[htag]

> We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale.

What specific studies should we have done to notice this association? What specific safety studies need to be done before introducing a new chemical compound into our society?

Historically speaking, the only conceivable way they would have learned this if they feed aspartame to pregnant women and then studied the offsprings. This is fine for a final testing phase of safety, but is inhumane to do unless you are incredibly sure it is safe. Animal models for studying autism are flawed, and wouldn't come at all for decades after aspartame's introduction.

In modern testing, we could theoretically generate a super long list of safety checks to do. This test might look like raising a large generation or two of the specific line of mice used for studying autism. Then checking the offspring autism rate of those exposed to aspartame compared to a control. This would be a single checkbox every new chemical compound would need to do, and there could easily be tens of thousands of similar tests that would need to be done. We would need to add to the list overtime, as our understanding of optimal human health improves over time.

Imagine the investment required to pass these safety tests. It's a minimum price tag of 25M, if the safety tests are standardized and lab techs are trained on them and do them in an assembly line like fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost be 10-100x. At that level of investment there's two issues. The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate. The other problem is this is just the safety test portion of R&D, after spending so much money this seems like a likely target for corruption and my skepticism for the results of such a test will be high.

[patapong]

> The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate.

Could you elaborate on why this is a problem? It seems to me that there is not inherent right to introduce new chemicals into our lives, and I would prefer this not be done without thorough risk assessment studies.

In the medical industry, introducing a new medicine requires years of testing for something that will be given to a tiny slice of the population. I find it odd that there does not seem to be a similar process for chemicals that could be spread throughout the entire population.

[htag]

I'm not capable of doing a full analysis on this question. I don't mean to say that this ban isn't worth doing, I meant to acknowledge that this has a downside. Let me throw out a few bullet points of those downsides of reducing the rate of new chemical compounds introduced to society.

* We are often creating chemicals that do the job of existing chemicals safer and more efficient. This ban would probably include a grandfather clause for old chemicals, and thus we might be using inferior products and doing more harm than we otherwise could. Look at refrigerants as an example of a chemical compound that has improved over the decades.

* Many chemical compounds introduced in the last 100 years directly improve productivity. The United States is in economic competition with other regions of the world. We could be creating a disadvantage that reduces our geo-political power.

* Many of these chemical compound increase quality of life. There's a strong unitarian argument for sucralose and polyurethane insulation.

[patapong]

Thank you, these are fair points!

[lo_zamoyski]

Why use it in the first place? There is no need in general to consume aspartame. Its very raison d'etre is treating the symptoms of the root cause: excess consumption.

The bad stuff we may already be eating is a given, and something to be distinguished from introducing new things with no existing role in the foot chain.

[pfannkuchen]

> but is inhumane

Is it more humane to launch it without testing, producing the same effect for a much, much larger group of people than would have been involved in the intentional study? This seems to be a fairly gaping hole in the definition of humane. It reminds me of people who see an accident and don’t help because they might be held liable for the accident and they don’t want to get involved.

[htag]

It's absolutely inhumane to expose pregnant women to chemicals unless you are highly certain that they are safe. Clearly it would be better if we tested aspartame exposure on a smaller population and detected this effect. I'm saying that if our confidence of it's safety is high enough to expose pregnant humans to the chemical in scientific studies our confidence of it's safety should be high enough to exposure it to the wider population.

[pfannkuchen]

Realistically though, that isn’t what happens, right? It’s not like if you release a chemical into the wild, that no pregnant woman will consume it. They will. Not studying the effects prior to release values the few individuals over the many in society, just because then the people who would do the study aren’t directly responsible for the negative effects. It’s kind of slimy IMO.

Prohibiting new chemicals outright would be fine, but that is pretty far from where we are today.