[scotch_drinker]

Some day, I'm confident our current practices related to food and nutrition will be looked back upon with horror and dismay. The lack of decent regulation, the lack of understanding of basic nutrition, the desire to somehow improve upon the foods that nature intended, all will be seen as the disasters they likely are.

Our chemically created foods are likely killing us in a variety of ways we are only just now beginning to understand.

[zwieback]

Sure, there are lots of foods that are legal but unhealthy but you don't have to eat them. It doesn't take much to get informed about the basics of nutrition.

The broad goal of FDA regulations is not really to prevent you from eating unhealthily but rather to prevent eggs, milk, meat and produce from making you sick. In that respect the food industry and FDA regulations have been spectacularly successful. Any nostalgia for a bygone era of healthy and plentiful food is misguided.

You could make a case for forcing people to eat healthier but that will be an uphill battle, both economic interest and poor consumer habits are aligned against that. There have been some success stories (e.g. outlawing transfats) but they are few and far between.

[lobster_johnson]

Unfortunately, the FDA isn't that rigorous about what can be hidden behind words like "natural flavours". Many are innocuous (e.g. coconut extract). Trehalose is one of them.

[no_flags]

Absolutely. We don't even know what the right regulations would be. Trans fat is a prime example. The FDA classified it as safe for years and then had to do a 180 on their position.

Anyone interested in the decline of our modern diet should check out Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston Price. He was a prominent dentist in the 30s that visited remote populations around the world, documenting their traditional diets and the health effects when switching to a "modern" diet. Available for free on Project Gutenberg http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html

[tptacek]

Our chemically chaste pre-industrial food supply did a fine job of killing without much help from us.

[gooseus]

Right, and those people looked back in horror and dismay at all the famine that did a fine job of killing their predecessors.

Must any criticism of modern practices equate to an endorsement of dialing back to ancient ones?

Is anybody building AI to catch these sorts of obvious fallacies? Now that would be pretty damn impressive for an AGI skeptic such as myself.

[saint_fiasco]

Not necessarily, but in this case it did. The grandparent comment talks approvingly of nature's intention.

[tptacek]

You take the good with the bad, is I guess all I'm saying.

[code_duck]

But why? How about intelligently assessing the situation and doing away with The Bad?

[tptacek]

By invoking the naturalist fallacy ("as nature intended"), I read the original comment on this thread as suggesting we throw the good away with the bad. My point is: that would be a bad trade. The pre-modern food supply was far more dangerous than the one we have now.

[eivarv]

That's not the naturalist[ic] fallacy, but an appeal to nature. But you're right.

[ajkjk]

I think we'll also be remembered as the era that started figuring that out and solving it with science, though. It's not all hopeless; at least we're trying.

[pvg]

Our chemically created foods are likely killing us in a variety of ways we are only just now beginning to understand.

Seems to have worked out ok for the last few 100k years unless you think the other hominids we suspect of cooking got offed by it and we just got deliciously lucky.