damn complex just fucking water is.

You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.

Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.

Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.

Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.

And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.

Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.

On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!

And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.

So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.

So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.

So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.


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.


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.


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.


What you’re doing is spreading unqualified FUD towards the work of scientists and engineers involved in bioengineering. We don’t need more ignorant opposition to STEM in the US. We already have large swathes of the population rejecting vaccines with an excellent safety record because taking their chances with an unknown disease known to do permanent neurovascular damage was more “natural”.


As opposed to you encouraging naivite among the general population about bioengineered products? We do need a good amount of opposition to this incredibly naive viewpoint that so many people like you have of accepting whatever nonsense some scientist says as unquestionable truth. If the people involved in bioengineering feel so strongly that the population need to take particular drug, make that argument scientifically instead of going into histrionics about FUD or whatever.

Trust in scientists have plummeted in the last few years because of very good reasons (vaccine mandates, for one). Trust is hard to build back up, so if you want the trust back, you will have to do the decades long hard work of building it back up instead of complaining about it. It's not coming back just because you complain about it.


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.


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.


> 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://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094


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.


Every molecule in your body is a chemical.


A statement that does not say anything. Don't even know why you would bother posting this.


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.


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.




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