[freedomben]

Anytime we talk about "banning" something I prefer a very conservative approach (conservative as in let's not ban things unless we are really sure). We are constantly learning new things that upend what we used to accept as science regarding nutrition and how the human body works. I think we do ourselves a disservice sometimes by banning things that we don't understand (and sometimes we think we understand but really don't).

That said, there is something wrong with our food. We have had an explosion in auto-immune disorders over the last few decades that is accelerating. Allergies to common foods are increasing rapidly as well. An allergist that I see has recently starting adding citrus tests to her test panel, because citrus is suddenly (and for unknown reasons) becoming a big problem. I don't know what's wrong, but I do hope we figure it out.

[DRW_]

>Anytime we talk about "banning" something I prefer a very conservative approach (conservative as in let's not ban things unless we are really sure). We are constantly learning new things that upend what we used to accept as science regarding nutrition and how the human body works. I think we do ourselves a disservice sometimes by banning things that we don't understand (and sometimes we think we understand but really don't).

If you aren't sure, then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!". Surely it makes more sense to be cautious about the things we ingest..

[tbrownaw]

If you aren't sure, then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!".

Um. There's kind of a big difference between requiring something and just not forbidding it.

[freedomben]

> Surely it makes more sense to be cautious about the things we ingest..

Completely agree

> If you aren't sure, then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!".

False dichotomy. I don't think the choices are either "ban it" or "okay, feed it to your kids!" There's a middle ground there that I think makes more sense.

[skh]

What’s the middle ground you are referrring to? Don’t feed it to kids but feed to adults? If you don’t know something is safe for consumption then it shoulnd’t be sold, right?

[tedunangst]

Isn't that what we do for alcohol? We already tried prohibition. It didn't stick.

[freedomben]

Getting into specific policy prescriptions is tempting the fate of Godwin's Law, but I don't believe it's wise or even possible to regulate every single molecule that gets sold for consumption.

Constant evaluation, testing, and liability for people/companies that knowingly use dangerous or harmful ingredients can go a long way here. In fact often times it's the only way broader datasets can be gathered. The market provides a strong incentive here as well not to poison your customers.

I also think that education, including warnings on packages, and then letting adults make their own decisions, is a good way to go. One state that I know of recently banned a pest control chemical because some idiot sprayed his dog's food bowl with it. The dog later died. The state's knee jerk response of banning it is counter-productive IMHO. I've been using it for DIY pest control for many years and it is one of the most effective I know of, and when used as directed is perfectly safe (don't spray anything that will be ingested with it, such as dog food bowls, gardens, etc).

[skh]

The market provides a strong incentive here as well not to poison your customers.

The history of corporate malfeasance and the desire of people to optimize for short term gain versus long term gain indicates that your view is not supported by reality.

For example see the cigarette industry and how it deliberately made its products addictive and more dangerous.

[freedomben]

The history of corporate responsibility and the desire of many other people to optimize for long term viability and survival does indicate that my view is supported by reality.

Your implication that because one or several persons (or companies) did something wrong, therefore all of mankind is bad/evil is fallacious. Because a neighbor of mine is a thief or a murderer, does not make all neighbors thiefs and murderers. We hold him accountable for his actions.

[yongjik]

> There's a middle ground ...

You mean the good old "Okay, I won't say anything when you feed it to your kids, but I didn't say it's OK, so if they die it's your fault!" ground?

[confounded]

What would that middle ground look like?

Selfishly, I’d be happy with banning a lot more food stuff. I love salt, sugar, and saturated fat, and like that they are well understood.

Most of the newer riskier things are ways to improve margins for companies that mass produce food, either by letting it sit on a shelf longer, or to make processed cornmeal taste more interesting.

[manicdee]

Is the middle ground “feed it to someone else’s kids”?

[will4274]

It's impossible to prove that a food item is safe. The two categories are known to be bad and not know to be bad.

[skh]

We’re pretty sure that wheat is safe, right? We don’t have a proof in a mathematical sense but it’s clear that wheat is ok to eat.

[will4274]

shrugs 30 years ago, everybody would have agreed that bread is safe. Now: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/295235.php

[freedomben]

Actually, no, there's plenty of people that believe wheat not be safe. Obviously this is true as well if you have Celiacs, which also wasn't widely known until relatively recently.

[skh]

Your definition of safe does not correspond to most peoples’ definition when it comes to food. Safe, in this context for most people, means safe for general consumption. Unsafe means that the product causes harm in just about everyone who consumes it.

[freedomben]

I'll agree with that wrt to Celiacs, but not the broader point. Many of the people that follow the Paleo diet (which is no small contingency) believe that wheat in general is indeed not safe.

[kortilla]

>then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!"

Why would you feed something to your kids just because it’s legal?

Who are the idiots that just pick things blindly off of shelves in stores without reading what’s in it?

Sugar is completely legal, yet I read the amounts of sugars in foods to avoid high sugar items. I’m also not giving my children bottles of olive oil to drink with dinner.

[danmaz74]

Do you always read all ingredients for prepared food you buy?

[Filligree]

Don't you?

[danmaz74]

I honestly do not, and I never saw anybody doing that...

[orf]

Why is it a disservice to demand we are sure something won't harm us before we build and industry around it?

Can you name any specific items that you feel it was a disservice to ban, and say why?

[freedomben]

The nature of bans makes it pretty difficult to specifically name items that I feel banning them was a disservice :-)

But here's an example: Cannabis. Why? There's now tremendous evidence that the ban was misguided, and that there are very real medicinal properties that benefit the human body and help control inflammation. When banning it (and making it a schedule 1 substance) research was severely hampered and in many cases halted.

[danmaz74]

Banning ingredients for food is a very specific kind of ban. I'm against the war on drugs, but I'm totally for banning strongly psychoactive ingredients from food - cannabis should be a controlled substance.

[freedomben]

Many people consume cannabis specifically as an ingredient in food. But at a broader level I think it's unproductive to limit categories to "banned in food" v. "banned", since that's a very arbitrary distinction. Also:

> but I'm totally for banning strongly psychoactive ingredients from food - cannabis should be a controlled substance.

That reads to me as contradictory. banning != controlled substance

[danmaz74]

Banning in food = you can't sell food containing the substance as normal food. Nobody would prohibit you to mix it into your own food and eat it, though. So, the substance's uses are controlled, but it's not banned :)

[kortilla]

Many of these food tech choices are the difference between more starvation and high enough yield to feed poor people. If we farmed the way we did 100 years ago, there would be mass starvation. The yield just isn’t there.

The FDA faces the same ethical dilemma every time they decide on new drugs. A slow approval process is literally letting people suffer and die in exchange for trials with more certainty.

The old FDA food guidelines that shape what schools are allowed to feed children are a perfect example of the stupidity of legislating based on poorly understood food science. “Carbs are good, fats are bad!”

Low sodium guidelines because “salt kills people!” also turned out to be pretty stupid in retrospect.

[ilikehurdles]

If the cause of starvation were under-production, I’d sympathize with this argument. But given the amount of food waste in Western countries, I’d say the real issue is one of distribution or access. Producers make production efficient not in order to feed the poor, but to increase margin by lowering the costs of production.

Growth hormones exist to make the agriculturist more money, they don’t help feed a war torn country.

If the priority of these systems were solving hunger, we’d disincentive meat and dairy production and incentivize high nutritious vegetarian production.

When we’re dumping corn into salmon feed, sugars, and vehicle fuel, I can’t fall for the idea that food is constrained by supply.

[kortilla]

We’re dumping corn into fuel precisely because we incentivize it over meat and dairy...

[kortilla]

The cause of starvation is lack of food available at a given price point.

Producers make production efficient to capture more of the market at the lower price points on the demand curve. There aren’t enough rich people to pay for thick margins at a large scale in the food industry. The only ones with large margins are the organic farmers selling to rich people.

Growth hormones exist to make chicken much faster, which means much cheaper chicken for consumers and to make the chicken raisers more money. If it weren’t cheaper, people wouldn’t buy more of it and it likely wouldn’t be worth the investment.

Here’s a thought exercise, why do you think sellers of factory chickens outsell free range chickens by orders of magnitude? If the only difference was margin and not price, nobody would buy the factory stuff.

[iguy]

Nobody is starving who is able to buy food on the world market. People starve in Yemen because there are guys with AK47s between them and the nearest functional port.

[Nasrudith]

How do you know that it is food related in itself? It is a common area of anxiety but I don't think much has stood up to statistical scrutiny - otherwise they'd start to see far more significant differences from differing lifestyles and diets.

There are many possible culprits from gut bacteria to hygiene hypothesis of an overactive immune system going after anything that remotely looks the part due to having evolved in filthier environments and being evolutionary "calibrated" to be overactive by default because parasites immunosuppress.

[freedomben]

> How do you know that it is food related in itself?

I don't know that for sure. It's simply my suspicion as a mostly layperson that has spent years researching and experimenting on myself through various diets, everything from SAD (Standard American Diet) to Paleo, AIP, Carnivore, Keto, etc. I notice a huge difference in the way I feel based on how I'm eating.

[CorvusCrypto]

>Allergies to common foods are increasing rapidly as well

Is there a list of stats for incidence of food allergies? It seems many friends I know (in EU) have food allergies to things like cucumber, hazel, peanuts, also gluten (celiax or something). One person I know has Crohn's disease. I would be curious to see the stats in both US and EU to see if it's really linked to a region's food. Or if it's just that common diets across the world are causing it.

Edit: or a third possibility is that rates haven't changed at all and it could be increase in either reporting or population making it seem like it's more commom now than before.

[freedomben]

The stats that I've seen were at my allergist's office, so unfortunately I don't have a link. I'll definitely look for one tho.

What you say is very interesting. Cucumber (like citrus) was also not something that people really had allergies to until recently (or possibly your third possibility kicks in here). Peanuts and gluten have skyrocketed recently too.

Maybe off topic, but I read an interesting theory regarding the use of GMOs to explain this. The logic went basically like this:

Plants were genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides -> farmers began spraying fields indiscriminately, knowing that the plants they cared about wouldn't die, but the weeds would, therefore producing bumper crops much more regularly -> This led to one of two possibilities: 1. the chemicals are being consumed in unsafe quantities by humans now when they eat those plants or 2. the mutations that hardened the plants changed their protein structure such that they are less digestible, which leads to intestinal damage, which promotes intestinal permeability, which leads to food allergies to foods not previously a problem.

[ghthor]

I wonder if the citrus is that the land were the groves are farmed has been saturated year after year with pesticides. In addition the fruit is less dense in nutrients, less nutrients in the soil, might lead to the plants trying to use the pesticides in the place of standard nutrients? Very wild hypothesis

[adamnemecek]

How is it a disservice?

[freedomben]

Do you think the Cannabis ban was a disservice?