[bognition]

Back in school I was often told the lead pipes in Roman aqueducts likely played a key role in the fall of Roman. We know lead is a poison with negative long term effects on cognition.

The aqueducts were also responsible for Romes ability to proliferate and grow. Lead was both a blessing and a curse.

I wonder what future generations will say about our highly enriched and processed diets. Calories have never been cheaper and food is ubiquitous. However I believe our food is playing a huge role in our degraded health.

It’s not surprising that most studies looking at the consumption of unprocessed food, fresh fruit and vegetables show benefits to our health.

The challenge is how do we get this food in the hands of those who need it cheaply and without sacrificing the nutritional (and microbial) content.

[papercrane]

The lead pipes theory is mostly just pop-science. Romans were likely getting more lead exposure from using lead cooking vessels and utensils.

[declan_roberts]

Not to mention the fact that their pipes immediately become mineralized, and very little lead leeches in cold water.

Headline science has a way of sticking around for a long time.

[hungmung]

Also...Roman plumbing was constant-flow. Lead in water is mostly an issue when it gets to rest in the pipes for a while, then when somebody turns the tap on they get water that's had time to absorb the lead. Since Roman plumbing had no taps though and was just running constantly, the amount of time the water was exposed to the lead was pretty minimal.

[throawaywpg]

spelling pedant: "leaches," not "leeches"

[darth_avocado]

It’s lychees

[didgeoridoo]

Plus literally “flavoring” their wine on purpose with lead acetate.

[MengerSponge]

And that was the first and last time that no-calorie sweeteners had deleterious population-level effects

[lotsofpulp]

High calorie sweeteners have deleterious population-level effects.

Is there any evidence that modern low calorie sweeteners have deleterious population-level effects, and what are they compared to high calorie sweeteners?

[cjbgkagh]

Anecdotally I get gut dybiosis (microbiome imbalance) that notably only occurs when using artificial sweeteners and stops when I stop taking it, I’ve talked to many others who have noticed the same thing. Gut dysbiosis can cause chronic systemic inflammation which is rather bad for the body, not sure if it’s worse than the sugar it replaces, but it shouldn’t be assumed that the problem is solved by low calories. I think it’s important to limit both, preferably to near zero.

[hinkley]

Sugar alcohols are especially bad for this. I fried my GI one year and it was largely down to developing a gum chewing habit at a time when sugar alcohols were in almost all gum brands. You can’t process them, but bad gut bacteria can.

[lamp_book]

I wonder if any Romans evidence had any evidence of population-level delirium from lead consumption...

[cjbgkagh]

Lower intelligence would likely surface as hedonistic behavior which is probably hard to distinguish from decadence. Decadence and hedonism were constantly being complained about long before the eventual fall.

[buovjaga]

Joseph R. McConnell et al. (January 6, 2025). Pan-European atmospheric lead pollution, enhanced blood lead levels, and cognitive decline from Roman-era mining and smelting. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2419630121

[edwardbernays]

So is the idea that widespread lead exposure led to the decline of the Roman empire largely pop science? Are you saying that's not accurate, or that the source of the lead exposure is miscounted?

[Quarrel]

Yes, that is the modern understanding. Widespread lead exposure had very little / nothing to do with the decline the Roman Empire.

[Isamu]

Plus to prove the lead connection you have to discount the centuries of Roman dominance and growth during which lead exposure was common.

[wredcoll]

This is a much better point. It's not like there were more lead pipes during the decline than the rise.

[edwardbernays]

Wouldn't there necessarily be more lead pipes at the peak and post-peak? Assuming that pipe-building was some non-linear function of dominance, which seems a fair assumption, we would start with 0% pipes at 0% rome and asymptotically close to 100% pipes at the asymptotic 100% peak rome. Is this a bad assumption, or is it basically just pedantry?

[yawboakye]

there are many ways to account for the fall of the roman empire, and everyone chooses their favorite (usually depending on where their interest bends). for example, it could be explained by the increased usage of mercenaries in the roman army. i like this theory because the fall was brought by losses to renegade forces. it could also be explained by bad leadership.

[throawaywpg]

"Decadence" likely had nothing to do with the Roman Empire's fall. That theory is based essentially on propaganda, designed to absolve them of blame.

The lead pipes had too much calcification, and not much lead would have leached out. But the Romans did use lead acetate as a sweetener, so they were adding lead directly to many (most?) of their meals.

[dathinab]

also lead flavoring

lead tastes sweet, sugar wasn't cheaply & widely available, honey is expensive etc.

and knowledge about lead poisoning was not really a think AFIK

at the same time lead pipes tend to gain a crust of chalk over time (depending on chalk content of the water) which mostly defuses their danger. Like you will find some very old houses with lead tape water pipes in the EU today but if you test their tape water you won't find (much of) an issue due to 1) the chalk 2) the water not staying long in the pipe if it's e.g. a 4 apartment house.

[fernmyth]

Here's Vitruvius in "De Architectura" claiming it's common, easily verified knowledge: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius...

Of course, him mentioning "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.

[dathinab]

interesting

> "Don't do this" suggests that lead water pipes into the home were common enough to need a warning against.

sadly, they still are today sometimes, in areas with a lot of 125+year old infrastructure :/

[bayindirh]

Interestingly, in 2017, a research found that crime rates in US dropped as lead pipes are replaced with better alternatives [0].

[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-ex...

[adastra22]

Which continued pretty much into the modern age. Nothing specifically Roman about it.

[boston_clone]

Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health?

Public health experts contend that enriched foods have improved baseline quality of life. Wheat breads with iron, folate, and B vitamins in the US is an easy example.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health?

Getting nutrients from whole foods is generally superior, for absorption and balance and avoiding overdosing, than getting it from supplements, whether taken directly or via enrichment.

That said, getting a nutrient any way is better than running a deficiency. For most of agricultural human history, in most societies, most of the population was nutritionally sufficient [1]. That changed with enrichment. It’s healthier to eat whole over enriched food; it’s better to have enriched food versus a vitamin decency.

It’s ahistoric to claim we’re unhealthier today than we’ve been over most of human history. But we can do better. In that way, Roman pipes brought clean water to its populations in a way that made them healthier than people had been in cities to date. But it also gave them lead poisoning, which while better than cholera, is worse than no lead.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9460423/

[boston_clone]

> That changed with enrichment.

You’re close. According to the paper, that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution

Whoops, typo—I meant nutritionally deficient.

Hunter-gatherers had a varied but volatile diet. Agriculture solved the volatility at the expense of variety. Most agricultural humans across history were nutritionally deficient.

Enrichment (a/k/a fortification) started to solve for the lack of variety, though it’s been historically stymied by our lack of understanding what e.g. vitamins are; modern farming, biology and logistics enable us to actually solve for the problems agriculture introduced to society for the first time.

[slumberlust]

If interested in Ultra Processed Foods, of which enriched foods usually are UPF, you can check out a good book called Ultra Processed People. It's not definitive, but it makes a compelling argument that while we don't know why exactly, processed foods containing the same nutrients as their whole brethren have deterious effects on our long term health.

[boston_clone]

I don’t think that’s a compelling argument; salt, for example, is also a common ingredient in “UPF”s (caveat emptor - there is no settled definition on that term).

The crux is that adding vital minerals to food is good. We can certainly distinguish between that and a Dorito.

[cpursley]

Trace those public health experts funding sources...

Hint: it's the farm-bill dependent carb farmers who apparently need our money via farm subsidies and want poor people hooked as they get it from the other end in the form of SNAP.

[boston_clone]

No; this is a deliberately misleading non-sequitur with decades of evidence to refute.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10609867

[cpursley]

The American waistline disagrees. The idea that highly processed sugar added white bread with all fiber and nutrients stripped with token vitamins added are added is a good thing is ludicrous. Why not just promote eating real food, including real bread?

[boston_clone]

It sounds like you're hypothesizing / gish galloping / strawmanning until you find something that "sticks".

Instead try researching things that support your claim, like the notion that sugary beverages are the main culprit to the obesity epidemic, even though most health experts don't have the evidence to isolate that as the core factor.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611578/

[Etheryte]

The lead pipe thing is one of the best known urban legends that's both completely false and also constantly making rounds on the internet.

[SapporoChris]

Not sure where you get completely false. Like most urban legends it's a little truth and a lot of falsehoods. Lead pipes are a known health hazard. Lead pipes didn't lead to the fall of the Roman Empire.

[Etheryte]

It's completely false as in lead pipes didn't have anything to do with the fall of the Roman Empire as originally mentioned in the top comment.

[bigmattystyles]

Don’t lead pipes or any pipes for water actually get a patina of calcium carbonate or something so while not great it’s not as bad as told. Only if the ph of the water changes because you change the water source, kinda like in flint?

[bongodongobob]

Yes. There's nothing wrong with lead pipes.

[bigmattystyles]

Not sure if sarcasm if I don't know enough beyond my own comment that I remembered from a PBS documentary.....

[giantg2]

"Back in school I was often told the lead pipes in Roman aqueducts likely played a key role in the fall of Roman. We know lead is a poison with negative long term effects on cognition."

I highly doubt there was much effect from the pipes. They would quickly be sealed in mineral scale. Cups or utensils - maybe, but would be more about specific important people using them rather than being widespread.

[MengerSponge]

Wine (and grape juice) was cooked in lead vessels, which generates Lead(II) Acetate aka Sugar of Lead. They lead poisoned themselves coming and going.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate

[hinkley]

Pre enlightenment Europe also saw cheap wine being sweetened with a lump of lead suspended in wine barrels.

Around the World in Six Glasses will tell you that tea replacing wine lead to Progress in Europe because they weren’t drunk all day but I wonder how much was inebriation and how much was lead exposure.

[MengerSponge]

Smells like a little of column A, a little of column B.

Beer was also widely prevalent, right? Even if it's just small beer (<3%ABV), it's not exactly making you smarter. It's hard to hit the Ballmer peak, after all

[hinkley]

Beer was their water treatment plan. You drank watered down alcohol as a way to avoid waterborne illnesses. Tea is boiling water which we still use to this day to deal with the water supply being contaminated.

[underlipton]

It should be noted that juice is a highly-processed food. It concentrates the sugar, vitamin, mineral, and water content of a plant while removing the fiber.

As to your last question, part of it may be rethinking the profit motive in food production. Food waste to keep prices high is a huge issue.

[throawaywpg]

Apparently it wasn't the pipes, which wouldn't have leached enough to make a difference. It was the fact that the Romans used lead acetate as a sweetener in their food and drinks!

[tim333]

The Victorians used lead pipes and then the British Empire declined. Coincidence?

[kmeisthax]

The Roman Empire did not fall because of lead pipe. It fell because the empire's elites ran out of territory to conquer and turned against one another.

Also, the Roman Empire didn't fall, either. It split in two. The Western half continued splitting into a bunch of competing kingdoms while the Eastern half slowly shrank over about a thousand years. It eventually wound up being rolled into the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until WWI.