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.
Which feels like a game of semantics, much "all concepts are made up" -- technically true but not useful to what we mean to communicate.  
 
 
You know what I mean, 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.
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,
'''However''.
 
If you are saying that you know exactly what chemicals are good ones and which are the bad ones,
then you are falling right into a trap that marketers have been getting away with for ''way'' too long.
then you are falling right into a trap that marketers have been getting away with for ''way'' too long.


And if you pay only attention to the last boogymen, and cannot rank what the worst influences are,
And if you pay only attention to last year's boogymen, then
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.
* they will continue to do so.
* you are actively distracting yourself from information that will actually let you live a bit healthier.
 
 
We need to be able to rank how bad things are,
rank which are worst influences are,
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.
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.
Drink half a dozen liters of water and your body cannot compensate.
(It's not common in part because you will feel terrible and stop doing it)
 
 
 
Every healthy thing can also kill you, if you take enough,
: they just happen to make it ''difficult'', often by having a large zone where the amount still won't do much
 
Unhealthy things are just the things that do so faster,
: that do so at amounts you might not immediately think of as harmful,
: i.e. that skip that safe zone
 
 


Unhealthy things are just the things that do that quickly enough that they ''skip'' having a safe zone
And for some things, the reason it won't kill you is that something else gets to you before another.
For example, drink too much coffee and it's the ''water'' that kills you first, not the caffeine.


{{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)}}




Latest revision as of 12:09, 21 March 2024

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

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

More technically

More practically

...except: bioaccumulation

LD50

Things barely worth talking about

E numbers

E numbers just means it's tested.

It is mostly things commonly used as food additives - so that we can 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:


What's in a name?

The things you actually probably want to be there

Some things worth talking about - mixed

Volatile organic compound (VOC)

Pesticides

BPA

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.


Phtalates

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

PFAS

PFOA

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.



Parabens

Reading off ingredient lists

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