[dlivingston]

Very funny, but also flippant and glib.

When people -- myself included -- say they have a problem with chemicals in food, they of course mean artificial chemicals: that is, compounds, preservatives, dyes, and flavors that are non-naturally present for that particular food item and were added for their shelf life, taste, aesthetic, or addictive properties.

Next time you visit your grocery store, go read the ingredients list of a few different boxed and frozen items. It's not uncommon to see three- or four- dozen ingredients on items that should have less than 10.

While all of these compounds may have FDA approval and studies verifying their safety for ingestion, please keep several things in mind:

1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.

2. We have a massive obesity crisis in this country (and increasingly globally). Sedentary lifestyles and increased caloric intake is no doubt part of this, but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.

[gruez]

>1. Studies use large, population-based sample sizes and their effects are based on their statistical significance on these populations. In other words, "side effects" are a population-level phenomenon, not an individual phenomenon. It is plausible that individual side effects are hidden as statistical noise. This is a problem with pharmacological studies as well and there is no easy solution to it AFAIK.

I don't get it, are you trying to imply there might be 0.0001% of people with negative side effects, they're not getting picked up, and for that reason those substances should have never been approved? If so what does that say about allergens? If the Colombian exchange happened today, should we ban peanuts on the basis that a few percent of people get side effects?

>but it is blindingly obvious (to me, at least) that the meat of the problem is environmental, primarily diets, and these compounds are wreaking havoc on the endocrine systems of the population causing a massive uptick in obesity and diabetes.

How is it "blindingly obvious" that it's caused by artificial colors specifically though? Otherwise it's a leap to go from "there must be something in the food" to "we should ban artificial colors".

[hgomersall]

What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok? Presumably a little bit of study is required... So how much? How many interactions should be studied? Is there a benefit trade off (I'm actually struggling here, so if you think so, perhaps you can clarify what benefits would lead to a a higher risk of harm)?

[gruez]

>What level of evidence is acceptable before stopping things entering our food chain? Is it anything that doesn't have positive evidence of harm ok?

Peanuts have very clear evidence of harm (at least to those who are allergic), and it's unclear what "benefits" it has besides "it tastes good". Why allow it?

[hgomersall]

3. Long term effects are very hard to study and tease out.

4. Interactions are even harder to establish, since the possible different cocktails and biologies combinatorially explode. This is the primary reason for a precautionary principle in introducing new compounds into our diets.

[user3939382]

The type of people you’re replying to would wait until their experiment was done to agree to ban things that are obviously bad even if by the time they said “ok guys I agree to ban it I have the data now!” all of humanity is next to them in a dead pile. Prior to that they would argue ad infinitum that there’s no proof x y and z are bad. People do that on this very forum with ingestion of microplastics. I don’t have patience for people like this anymore.