Those darn chemicals: Difference between revisions
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Now, if we say absolutely everything is chemicals, that feels like a game of semantics, like "all concepts are made up" -- ''yes'', technically true but not useful to what we mean to communicate. Stop defending putting that weird shit in my body. | Now, if we say absolutely everything is chemicals, that feels like a game of semantics, like "all concepts are made up" -- ''yes'', technically true but not useful to what we mean to communicate. Stop defending putting that weird shit in my body. | ||
And yes, if that were my game here, you would be absolutely right to call it out. | |||
Yet if you are saying you know exactly what chemicals are good ones and which are bad ones, | Yet if you are saying you know exactly what chemicals are good ones and which are bad ones, | ||
then you are falling right into | then you are falling right into a trap that marketers have been getting away with for ''way'' too long. | ||
And | And if you pay only attention to the last boogymen, and cannot rank what the worst influences are, | ||
if you pay only attention to the last boogymen, and cannot rank what the worst influences are, | or estimate how much to care about specific ones, then you're you're actively distracting yourself from information that will actually let you live a bit healthier. | ||
or estimate how much to care about specific ones. | |||
One dumb point to be made is that almost ''everything'' is toxic at the right dose. | |||
''Every'' healthy thing in normal doses can kill you if there is enough of it. | |||
Unhealthy things are just the things that do that quickly enough that they ''skip'' having a safe zone | |||
{{comment|(the main technical reason you wouldn't take away the 'almost' is that the mechanism that kills you is sometimes considered something else. For example, drink too much coffee and it's the ''water'' that kills you, even if the caffeine would also do so later)}} | |||
A more practical take is | |||
* anything that harms you in short term, particularly in amounts easily available | |||
:: | |||
* anything that you don't break down, because it will accumulate over time even with tiny exposure | |||
* anything that harms in any way, and is hard to remove | |||
And it's hard to get yourself informed. | |||
When I try to do research, I find ''way'' too many pages that use some fancy sounding words, skips five steps, and conclude it's good. Or that it's fine, who knows. | |||
Add to that that biochemistry is ''complex'' and seeing a thing in isolation is generally not that meaningful, | |||
So I don't trust most pages I come across that do not cite sources, do not relativize that giving 100 times the dose to an animal 1/10 our size is just ''not'' a good reference, etc. | |||
Even when harder research gives strong evidence, it is still in isolation and under a handful conditions, that is still rarely slotted into the wider picture of bodies in general, let alone yours in particular. | Even when harder research gives strong evidence, it is still in isolation and under a handful conditions, that is still rarely slotted into the wider picture of bodies in general, let alone yours in particular. | ||
Revision as of 18:29, 20 October 2023
BIG RED TEXT HELLO: This is not health advice, or necessarily correct. Do not make health decisions based on just this. Do your own research, and not just the stuff that agrees with your opinions.
On toxicity
Everything is chemicals, and everything is toxic at high concentrations
Toxin, poison, venom
LD50
Bioaccumulation
Things barely worth talking about
E numbers
E numbers just means it's tested
E numbers tend to mostly be things commonly used as food additives.
And that is a large part of why we tested it: to quantify how to use them safely.
They get short codes in the process, which is an easier shorthand to refer to the substance
and the tests. This is often easier more precise and/or easier than a fancier pseudonym and/or more chemical name (things like INCI may help both ways (e.g. water is aqua) but at least tend to standardize the names used somewhat).
Such naming can also make regulation a lot easier to do, including the health testing.
While regulations apply regardless of what name you use, it can make it somewhat easier for you to recognize what's in there.
Some negative fearful snap judgment got all E numbers associated with unnatural and bad for you,
because it's largely just "the set of things we tested", it mostly isn't.
A good number of them are in fact nutrition you absolutely need, or are perfectly healthy, and/or perfectly natural.
Consider:
- E300 though E309 are vitamin C and E,
- E101 is vitamin B2 used as coloring,
- E160c is pepper extract, mostly used for coloring
- E160a is carrot used for coloring,
- E170 is calcium (basically),
- E407 comes from seaweed,
- E322 frequently comes from soy,
- E948 is oxygen
Sure, there are also a few handfuls (out of hundreds) that I don't see having a place in my food, if I have any choice.
And that was part of the point: the testing let us know we don't want it, the name lets us check more easily.
And a few that you'll probably never see - there's rarely any silver (E174) or gold (E175) in food
but they're included for testing purposes, just so that you may know how safe they are when they are used in, say, cake decoration.
See also:
Some things worth talking about
Pesticides
BPA
Phtalates
PFAS
PFOA