Every generation has some product/ingredient that they didn’t know was dangerous at the time: tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc. What is that item for this generation?
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to "plastic" as if it's a single substance. It's a bunch of different materials that don't really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that "you shouldn't burn plastic" because the smoke is "toxic". For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it's no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There's also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled "BPA Free". BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I'd say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren't chemists.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don't hear about it in the news though do you....
Yea I did my 10 seconds of research before I quoted my number! I could have said '200k' but 'hundreds of thousands' sounds much more dramatic don't you think? Which is the whole point of the Dihydrogen monoxide thing.
According to its Wikipedia page, this joke was first published in 1983! I suspect most people know it from the early 2000's when it made a resurgence again.
What I think it is, is that every single person who ever consumes it, will eventually die. We are also literally dependant on it. If you stop ingesting it for too long, it can also cause you to die...
That's how it went around here, at least.
Look at all of the related "risks" and add them up. I'm sure that drowning is a small number, but then add in all of the deaths from scalding, acid rain, poisons (that contain water), etc etc and it eventually gets to be a very big number. Probably in the millions
The WHO estimates 236k deaths per year worldwide due to drowning. There's other ways to die to Dihydrogen monoxide other than drowning, so my numbers hold up!
Not only BPAs but many chemicals like BPAs can cause birth defects because our bodies think they are estrogen.
If this worries you, read the books It Starts With the Egg and Grain Brain.
They both suggest that not only what you eat, but how it's prepared can affect the health of a child.
For instance it's a big no-no, according to It Starts With the Egg, to heat most plastics in the microwave. The heat breaks the plastic down, it can get in your blood, your body will think it's estrogen, and they don't even know the full effects of this yet.
So think about
burritos in plastic wrapping,
cling wrap on a bowl,
reheating leftovers in Tupperware,
disposable cutlery
These chemicals are not just in food:
your car's interior
your cell phone case
even the clothes on your back, unless they're 100% pure, untreated, natural fabric, may have been made with these chemicals.
Thinking about reducing plastic fucks me up and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Noticing every single time we bring new plastic into the household, and how hard it is to avoid. Chicken comes in plastic wrap, and even if we got it at a butcher counter, they still toss it in a plastic bag before wrapping it in brown paper. Bags of potting soil, our toothpaste tubes, peanut butter jars… it’s endless.
At least the majority of my clothes are cotton or wool, but another source is carpet and there isn’t anything I can do about this apartment carpet.
I would guess that chemical effects would be diverse while "physical" effects would not be so diverse. Keep in mind that things like mesothelioma from asbestos are kinda sorta "physical" effects because it's from jagged roughness of the particles at the nanoscale rather than any specific chemistry.
Also be wary of people that say they are chemists on the internet when oil, plastics, and guns have mostly only been researched by their manufacturers. All totally safe.
Less social media IMO, more the weaponization of techniques first researched in the 60s-80s made real and pushed via automaton to all corners of the public internet.
The reason you become vulnerable is because you abdicate control (most had no idea) of your feed to providers that own domain names.
This was a co-option of how the internet worked previously.
I always thought the Cambridge Analytical scandal was just the left trying to point fingers at how Trump could have possibly won, instead of blaming the Democratic party for their terrible handling of the Sanders campaign, and how Clinton was so utterly unlikable, they grasped at so many straws, we're still reeling from it to this day.
The big ones being the Ukrainian war, the failure of the Afghanistan pull-out, and of course CA.
Well this might come as a shock but the techniques used to groom suicide bombers also work on white people too. Prey on their disillusionment, pump them full of hatred for "the enemy" then give them the means to carry out an attack.
But if you're digging back through history, check out how once upon a time, everyone from the US government to Coca-Cola was awkwardly trying their hand at mind control.
Fortunately, they've pinky promised that's all behind them now, despite having access to millions of people who voluntarily pin their own eyes open and spend the night scrolling through rapid flashes of sex, violence and extremism, in their own DIY Clockwork Orange therapy (only it's trying to make them worse, not better)
What could go wrong except for everything that's currently going wrong?
The damage done by giving neoliberals power and the far-right platform is going to take decades to undo, if we survive it at all.
Climate change is progressing at an alarming rate while the oil and gas lobby teach AI how to astroturf, cheered on by every billionaire hoping they can fire their employees and pocket their wages.
If the far-right are given the power they need, they'll decimate the population searching for whatever magic group they need to genocide that will make their parents love them, their mental illness evaporate and their dicks 14" long. When they finally realize no such group exists, we'll get to see what happens when you give the nuclear launch codes to wife beaters ane school shooters.
there were a number of university experiments on human choice often dealing with a disparity of information between the parties.
What was learned by the US government in its testing was also known. The reality is experiments like these were done very heavily up until the 60's with the vast majority getting nixed by the early-to-late 70s
this coincides also with our release of mental patients which were as much experiment subjects as they were patients. We were mapping out people's behavior to information stimulus for most of the 20th century.
the programs were all stopped but the information continued on and is used in many strata of our lives.
I don't think the SPE is that good a reference, and also not super meaningful to this sort of case of Internet manipulation anyway. Look at the amount of points showing it was basically not a normal experiment but predetermined to act out how the PI wanted - in that wikipedia link.
My understanding of MK Ultra was basically the government wasted a lot of money because of fear of missing out vs the Soviets. It didn't accomplish anything.
And subliminal marketing has been widely debunked to my knowledge. People thought it might do something, but experimentally it didn't.
I would have pointed to disinformation campaigns myself - there is research that implies it works.
SPE shows exactly how when you alter a worldview how that person changes. It was extreme and unintended but it showed how powerful it can be when the subjects willingly accept the game.
subliminal marketing in the form of showing single image frames was debuked, thats one of many techniques.
SPE shows that people being paid or encouraged to act a certain way will act a certain way, especially in deference to authority - which we already knew IMO. How does this translate to the Internet - people can be paid to spread info online that might be misleading or straight up disinformation? That doesn't seem especially novel to me. PR and Propaganda existed long before SPE or the 60s.
Do you have any links to what sort of subliminal marketing you're referencing that is shown to work?
I agree, and I think it's even more broader: Anxiety and stress.
These are extremely dangerous and underrated, and even exploited by many (e.g. news, politicians, workplace, social media, marketing).
It's like sticking a cigarette into your mouth without you able to immediately take it out.
Sugar is not bad. Abuse of sugar is bad. Sugar is absolutely fine, as long as one doesn't exceed. Problem is that in American-inspired diets sugar is everywhere at gigantic doses
Depends on what you mean by "basic groceries." Produce and generally anything that is not processed or prepackaged is ok, but most anything ready to eat, including any baked goods is likely to be pretty high in sugar.
And just FYI, since glucose, fructose, and sucrose are all naturally occurring, they (and HFCS) are considered organic legally
Correct. However, there are many ways to get glucose into the brain that are not dependent on eating glucose directly. For example, starch and cellulose are both big long chains of glucose molecules linked together, although no multicellular organisms have the necessary enzymes to break down cellulose into glucose (at least none of which I'm aware, anyway).
For the most part, getting your glucose by breaking down starch is healthier than eating it directly, because it slows down the introduction of starch into the bloodstream which keeps your blood sugar levels more stable, since the enzymes that break down starch (α and β amylase, IIRC) don't do it instantly. Plus, other simple sugars can easily be converted by the buddy into glucose by a variety of enzymes find naturally in the body.
But even without eating any carbohydrates, the human body had the ability to create its own glucose via a process called gluconeogenesis, which occurs mainly in the liver. So, it's not generally advisable to eat too much sugar directly, as there are plenty of other avenues through which the body can get its glucose, and eating the glucose directly leads to a much higher chance of developing diabetes later in life, even if you remain at a healthy weight.
Source: I'm a chemist who teaches college-level biochemistry and nutrition. If you want a source with more details, LMK your educational background and I'd be happy to provide some reading material.
This is exactly my point: glucose, fructose and sucrose are not unhealthy. They are just fine. Unless one exceeds. Glycemic index is relevant. Eating a bit of sugar sometimes or an apple is just fine (fruit is a great source of sugars, but it is also very healthy).
Problem is that in America and UK they manage to put additional sugar even in the pasta sauce... Everything is so sweet that it tastes bad for many foreigners (it tastes bad for me for instance)
Source: we have a similar background but mine is more theoretical (modelling, hpc, biophysics, theoretical biophysical chemistry and theoretical chemistry), I have a PhD as well and I used to work in academia (on both biological mechanisms and materials for renewable energy) before moving to AI in industry (different sectors). We are saying the same :D
Fructose is typically fine when it's paired with equal amounts of glucose, like in fruit. Your body has a really hard time processing high concentrations of fructose alone, which is how most sugary food is produced now a days since high fructose is a much cheaper method of sweetening food than a balanced mix of sugars.
Except "high fructose corn syrup" doesn't really have that high of a concentration of fructose. Standard corn syrup and most fruits have glucose and fructose in a ratio that's roughly 50:50. HFCS is about 55:45 in favor of fructose, mostly because both sugars are roughly the same stability from a chemical sense, so the enzyme that is used to convert one to the other (glucofructoisomerase, IIRC) can't really get that far from that 50:50 ratio. There are lots of natural sources that are way higher in fructose (agave nectar is like 90:10 fructose, again IIRC).
And fructose isn't added to everything because the sugar is cheaper than other sugars (although the government subsidies for corn farmers do make HFCS ridiculously cheap); it's because our taste buds perceive fructose as sweeter than a similar amount of other simple sugars. So it's actually cheaper to use HFCS than raw corn syrup or other sugar sources, because your actually need less sugar to get the same taste. It's really similar to how artificial sweeteners work; a synthetic molecule can trick our taste buds into sending signals to the brain that say "this is sweet" at a rate that's 80-300x more effective per molecule. A lot of artificial sweeteners do actually have calories when digested, but such a small amount of sweetener gets used that the caloric content gets rounded down to zero. But I digress.
The real issue is that simple sugars are being added in large amounts to EVERYTHING (because they taste good), and processed and prepackaged foods are cheaper to buy and easier than preparing food yourself. HFCS ships easily, has a long shelf life, and puts money in the pockets of corporate farms that prefer to grow one (maybe two) crops over vast swathes of land in the US, which is why it's everywhere. Not that corn is anything special! You can make a high fructose syrup from nearly any starchy crop. Corn was just in the right place at the right time.
Like with most problems in the US, the real underlying cause is the corporations and government subsidies that ignore sustainability (economic and environmental), as well as the health of the population in favor of profit. Unfortunately, that's a tougher problem to solve and political and economic reform is a tougher sell for Middle America than making one specific ingredient into a Boogeyman.
HFCS is the #1 reason by far that sugar is added to products. It is cheap and the precursor (corn) is maybe the most heavily subsidized product except oil. Those subsidies also have an additive effect to the US beef (and other meat) subsidies through feed corn.
Look no further for the cause of the obesity problem in America. It's an everything. I bought what I thought were raw sausages and it was even in there.
There's no such thing as "raw" sausage. Uncooked maybe. But never raw, like carots or stake can be raw.
Sausage is ground meat mixed with all sorts of spices and things. Including yes almost always sugar and salt. Without the extra spices, it's not sausage anymore. It's just ground beef, pork, turkey, venison, whatever.
Totally. Sugar should be seen similarly like alcohol or cigarettes regarding the addictiveness. But we are consuming it everyday and feed our children with it.
Soda specifically - is something we should be looking closer at in relation to sugar abuse. The number of kids and young adults I see quaffing giant plastic cups of fountain drinks is alarming.
This will be the next big class action suit similar to tobacco. Big sugar has been operating just like tobacco, denying negative side effects and lobbying at state and federal levels to stifle bans and regulatory actions.
America is on the verge of a sytemeic failure when it comes to health care, and a lot of that is due to the prevalence of diabetes in our aging population.
Right now one in every three medicare dollars goes towards treating diabetes, a perfectly preventable disease. It's not sustainable, and it's literally siphoning off our ability to treat other ailments.
This right here. We are undoubtedly the plastic generation. And it's not letting up any time soon; our kids will be included in this cohort as well. Banning plastic bags in cities is next to useless when everything we eat, everything we drink, and everything we buy is wrapped in plastic.
Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.
Since you mention tobacco: It's worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
Zembla, a Dutch independent journalism TV program, made a video regarding a big PFAS cover-up in The Netherlands: https://youtu.be/y3kzHc-eV88. If you ask me, PFAS is worse the plastic.
While what you say is generally true, I would add that many diseases were "rare" in pre-modern times because they were not easily diagnosis at the time or because people were killed earlier by something else that is now treatable.
There's a couple studies showing that even though your body can't process and remove PFAS and it just keeps accumulating, if you donate blood regularly you reduce the amount in your body by a bit each time. There are other slight health benefits to donating blood and lots of places will pay you for it. So if you can reduce your PFAS intake and donate blood you can slowly get rid of it. I use arch linux btw.
Starbright boat polish contains and advertises that it has PTEF. Think about that , a product designed to be rubbed all over l boats until it "wears off" in waterways. I used to use it ( it is a good polish) until I realized how messed up that is.
A lot of good lubricants and dry lubricants and anti-sieze bolt coatings have PFAs. Most waterproof fabrics like tents, goretex jackets and boots, waterproofing sprays, etc also contain them. Atleast waxed canvas and wool is making a big comeback in the outdoors communities.
Non stick cookware. Water repellent and stain resistant items and coatings. Stuff like that.
It's not a required ingredient for sunscreen to work, it's just to make it more water resistant (it stays on your skin longer) so those chemicals are typically used in sunscreen that's marked for water/sports applications. You can buy PFAS free sunscreen too
I recently got a reverse osmosis water filter to remove it from my water. Since I rent I got a countertop filter but if you own your place you can get a filter installed for all your water.
Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they'd cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.
Yes, all plastics. Even bpa free plastics leak estrogenic chemicals into food, and fpod is often stored in plastic containers. Even milk cartons are lined with plastic.
Teflon(nonstick coated pans and pots) arr similarly terrible
Shoes with a raised heel is bad for your knees. (Easily measurably bad. Especially for running)
As somebody who vaped for a long time, I kind of disagree with this one. Of every method for quitting smoking, vaping was the easiest and most effective. It let me titrate down to eventually 0 nicotine juice, which let me stop altogether. I only very rarely vape anymore, I keep my mod around in case I am ever out drinking and get an urge, but it is definitely the reason I was able to quit smoking.
The popcorn lung thing is kind of an urban legend, there is no case of any vaper ever getting it from vaping, but diacetyl (the additive in question) has been discontinued in basically all juice just in case anyway.
The usual mantra in vaping communities was always to tell people that if you weren't a smoker already, don't start vaping. Is it better than smoking? Almost assuredly, but it's still not going to be better than just breathing cleaning air. The recommendation was always as a transition away from smoking. It's one of the few hobbies we would congratulate each other over leaving.
If you don't vape or smoke already, don't start though.
Yeah the sentiment surrounding vapes generally is that they're better than cigarettes. Most people still want to entirely quit vaping, quit nicotine altogether.
Unfortunately, vapes are super enticing to younger people. Even ignoring the underage market entirely, young people love vaping. I'm in the army, so maybe my demographics are skewed, but EVERYBODY is vaping super high nicotine disposable vapes these days.
When I first started vaping, nicotine concrentations were commonly 3 or 6 mg/ml, now 50mg/ml is common.
I think it depends on the vape (and ingredients) in question. Cannabis vapes from dispensaries are required to not have additives. They're all tested thoroughly. So those would be "safer" than things with added oils or flavoring. I'm not sure if they're better than vaporizing the actual plant flower instead of concentrate.
Nicotine based vapes, I can only assume use some interesting ingredients since it's not just a compressed/heated/iced tobacco plant. I've never used one, but I've also never seen someone ask for test results of a nicotine vape (or have them provided).
When I was vaping I always mixed my own juice, so was very sure of what went in. There's always the chance of buying from a sketchy vendor and getting something weird in your mixes, but most were fairly benign. Vaping liquid is actually pretty simple in composition.
A base of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with additional additives for nicotine and flavour.
I bought my VG and PG from a local vendor, but those are readily available basically anywhere because they have a lot of uses outside vaping. I ordered pure liquid nicotine (in a PG suspension) online. Flavour additives also ordered online from a fairly reputable vendor that was well known in . I have no idea what policies about sharing vendors are here, but I am happy to give recommendations to anyone if they are looking to make their own juice to save money/be safer.
I mostly made fairly simple flavours, nothing too fancy. I had a friend who actually just vaped VG/PG with nicotine and no flavours at all.
Automobiles. Especially in the USA they are causing a public health crisis, environmental crisis, qualify of life crisis. I grew up loving them and they have uses but I'm fully convinced in the future they should be a luxury used for specific tasks or trips rather than the only form of transportation available.
Microplastics and plastic related byproducts, like phtalates (which are connected with a decreased fertility in mammals)
I'm positive that the long term effects of these substances, that can be found in every link of the food chain nowadays, will be discussed a lot in the future
You said product, and I mean this legitimately. Not because of meme hate or hating on what is trendy, but because it is and has been a tool of the CCP. This isn't really in question, and it was one of the first large platforms to entirely erase the idea of a timeline and fully devote itself only to a algorithm feed. One that bytedance has put their finger on the scales of many times.
The effect this has is hard to quantify, but the postmortem on it is going to be incredible as we unpack exactly how much this influenced the trends and politics among zoomers, and to what extent.
PFAS, which are needed to produce teflon and other nonstick materials. It currently begins to attack attention, but wasn't really an issue a few years ago. It doesn't decay naturally so it will be forever in the environment. The EU is even planning to ban all PFAS.
Vapes. The less regulated and underground production, which is easily finding its way to the high street, is building to be a repeat of the tobacco issues with cigarettes.
My mom switched from chain smoking regular cigs to vaping. While I'm glad she's significantly reduced her lung cancer risk, who knows what it's really doing?
It's better than smoking but definitely still unhealthy, especially chain vaping like many do. You should talk to her, let her know you're worried about her health, and see if she might try reducing intake. I quit smoking cold turkey three years ago. It wasn't easy, I was extremely irritable for a month, but the cravings became bearable after that. An easy trade for higher quality of life and longer life expectancy with less wasted money.
the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
It was specifically caused by black-market THC vape cartridges containing vitamin E acetate as a filler. This chemical was marketed to black-market vape makers as "Honey Cut", intended to dilute or "cut" cannabis extracts while keeping the mixture thick so it looked good to customers.
Legit cannabis vapes don't include fillers; a typical California dispensary vape cartridge contains ~90% cannabinoids by weight. Nicotine vapes are water-based rather than oil-based, so vitamin E acetate would not mix with them.
Vitamin E acetate sounds like a healthy thing — it's a vitamin, right? — but it's not. When it's heated in a vape, it produces a variety of chemicals that would be entertaining to the organic chemist — but no good for your lungs. You don't need to be inhaling alkenes or ketenes, to say nothing of carcinogenic benzene.
(Hey stoners! Don't use black-market carts, just like you wouldn't smoke "synthetic cannabis" aka "spice". If you want to vape instead of smoking, and you're not in a place with good dispensaries with lab-tested vape products, use a dry-herb vape and plain ol' herb.)
Yep. the whole vaping industry got ruined because of this, and it wasn't even related to said industry. I guess it's just another example of what lobbying is capble of.
I've never used a nicotine vape product in my life.
I tried cigarettes once as a teenager and didn't like them; tried a cigar once and threw it away.
I don't like nicotine. I like beer and weed.
But the whole scare about nicotine vaping is utterly bogus.
Almost all of the harm of smoking is from the smoke — soot, tar, and carbon monoxide — and not the nicotine. Inhaling smoke is bad for you. It doesn't matter if that smoke is from tobacco, or cannabis, or a forest fire. Inhaling smoke is bad for you.
If all the cigarette smokers could be switched to vaping overnight, keeping their nicotine doses the same but using vape juice rather than burning plants to get it, that would be a huge public health win.
The fact that regulatory agencies have gotten in the way of converting all the smokers to vaping, instead of gleefully endorsing such a change, is utter madness.
I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.
Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn't be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!
Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn't be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.
A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.
Aside from tobacco, all of those things were known to be dangerous but used commercially anyway because they were cheaper than alternatives. Today's equivalents are PFAS, plastics, and sweeteners of every kind. You will die with all of them in your body.
Marketing. We put a person on the moon because we were scared of the space race, and then we spent the next 50 years figuring out how to make rich people richer by manipulating human behavior and gamifying everything so you buy into the buy more stuff you don't need and click more stuff you don't care about. We've gotten so good at it, we only need a 10 second short to advertise stuff to you.
This affects everything we do down to its core and will likely be the cause of astronomical ADHD rates in the future.
you're grasping at something deeper here. humans have an underlying tendency to be gullible and easily manipulateable. we need to pour funds and funds into the education system and move more focus onto critical thinking, logical fallacies and self-esteem / self-image, as it plays a large role in calling out injustices and building an accurate world view
imo its the no. 1 reason the world is so fucked. we believe evrything we're told because it appeals to a sense of self-empowerment (our tribe over theirs). hunter gatherer tribes would sometimes literally slaughter each other to survive. it is in our instincts to be able to be convinced that other groups of people are our enemies, when really everyone thinking the exact opposite would be heaven on earth, except for the ultra greedy
So true. The only way that the human race is to survive and prosper into the far future is for us to move to a mindset of the whole world's population being one big tribe, as far as I am concerned. We will eventually destroy ourselves if we keep with the 'us vs them' mindset.
we need to pour funds and funds into the education system and move more focus onto critical thinking, logical fallacies and self-esteem / self-image, as it plays a large role in calling out injustices and building an accurate world view
Nope. Education is our own responsibility. Leave it to the state or organisations and get brain-raped. Teach yourself, teach your kids, teach your friends etc. For the most part we need to purify our own knowledge and learn to learn on our own.
I disagree that people should be left to educate themselves in isolated communities. What happens when our communities clash on important issues? Instead we should agree on what should be taught in schools and work on regulating it and making it self-improving.
I agree that bureucacy and corruption will inevitably have an impact, but whichever way I think about it, not caring as much for your stranger man as for your family or friends is what allows the mind-rape in the long run, and that makes it necessary for us to globally educate people on at least that, so we don't end up where we are now.
I thought the comments section would be filled with vapes.
Guys, i think vapes are a good candidate for something that hindsight will show us was dangerous, and i think images of teens smoking Juul will age as poorly as kids drinking beer.
Corn. It is a fact that the number of autoimmune diseases are rising. I read a NHS study comparing the data of the last 30 or so years and of right now 1 of 10 people in the UK will get an autoimmune disease at some point in their live such as diabetes, MS, Parkinson,... 30 years ago it was like 1 out of 50. And one common thing in countries with a higher autoimmune disease rate is a lot of corn products, like corn starch, corn sirup,...
Right now the final proof is missing cause the studies just started. And maybe it is not corn and something completely different, but the stakes are high it is corn.
I feel like with what you've stated it is far too early to point to corn itself as the cause. Their are so many things that have grown in usage these past 30 years I'm not sure how they could confidently say it is corn itself doing it.
Yes and no. Corn is nothing new but the corn we use is kinda new. It is one of the biggest GMO there is. That's a big part in research right now within those studies. And it's not against GMO per se but the changes corn made.
Maybe it's really just sugar and fructose semms to be worse as glucose. So yeah, maybe sugar, but right now it seems to be more.
I was just thinking about plastics and all of the associated chemicals. And almost everything corn related is packaged in plastic so even if they did link corn, could they really say the plastic does not affect us? Of course not.
Not only could it be almost anything that's increased in our general environment, but better means to identify specific diseases. Diagnostics and knowledge have advanced in the 30 or so years this study apparently covers, and can account for an "increase" in the prevalence of auto-immune diseases.
In theory, there's still some diseases that while well understood, HCPs still take excruciatingly long to diagnose and prefer to explore routes like mental health and exclusionary diagnoses first, which could suggest prevalence is higher still.
This is correlation. Corn (or high fructose corn syrup) is a common ingredient in ultra processed foods, which we already know are the cause of the obesity epidemic. Pre-Colombian societies ate plenty of corn.
It’s also not just about sugar as some other comments have suggested. Humans are built to eats carbs and some tribal people even today get a huge amount of calories from honey without any obesity.
The problem is the way sugar (and fat and other ingredients) are processed in industrial food production. Studies have shown that if you give people food that contains the exact same proportion of fats and sugars, in whole food and junk food form, people will eat more of the junk food. This is the problem. Whole foods are generally all fine.
That sounds a lot like correlation not causation. Countries that use a lot of corn syrup also use a lot of every other food industry chemical, and somewhere in that chemical soup could be something real, but it's probably not the corn
Plastic, PFAS, CO2 Pollution, Tire dust (leading problem is cause of Asthma), Leaded fueled small prop planes (still standard), Oil, Industrialized agriculture (destroys nutrients in soils so food does not have it, produces tons CO2), many more.
This mystery can be resolved by googling 'ld50 caffeine.' ~750mg is toxic and 10,000mg can kill people
The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine is estimated between 150 to 200 mg per kilogram but reports of lethal intoxications have been made with doses as low as 57 mg per kilogram.
Personally, 300mg is pretty much as far as I want to go.
Caffeine isn't terrible for you in moderate amounts, and coffee is actually a decent source or antioxidants especially if you don't get them elsewhere in your diet, but this is independent of caffeine itself (decaf has antioxidants). Daily high doses of caffeine is definitely bad for your health, and can negatively impact other health issues you may have such as anxiety, depression, etc. Do your research, talk to your doctor, and consider decreasing your daily intake.
According to Google, 400 mg (~4 cups of coffee or 10 cans of soda) per day is when you run into health risks, while 1200 mg in a short time span is overdose territory.
Cool, I’ll look for it. I haven’t bought soda in many years. More interested in coffee. I still don’t know if “breakfast coffee” has more or less than “half caff”.
Breakfast blend is unspecific, but it's a mix of normal, not decaf coffee, aimed at being smooth, not too bold or acidic etc. Half caff is a blend of decaf and normal beans, so breakfast will have approximately twice as much caffeine. Light/dark roast and specific coffee bean type used will vary the caffeine levels.
I'm no scientist, but I've been in the coffee industry for a long time. I would say more than 500mg per day is a lot. 200-300mg per day seems to be a nice sweet spot. That's about 12-16oz of brewed specialty coffee.
Once again, I'm not a food scientist, but I believe other ingredients you find in energy drinks can compound the effects of caffeine. Similar to how alcohol mixed with certain medications with fuck up your liver really fast.
Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn't currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.
If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.
Artificial sweeteners. Everyone is so obsessed with whether or not they cause cancer that their other potential effects get much less attention. There's a major industry push to keep them on the shelves, and we still have only recently discovered the gut microbiome.
I would probably say either alcohol or microplastics. Both are carcinogenic. At least alcohol is avoidable, but microplastics pretty much saturate all of our environments. It reminds me of when they were doing experiments to figure out the impact of lead, they couldn't even open the door to the lab, because the airborne concentration of lead would throw off the readings. We might not ever know what real health is like without walking around with grams of microplastics inside us.
Probably digital screen exposure. The impact of the digital age on mental health, especially due to increased screen time, is an area of active study. Some early research suggests potential risks, including impacts on sleep, attention, and mental well-being.
Things have slowly drifted from "we might wanna consider doing something before this becomes a problem" to "we need an immediate and concrete plan" to "anything short of immediate and drastic action is killing and will continue to kill people" over the course of the last decade or two.
I'm not saying that we should all pull a BSG and give it all up to be cavemen again.
But our bodies most certainly didn't evolve in order to sit at desks, stare at screens, communicate without physical contact, and avoid sunshine like the plague.
We evolved to be active, but developed the technology that allows most of us to be sedentary 99% of the time, and then we wonder why obesity and chronic back pain are pandemics.
Complete shot in the dark but my brain can't let it be (also fuck it, thats the point of this topic):
Surfactants, specifically modern soap and soap products. I strongly suspect that petroleum based soaps cause damage and issues.
When you wash your glasses in a dishwasher, pour some water in after it is dried. Look at how many bubbles are formed on the surface. Pour it out and do it again - usually there will be less bubbles. That means you are ingesting leftover detergent that wasn't rinsed off. Can't be great for you.
It feels like the WHO - or more realistically - the media is/was trying hard to make aspartame this by claiming it causes cancer. They're certainly annoying the soft drinks vendors using them.
Perhaps microplastic? I know it already kills by choking turtles or so but no answer yet if it can cause some health effects.
Edit: Just saw the comments now, microplastic seem to be the most common comment. So here is another go, The chemical they used in cars I think it's VOC/ also known as new car smell currently it can make some people sea sick. Right now there is lack of study that it is actually toxic.
Prolonged Sitting
Prolonged Loud Headphone Use
Off-Label Drug Use (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy)
Sun/Heat/Poor Air Exposure
Thiamine/B1 Deficiency via Alcohol Consumption
We know they’re all dangerous (to wildly varying extents), but I don’t think we’ve had enough moments-of-reckoning, like with emphysema and lung cancer following long term smoking.
That whole thing turned out to be a nothingburger. The report said that if you drink like 9 cans of diet soda it could possibly cause cancer. If you're drinking 9 cans of diet soda a day aspartame is the least of your problems.
My wife has been telling me for years that research was still ongoing about aspartame being potentially carcinogenic, so I should be careful with my at most one diet soda a day. When the news first came up that the WHO was about to classify it as such, I was like “oh shit, it’s happening?”
And then the details came a few days later, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. 😆
It's one of the markers that your brain uses to control its circadian rhythms. During half of your 24 hour cycle its fine. Our devices push that balance too far though, contributing to stress and insomnia by disrupting that regulatory mechanism.
Wouldn't be too different from living in the artic circle during the summertime, except without blackout shades and we're doing it to ourselves with tvs, computers and mobile devices.
Half was a rhetorical estimate to attempt to communicate a basic idea, not an attempt to use an accurate academic term. Look it up if you want to know more, quit arguing with me. What I am describing is not new or cutting edge. We have oodles of data you can look at.
Mmh i can see that yeah that can be a bit of a stressor, but idk.. it's already known to be "less than ideal", blue light filters are super common and the body is pretty good at regulating and adjusting sleep.
Buuut i guess that's what we thought about other issues too.
Is coffee dangerous because drinking it at 11pm each night keeps you awake too? I think that's overstating your case, although I think there is a minor benefit to limiting blue light.
personally, I have all the lights set to turn red an hour after sunset and it has had a much larger effect than limiting screen time at bedtime, which is what most people seem to focus on.
Depends how sensitive you are to caffeine. I strongly suspect sensitivity to blue light is similarly varied between individuals. I am not a doctor, however, and I honestly don't give enough fucks to try to convince you.
Not exclusively, the body's systems are far more complex and interconnected than that. It's really just the need to have some kind of nighttime for your overall well-being. It's what we evolved around.
Could be smart watches. Don't quote me on this, but wearing a watch 24/7 that emits light to constantly track your heart rate cannot exactly be good for your health (unless you truly need it)
Is Tobacco dangerous? I thought it was mostly the ridiculous amount of chemicals they soaked and resoaked it in when making cigarettes that made it especially bad.
I know this is a bait comment, but I'll entertain it a bit.
Extra estrogen actually does increase your risk of certain medical conditions like endometrial cancer (cancer of the uterus) and blood clots (potentially leading to things like a stroke or heart attack).
However, cisgender people still do need to have hormone supplementation at times for various reasons and doctors are generally able to mitigate the risks fine/the risks are not overly high. So I can't see this causing some sort of major health incident.
The difference being taking hormone therapy because one needs it vs taking hormone therapy just because. There could be legitimate medical reasons for hormone therapy.
What about GAC that cis-gendered people access that is arguably not medically necessary? Such as HRT for menopause, hypogonadism, or sexual enhancement? HRT adds to quality of life (and affirms one's gender, looking at you, Viagra) but is arguably not at all medically necessary in most common use cases.
Or going past hormones, what about body augmentation incl. things like aesthetic or reconstructive surgeries, hair transplants or removals?
I was going to post something like this in response, but you beat me. Well said. There are so many medical treatments we do that aren't medically necessary to sustain life, but are instead used to improve quality of life. It would be odd to start drawing the line and denying quality of life care arbitrarily like that.
Not sure if you actually meant that in response to me?
I was pointing out to that guy that GAC isn't exclusively for trans people, and that by their logic, if you want to deny it for one group then it should be denied for all people unless life-critical. I think certain people forget their little blue pills are about affirming their identify as men.
What an insane comment. Something that pertains to 0.1 of .01% of the population is the equivalent of the magnitude of tobacco on the world, lead, or asbestos
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to "plastic" as if it's a single substance. It's a bunch of different materials that don't really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that "you shouldn't burn plastic" because the smoke is "toxic". For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it's no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There's also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled "BPA Free". BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I'd say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren't chemists.
Now I just want an accurate infographic of "safe" combustible plastics.
Yeah! I don't want to accidentally throw a redneck bonfire with white smoke again.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don't hear about it in the news though do you....
I'm confused about how it kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. How, by drowning?
It's an old (early-internet?) joke iirc. And yes, I think that's the answer
Oh shit, I was thinking there was no way that hundreds of thousands of people did from drowning every year, but they actually do.
WHO estimates that every year over 200k people die from drowning
Yea I did my 10 seconds of research before I quoted my number! I could have said '200k' but 'hundreds of thousands' sounds much more dramatic don't you think? Which is the whole point of the Dihydrogen monoxide thing.
Wow, talk about preventable deaths...
According to its Wikipedia page, this joke was first published in 1983! I suspect most people know it from the early 2000's when it made a resurgence again.
What I think it is, is that every single person who ever consumes it, will eventually die. We are also literally dependant on it. If you stop ingesting it for too long, it can also cause you to die... That's how it went around here, at least.
That’s my understanding as well, it was a joke about correlation != causation.
Look at all of the related "risks" and add them up. I'm sure that drowning is a small number, but then add in all of the deaths from scalding, acid rain, poisons (that contain water), etc etc and it eventually gets to be a very big number. Probably in the millions
The WHO estimates 236k deaths per year worldwide due to drowning. There's other ways to die to Dihydrogen monoxide other than drowning, so my numbers hold up!
Acid rain has never killed anyone. It can kill plants and destroy farms, so I guess it can kill indirectly by causing famine, but that's about it.
Not only BPAs but many chemicals like BPAs can cause birth defects because our bodies think they are estrogen.
If this worries you, read the books It Starts With the Egg and Grain Brain.
They both suggest that not only what you eat, but how it's prepared can affect the health of a child.
For instance it's a big no-no, according to It Starts With the Egg, to heat most plastics in the microwave. The heat breaks the plastic down, it can get in your blood, your body will think it's estrogen, and they don't even know the full effects of this yet.
So think about
These chemicals are not just in food:
Thinking about reducing plastic fucks me up and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Noticing every single time we bring new plastic into the household, and how hard it is to avoid. Chicken comes in plastic wrap, and even if we got it at a butcher counter, they still toss it in a plastic bag before wrapping it in brown paper. Bags of potting soil, our toothpaste tubes, peanut butter jars… it’s endless.
At least the majority of my clothes are cotton or wool, but another source is carpet and there isn’t anything I can do about this apartment carpet.
Are microplastics similarly diverse in their effects on the human body?
I would guess that chemical effects would be diverse while "physical" effects would not be so diverse. Keep in mind that things like mesothelioma from asbestos are kinda sorta "physical" effects because it's from jagged roughness of the particles at the nanoscale rather than any specific chemistry.
So what you're saying is instead of having a bonfire I should be have a milk jug fire?
Yes.
Also be wary of people that say they are chemists on the internet when oil, plastics, and guns have mostly only been researched by their manufacturers. All totally safe.
Social media. It wasn't until very recently that people started to realize just how harmful it actually is.
Less social media IMO, more the weaponization of techniques first researched in the 60s-80s made real and pushed via automaton to all corners of the public internet.
The reason you become vulnerable is because you abdicate control (most had no idea) of your feed to providers that own domain names.
This was a co-option of how the internet worked previously.
What kind of techniques were researched? This sounds interesting to learn about. Do you have some terms I could search that will help me learn more?
Start with Cambridge Analytica for sure.
I always thought the Cambridge Analytical scandal was just the left trying to point fingers at how Trump could have possibly won, instead of blaming the Democratic party for their terrible handling of the Sanders campaign, and how Clinton was so utterly unlikable, they grasped at so many straws, we're still reeling from it to this day.
The big ones being the Ukrainian war, the failure of the Afghanistan pull-out, and of course CA.
Well this might come as a shock but the techniques used to groom suicide bombers also work on white people too. Prey on their disillusionment, pump them full of hatred for "the enemy" then give them the means to carry out an attack.
But if you're digging back through history, check out how once upon a time, everyone from the US government to Coca-Cola was awkwardly trying their hand at mind control.
Fortunately, they've pinky promised that's all behind them now, despite having access to millions of people who voluntarily pin their own eyes open and spend the night scrolling through rapid flashes of sex, violence and extremism, in their own DIY Clockwork Orange therapy (only it's trying to make them worse, not better)
What could go wrong except for everything that's currently going wrong?
The damage done by giving neoliberals power and the far-right platform is going to take decades to undo, if we survive it at all.
Climate change is progressing at an alarming rate while the oil and gas lobby teach AI how to astroturf, cheered on by every billionaire hoping they can fire their employees and pocket their wages.
If the far-right are given the power they need, they'll decimate the population searching for whatever magic group they need to genocide that will make their parents love them, their mental illness evaporate and their dicks 14" long. When they finally realize no such group exists, we'll get to see what happens when you give the nuclear launch codes to wife beaters ane school shooters.
Vote better.
there were a number of university experiments on human choice often dealing with a disparity of information between the parties.
What was learned by the US government in its testing was also known. The reality is experiments like these were done very heavily up until the 60's with the vast majority getting nixed by the early-to-late 70s
this coincides also with our release of mental patients which were as much experiment subjects as they were patients. We were mapping out people's behavior to information stimulus for most of the 20th century.
the programs were all stopped but the information continued on and is used in many strata of our lives.
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0by2ybb/mk-ultra-the-cia-s-secret-pursuit-of-mind-control-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Subliminal Marketing (one of many techniques) is banned however use of the technique in other mediums is not. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/laws-subliminal-marketing-69892.html
With regards to international actors and thier domestic collaborators, check into Foundations of Geopolitics. Its a playbook being followed.
I don't think the SPE is that good a reference, and also not super meaningful to this sort of case of Internet manipulation anyway. Look at the amount of points showing it was basically not a normal experiment but predetermined to act out how the PI wanted - in that wikipedia link.
My understanding of MK Ultra was basically the government wasted a lot of money because of fear of missing out vs the Soviets. It didn't accomplish anything.
And subliminal marketing has been widely debunked to my knowledge. People thought it might do something, but experimentally it didn't.
I would have pointed to disinformation campaigns myself - there is research that implies it works.
SPE shows exactly how when you alter a worldview how that person changes. It was extreme and unintended but it showed how powerful it can be when the subjects willingly accept the game.
subliminal marketing in the form of showing single image frames was debuked, thats one of many techniques.
SPE shows that people being paid or encouraged to act a certain way will act a certain way, especially in deference to authority - which we already knew IMO. How does this translate to the Internet - people can be paid to spread info online that might be misleading or straight up disinformation? That doesn't seem especially novel to me. PR and Propaganda existed long before SPE or the 60s.
Do you have any links to what sort of subliminal marketing you're referencing that is shown to work?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6204644/
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2016/1/niw013/2757133#:~:text=Subliminal%20manipulation%20is%20often%20considered,information%20such%20as%20single%20words.
simple phrases and mnemonics are amazing too, those short insulting names have more of a role than people realize.
That geopolitics book is buy some Russian guy right? I’ve heard that it’s literally being played out even though it was written a long time ago
printed in the early 80s, written by the man who is considered the grandfather of the current Russian' govt's ideology and "plan"
he has the ear of putin, or did.
Is that the guy that Adam Curtis talked about in Hypernormalisation?
Buckle up, you’re in for a wild ride Zersetzung
this guy
Abortion was a very well researched controversial topic to divide the feminist movement as much as possible.
Most propaganda boils down to fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) to promote division and conqueror the smaller groups
I agree, and I think it's even more broader: Anxiety and stress. These are extremely dangerous and underrated, and even exploited by many (e.g. news, politicians, workplace, social media, marketing). It's like sticking a cigarette into your mouth without you able to immediately take it out.
Sugar. People don't realize how bad it is for you and how addictive it is.
Sugar is not bad. Abuse of sugar is bad. Sugar is absolutely fine, as long as one doesn't exceed. Problem is that in American-inspired diets sugar is everywhere at gigantic doses
Do basic groceries abuse sugar? And I'm not talking about the "organic" ones
Depends on what you mean by "basic groceries." Produce and generally anything that is not processed or prepackaged is ok, but most anything ready to eat, including any baked goods is likely to be pretty high in sugar.
And just FYI, since glucose, fructose, and sucrose are all naturally occurring, they (and HFCS) are considered organic legally
Glucose (a sugar) is also literally the main fuel of human cells and the only one for brain cells...
Correct. However, there are many ways to get glucose into the brain that are not dependent on eating glucose directly. For example, starch and cellulose are both big long chains of glucose molecules linked together, although no multicellular organisms have the necessary enzymes to break down cellulose into glucose (at least none of which I'm aware, anyway).
For the most part, getting your glucose by breaking down starch is healthier than eating it directly, because it slows down the introduction of starch into the bloodstream which keeps your blood sugar levels more stable, since the enzymes that break down starch (α and β amylase, IIRC) don't do it instantly. Plus, other simple sugars can easily be converted by the buddy into glucose by a variety of enzymes find naturally in the body.
But even without eating any carbohydrates, the human body had the ability to create its own glucose via a process called gluconeogenesis, which occurs mainly in the liver. So, it's not generally advisable to eat too much sugar directly, as there are plenty of other avenues through which the body can get its glucose, and eating the glucose directly leads to a much higher chance of developing diabetes later in life, even if you remain at a healthy weight.
Source: I'm a chemist who teaches college-level biochemistry and nutrition. If you want a source with more details, LMK your educational background and I'd be happy to provide some reading material.
This is exactly my point: glucose, fructose and sucrose are not unhealthy. They are just fine. Unless one exceeds. Glycemic index is relevant. Eating a bit of sugar sometimes or an apple is just fine (fruit is a great source of sugars, but it is also very healthy).
Problem is that in America and UK they manage to put additional sugar even in the pasta sauce... Everything is so sweet that it tastes bad for many foreigners (it tastes bad for me for instance)
Source: we have a similar background but mine is more theoretical (modelling, hpc, biophysics, theoretical biophysical chemistry and theoretical chemistry), I have a PhD as well and I used to work in academia (on both biological mechanisms and materials for renewable energy) before moving to AI in industry (different sectors). We are saying the same :D
Sorry I don't understand what you mean. Could you please rephrase? Thanks
Sugar does nothing good and its 100% konessential for the human body. You dont need to eat a single carb.
And that includes fiber, which is also a carb.
Good luck with your digestion if you don't eat fibers... Your gut flora must live a miserable life :(
I'd go with high fructose corn syrup
Fructose is typically fine when it's paired with equal amounts of glucose, like in fruit. Your body has a really hard time processing high concentrations of fructose alone, which is how most sugary food is produced now a days since high fructose is a much cheaper method of sweetening food than a balanced mix of sugars.
Except "high fructose corn syrup" doesn't really have that high of a concentration of fructose. Standard corn syrup and most fruits have glucose and fructose in a ratio that's roughly 50:50. HFCS is about 55:45 in favor of fructose, mostly because both sugars are roughly the same stability from a chemical sense, so the enzyme that is used to convert one to the other (glucofructoisomerase, IIRC) can't really get that far from that 50:50 ratio. There are lots of natural sources that are way higher in fructose (agave nectar is like 90:10 fructose, again IIRC).
And fructose isn't added to everything because the sugar is cheaper than other sugars (although the government subsidies for corn farmers do make HFCS ridiculously cheap); it's because our taste buds perceive fructose as sweeter than a similar amount of other simple sugars. So it's actually cheaper to use HFCS than raw corn syrup or other sugar sources, because your actually need less sugar to get the same taste. It's really similar to how artificial sweeteners work; a synthetic molecule can trick our taste buds into sending signals to the brain that say "this is sweet" at a rate that's 80-300x more effective per molecule. A lot of artificial sweeteners do actually have calories when digested, but such a small amount of sweetener gets used that the caloric content gets rounded down to zero. But I digress.
The real issue is that simple sugars are being added in large amounts to EVERYTHING (because they taste good), and processed and prepackaged foods are cheaper to buy and easier than preparing food yourself. HFCS ships easily, has a long shelf life, and puts money in the pockets of corporate farms that prefer to grow one (maybe two) crops over vast swathes of land in the US, which is why it's everywhere. Not that corn is anything special! You can make a high fructose syrup from nearly any starchy crop. Corn was just in the right place at the right time.
Like with most problems in the US, the real underlying cause is the corporations and government subsidies that ignore sustainability (economic and environmental), as well as the health of the population in favor of profit. Unfortunately, that's a tougher problem to solve and political and economic reform is a tougher sell for Middle America than making one specific ingredient into a Boogeyman.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Edit: cleaned up autocorrect typos and grammar
HFCS is the #1 reason by far that sugar is added to products. It is cheap and the precursor (corn) is maybe the most heavily subsidized product except oil. Those subsidies also have an additive effect to the US beef (and other meat) subsidies through feed corn.
Look no further for the cause of the obesity problem in America. It's an everything. I bought what I thought were raw sausages and it was even in there.
There's no such thing as "raw" sausage. Uncooked maybe. But never raw, like carots or stake can be raw.
Sausage is ground meat mixed with all sorts of spices and things. Including yes almost always sugar and salt. Without the extra spices, it's not sausage anymore. It's just ground beef, pork, turkey, venison, whatever.
Fructose is a type of sugar. High fructose corn syrup is almost pure sugar, like honey.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is nothing like Honey.
It all turns into glucagon in the body. It does the same shit in the end.
Totally. Sugar should be seen similarly like alcohol or cigarettes regarding the addictiveness. But we are consuming it everyday and feed our children with it.
Soda specifically - is something we should be looking closer at in relation to sugar abuse. The number of kids and young adults I see quaffing giant plastic cups of fountain drinks is alarming.
Even worse when they use it to replace water.
Juice isn’t any better. You’re drinking much more fruit than you would eat normally.
yeah because it's high sugar. i think that's absolutely common knowledge by now.
I agree especially with concentrates or “juice drinks” that have less than 10% juice. All of those things are just sugar drinks.
Carbonated water doesn't kill people.
Can you breathe the bubbles when drowning?
This will be the next big class action suit similar to tobacco. Big sugar has been operating just like tobacco, denying negative side effects and lobbying at state and federal levels to stifle bans and regulatory actions.
America is on the verge of a sytemeic failure when it comes to health care, and a lot of that is due to the prevalence of diabetes in our aging population.
Right now one in every three medicare dollars goes towards treating diabetes, a perfectly preventable disease. It's not sustainable, and it's literally siphoning off our ability to treat other ailments.
I get withdrawal symptoms on a regular basis. Cold sweat, ravenous appetite, weak limbs, shaky hands. It's horrible, really.
This right here. We are undoubtedly the plastic generation. And it's not letting up any time soon; our kids will be included in this cohort as well. Banning plastic bags in cities is next to useless when everything we eat, everything we drink, and everything we buy is wrapped in plastic.
Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.
Since you mention tobacco: It's worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
Zembla, a Dutch independent journalism TV program, made a video regarding a big PFAS cover-up in The Netherlands: https://youtu.be/y3kzHc-eV88. If you ask me, PFAS is worse the plastic.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/y3kzHc-eV88
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
While what you say is generally true, I would add that many diseases were "rare" in pre-modern times because they were not easily diagnosis at the time or because people were killed earlier by something else that is now treatable.
Sure, but incidence of lung cancer went way up as tobacco consumption rose heavily in the early 20th century.
There's a couple studies showing that even though your body can't process and remove PFAS and it just keeps accumulating, if you donate blood regularly you reduce the amount in your body by a bit each time. There are other slight health benefits to donating blood and lots of places will pay you for it. So if you can reduce your PFAS intake and donate blood you can slowly get rid of it. I use arch linux btw.
I also use Arch btw
How do I avoid these?
Starbright boat polish contains and advertises that it has PTEF. Think about that , a product designed to be rubbed all over l boats until it "wears off" in waterways. I used to use it ( it is a good polish) until I realized how messed up that is.
A lot of good lubricants and dry lubricants and anti-sieze bolt coatings have PFAs. Most waterproof fabrics like tents, goretex jackets and boots, waterproofing sprays, etc also contain them. Atleast waxed canvas and wool is making a big comeback in the outdoors communities.
Non stick cookware. Water repellent and stain resistant items and coatings. Stuff like that.
Largely by avoiding waterproof or water resistant skincare products such as sunscreen and makeup. Also avoid using nonstick cookware.
But I need sunscreen or my stupid Irish skin will turn into a big lump of cancer anyway.
I think the key there was "water resistant", suggesting the substance is used in the additives to make it resist getting rinsed off.
It's not a required ingredient for sunscreen to work, it's just to make it more water resistant (it stays on your skin longer) so those chemicals are typically used in sunscreen that's marked for water/sports applications. You can buy PFAS free sunscreen too
Use the ThinkSport brand.
Ahh yes, the bury your head in the sand trick
Also non-stick pans, flame-retardant fabrics, ...
I recently got a reverse osmosis water filter to remove it from my water. Since I rent I got a countertop filter but if you own your place you can get a filter installed for all your water.
Thanks. Any chance you could share a link so I know what to look for?
Mine is from a company called bluevua. They’re on Amazon.
Social media.
Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they'd cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.
Social Media
Microplastics
Social media
Nah
Nah nah
Nana-nah naah
Hey hey hey!
Plastics.
Yes, all plastics. Even bpa free plastics leak estrogenic chemicals into food, and fpod is often stored in plastic containers. Even milk cartons are lined with plastic.
Teflon(nonstick coated pans and pots) arr similarly terrible
Shoes with a raised heel is bad for your knees. (Easily measurably bad. Especially for running)
As somebody who vaped for a long time, I kind of disagree with this one. Of every method for quitting smoking, vaping was the easiest and most effective. It let me titrate down to eventually 0 nicotine juice, which let me stop altogether. I only very rarely vape anymore, I keep my mod around in case I am ever out drinking and get an urge, but it is definitely the reason I was able to quit smoking.
The popcorn lung thing is kind of an urban legend, there is no case of any vaper ever getting it from vaping, but diacetyl (the additive in question) has been discontinued in basically all juice just in case anyway.
The usual mantra in vaping communities was always to tell people that if you weren't a smoker already, don't start vaping. Is it better than smoking? Almost assuredly, but it's still not going to be better than just breathing cleaning air. The recommendation was always as a transition away from smoking. It's one of the few hobbies we would congratulate each other over leaving.
If you don't vape or smoke already, don't start though.
If it's so effective at helping people quit, why do you still vape?
I quit smoking a decade ago. I don't occasionally have a cigarette. I don't EVER have a cigarette. Or vape, because I'm an adult.
I've never thought vapes were not-dangerous. Do people really think that? I assume they're safer than cigarettes but less-bad doesn't mean good.
Yeah the sentiment surrounding vapes generally is that they're better than cigarettes. Most people still want to entirely quit vaping, quit nicotine altogether.
Unfortunately, vapes are super enticing to younger people. Even ignoring the underage market entirely, young people love vaping. I'm in the army, so maybe my demographics are skewed, but EVERYBODY is vaping super high nicotine disposable vapes these days.
When I first started vaping, nicotine concrentations were commonly 3 or 6 mg/ml, now 50mg/ml is common.
I think it depends on the vape (and ingredients) in question. Cannabis vapes from dispensaries are required to not have additives. They're all tested thoroughly. So those would be "safer" than things with added oils or flavoring. I'm not sure if they're better than vaporizing the actual plant flower instead of concentrate.
Nicotine based vapes, I can only assume use some interesting ingredients since it's not just a compressed/heated/iced tobacco plant. I've never used one, but I've also never seen someone ask for test results of a nicotine vape (or have them provided).
When I was vaping I always mixed my own juice, so was very sure of what went in. There's always the chance of buying from a sketchy vendor and getting something weird in your mixes, but most were fairly benign. Vaping liquid is actually pretty simple in composition.
Just curious, what's you definition of vaping liquid? And was your vendor reputable or someone you knew from elsewhere?
A base of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with additional additives for nicotine and flavour.
I bought my VG and PG from a local vendor, but those are readily available basically anywhere because they have a lot of uses outside vaping. I ordered pure liquid nicotine (in a PG suspension) online. Flavour additives also ordered online from a fairly reputable vendor that was well known in . I have no idea what policies about sharing vendors are here, but I am happy to give recommendations to anyone if they are looking to make their own juice to save money/be safer.
I mostly made fairly simple flavours, nothing too fancy. I had a friend who actually just vaped VG/PG with nicotine and no flavours at all.
Tremedous amount of lung damage in the near future. At the most common sense level it makes zero sense to inhale shit into your lungs.
Dry herb vaporizer ≠ e-cigarette
Automobiles. Especially in the USA they are causing a public health crisis, environmental crisis, qualify of life crisis. I grew up loving them and they have uses but I'm fully convinced in the future they should be a luxury used for specific tasks or trips rather than the only form of transportation available.
Plastic and sugar are good answers, but cars are right there in terms of harm and way more acceptable despite that.
Microplastics and plastic related byproducts, like phtalates (which are connected with a decreased fertility in mammals)
I'm positive that the long term effects of these substances, that can be found in every link of the food chain nowadays, will be discussed a lot in the future
Tiktok.
You said product, and I mean this legitimately. Not because of meme hate or hating on what is trendy, but because it is and has been a tool of the CCP. This isn't really in question, and it was one of the first large platforms to entirely erase the idea of a timeline and fully devote itself only to a algorithm feed. One that bytedance has put their finger on the scales of many times.
The effect this has is hard to quantify, but the postmortem on it is going to be incredible as we unpack exactly how much this influenced the trends and politics among zoomers, and to what extent.
Billionaires
Worth noting companies usually know it's dangerous way before the public does.
The chemicals used in Teflon manufacturing
PFAS, which are needed to produce teflon and other nonstick materials. It currently begins to attack attention, but wasn't really an issue a few years ago. It doesn't decay naturally so it will be forever in the environment. The EU is even planning to ban all PFAS.
Vapes. The less regulated and underground production, which is easily finding its way to the high street, is building to be a repeat of the tobacco issues with cigarettes.
Surprised this isn't higher tbh.
My mom switched from chain smoking regular cigs to vaping. While I'm glad she's significantly reduced her lung cancer risk, who knows what it's really doing?
It's better than smoking but definitely still unhealthy, especially chain vaping like many do. You should talk to her, let her know you're worried about her health, and see if she might try reducing intake. I quit smoking cold turkey three years ago. It wasn't easy, I was extremely irritable for a month, but the cravings became bearable after that. An easy trade for higher quality of life and longer life expectancy with less wasted money.
While with tabbaco, as @[email protected] said
With vaping, lots of studies on pg/vg vaping was done and not much has been found. The UK gov supports it for years now. Most of the bad name of vaping caused by people who didn't bother to research or people who confused it with the EVALI cases,which bought their products illegally and contained vitamin E
Yeah, the 2019-2020 vaping lung illness outbreak had nothing whatsoever to do with nicotine vaping.
It was specifically caused by black-market THC vape cartridges containing vitamin E acetate as a filler. This chemical was marketed to black-market vape makers as "Honey Cut", intended to dilute or "cut" cannabis extracts while keeping the mixture thick so it looked good to customers.
Legit cannabis vapes don't include fillers; a typical California dispensary vape cartridge contains ~90% cannabinoids by weight. Nicotine vapes are water-based rather than oil-based, so vitamin E acetate would not mix with them.
Vitamin E acetate sounds like a healthy thing — it's a vitamin, right? — but it's not. When it's heated in a vape, it produces a variety of chemicals that would be entertaining to the organic chemist — but no good for your lungs. You don't need to be inhaling alkenes or ketenes, to say nothing of carcinogenic benzene.
(Hey stoners! Don't use black-market carts, just like you wouldn't smoke "synthetic cannabis" aka "spice". If you want to vape instead of smoking, and you're not in a place with good dispensaries with lab-tested vape products, use a dry-herb vape and plain ol' herb.)
Yep. the whole vaping industry got ruined because of this, and it wasn't even related to said industry. I guess it's just another example of what lobbying is capble of.
I've never used a nicotine vape product in my life.
I tried cigarettes once as a teenager and didn't like them; tried a cigar once and threw it away.
I don't like nicotine. I like beer and weed.
But the whole scare about nicotine vaping is utterly bogus.
Almost all of the harm of smoking is from the smoke — soot, tar, and carbon monoxide — and not the nicotine. Inhaling smoke is bad for you. It doesn't matter if that smoke is from tobacco, or cannabis, or a forest fire. Inhaling smoke is bad for you.
If all the cigarette smokers could be switched to vaping overnight, keeping their nicotine doses the same but using vape juice rather than burning plants to get it, that would be a huge public health win.
The fact that regulatory agencies have gotten in the way of converting all the smokers to vaping, instead of gleefully endorsing such a change, is utter madness.
I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.
Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn't be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!
Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn't be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.
A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.
Dyr herb vapes ≠ e-cygarettes
Literally came here to say plastic. That's the one.
Vaping fluid, hydrophobic coatings
Not sure why people keep saying microplastics. That's been known for a long time now.
Endocrine disrupters - mainly from plastics
Aside from tobacco, all of those things were known to be dangerous but used commercially anyway because they were cheaper than alternatives. Today's equivalents are PFAS, plastics, and sweeteners of every kind. You will die with all of them in your body.
Marketing. We put a person on the moon because we were scared of the space race, and then we spent the next 50 years figuring out how to make rich people richer by manipulating human behavior and gamifying everything so you buy into the buy more stuff you don't need and click more stuff you don't care about. We've gotten so good at it, we only need a 10 second short to advertise stuff to you.
This affects everything we do down to its core and will likely be the cause of astronomical ADHD rates in the future.
you're grasping at something deeper here. humans have an underlying tendency to be gullible and easily manipulateable. we need to pour funds and funds into the education system and move more focus onto critical thinking, logical fallacies and self-esteem / self-image, as it plays a large role in calling out injustices and building an accurate world view
imo its the no. 1 reason the world is so fucked. we believe evrything we're told because it appeals to a sense of self-empowerment (our tribe over theirs). hunter gatherer tribes would sometimes literally slaughter each other to survive. it is in our instincts to be able to be convinced that other groups of people are our enemies, when really everyone thinking the exact opposite would be heaven on earth, except for the ultra greedy
So true. The only way that the human race is to survive and prosper into the far future is for us to move to a mindset of the whole world's population being one big tribe, as far as I am concerned. We will eventually destroy ourselves if we keep with the 'us vs them' mindset.
Star Trek was definitely on to something.
Nope. Education is our own responsibility. Leave it to the state or organisations and get brain-raped. Teach yourself, teach your kids, teach your friends etc. For the most part we need to purify our own knowledge and learn to learn on our own.
You are right about critical thinking and such.
I disagree that people should be left to educate themselves in isolated communities. What happens when our communities clash on important issues? Instead we should agree on what should be taught in schools and work on regulating it and making it self-improving.
I agree that bureucacy and corruption will inevitably have an impact, but whichever way I think about it, not caring as much for your stranger man as for your family or friends is what allows the mind-rape in the long run, and that makes it necessary for us to globally educate people on at least that, so we don't end up where we are now.
I thought the comments section would be filled with vapes.
Guys, i think vapes are a good candidate for something that hindsight will show us was dangerous, and i think images of teens smoking Juul will age as poorly as kids drinking beer.
Capitalism. Been around for all generations but feels like greed is at its worst now.
Social Media
Probably brake pads. Everyone's living in cities now, just breathing in brake pad and lead particles.
Oh and car tires. Just huffing those all day.
Corn. It is a fact that the number of autoimmune diseases are rising. I read a NHS study comparing the data of the last 30 or so years and of right now 1 of 10 people in the UK will get an autoimmune disease at some point in their live such as diabetes, MS, Parkinson,... 30 years ago it was like 1 out of 50. And one common thing in countries with a higher autoimmune disease rate is a lot of corn products, like corn starch, corn sirup,... Right now the final proof is missing cause the studies just started. And maybe it is not corn and something completely different, but the stakes are high it is corn.
I feel like with what you've stated it is far too early to point to corn itself as the cause. Their are so many things that have grown in usage these past 30 years I'm not sure how they could confidently say it is corn itself doing it.
There's also the fact people have been eating corn as a staple for millennia.
Yes and no. Corn is nothing new but the corn we use is kinda new. It is one of the biggest GMO there is. That's a big part in research right now within those studies. And it's not against GMO per se but the changes corn made. Maybe it's really just sugar and fructose semms to be worse as glucose. So yeah, maybe sugar, but right now it seems to be more.
Worth noting US corn is quite different than corn of the past due to selective breeding and such
Like for instance plastics.
Maybe all the shit they spray on the corn to make sure it grows quickly/effectively
I was just thinking about plastics and all of the associated chemicals. And almost everything corn related is packaged in plastic so even if they did link corn, could they really say the plastic does not affect us? Of course not.
Not only could it be almost anything that's increased in our general environment, but better means to identify specific diseases. Diagnostics and knowledge have advanced in the 30 or so years this study apparently covers, and can account for an "increase" in the prevalence of auto-immune diseases.
In theory, there's still some diseases that while well understood, HCPs still take excruciatingly long to diagnose and prefer to explore routes like mental health and exclusionary diagnoses first, which could suggest prevalence is higher still.
Prior to the 1960s, hardly anybody died of cancer.
Because we didn't even know what it was, let alone how to detect it.
Nah, sugar and plastics.
Corn has a lot of sugar and is put into everything, so it's closely related - but I'm almost 100% it's just sugar in general
This is correlation. Corn (or high fructose corn syrup) is a common ingredient in ultra processed foods, which we already know are the cause of the obesity epidemic. Pre-Colombian societies ate plenty of corn.
It’s also not just about sugar as some other comments have suggested. Humans are built to eats carbs and some tribal people even today get a huge amount of calories from honey without any obesity.
The problem is the way sugar (and fat and other ingredients) are processed in industrial food production. Studies have shown that if you give people food that contains the exact same proportion of fats and sugars, in whole food and junk food form, people will eat more of the junk food. This is the problem. Whole foods are generally all fine.
It's wild to me how much stuff has corn in it. A few years ago SwiftonSecurity did a big thread on Twitter all about corn and its frightening.
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2020/02/19/disturbing-corn-fact-everything-is-made-from-corn/
That sounds a lot like correlation not causation. Countries that use a lot of corn syrup also use a lot of every other food industry chemical, and somewhere in that chemical soup could be something real, but it's probably not the corn
Plastic, PFAS, CO2 Pollution, Tire dust (leading problem is cause of Asthma), Leaded fueled small prop planes (still standard), Oil, Industrialized agriculture (destroys nutrients in soils so food does not have it, produces tons CO2), many more.
Please, please, please, don’t be caffeine! 🤞
Coffee has been around for thousands of years but I'm pretty sure %100 pure caffeine could kill if you ingested enough at once
It's not the purity, it's the dose, like any chemical the dose makes the poison.
The FDA recommends staying under 5 cups (400 mg) a day to avoid negative effects with an average person.
It says toxic effects can be observed with rapid consumption of 12 cups, or 0.15 tablespoons of pure caffeine. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/spilling-beans-how-much-caffeine-too-much
This mystery can be resolved by googling 'ld50 caffeine.' ~750mg is toxic and 10,000mg can kill people
Same as cocaine
Yes, caffeine can kill. https://www.livescience.com/caffeine-overdose-200-cups-of-coffee
Caffeine isn't terrible for you in moderate amounts, and coffee is actually a decent source or antioxidants especially if you don't get them elsewhere in your diet, but this is independent of caffeine itself (decaf has antioxidants). Daily high doses of caffeine is definitely bad for your health, and can negatively impact other health issues you may have such as anxiety, depression, etc. Do your research, talk to your doctor, and consider decreasing your daily intake.
What's the threshold for "high doses"?
According to Google, 400 mg (~4 cups of coffee or 10 cans of soda) per day is when you run into health risks, while 1200 mg in a short time span is overdose territory.
If you're drinking 10 cans of soda a day you got much bigger problems than caffeine.
True. But I could see some people reaching 400 mg with like two coffees, an energy drink, and a couple cans of soda.
Too bad they don’t list caffeine on the nutrition facts. Who knows how much you get.
For what, soda? Looking at a Mountain Dew right now and it says 54mg caffeine. It’s next to the nutrition facts but not in the box itself
Cool, I’ll look for it. I haven’t bought soda in many years. More interested in coffee. I still don’t know if “breakfast coffee” has more or less than “half caff”.
Breakfast blend is unspecific, but it's a mix of normal, not decaf coffee, aimed at being smooth, not too bold or acidic etc. Half caff is a blend of decaf and normal beans, so breakfast will have approximately twice as much caffeine. Light/dark roast and specific coffee bean type used will vary the caffeine levels.
Caffeine content has been listed for years on drinks, just not in the nutrition box.
I'm no scientist, but I've been in the coffee industry for a long time. I would say more than 500mg per day is a lot. 200-300mg per day seems to be a nice sweet spot. That's about 12-16oz of brewed specialty coffee.
Once again, I'm not a food scientist, but I believe other ingredients you find in energy drinks can compound the effects of caffeine. Similar to how alcohol mixed with certain medications with fuck up your liver really fast.
Sugar is this generation's nicotine.
If it's not known wether it's dangerous, how would anyone reply? With their guts?
This question can only get non proven answers and risks getting answered the top health infox of the moment.
"smart" devices aka Internet asbestos
It was only 13 years ago that the FDA changed its stance on BPA from "safe" to "some concern".
Social media. All forms. Including this one.
Carbon fiber dust.
I think it's about to be the weather
Plastics
Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn't currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.
If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.
Microplastics and PFAS
No, seriously, these two will kill Earth, and us
Alcohol is a known carcinogen and many people still don't know that.
Oh I know, I just don't care
Red meat also
And warm liquids!
I think only hot liquids count. They can burn off the protective coating in your mouth/throat and cause cell damage from what I understand.
By your definition we don't know yet. Ask again in 10 years.
Except the sad fact is in every one of those examples, they did know. It's just nobody cared because it would hurt the bottom line.
Or they didn’t care because they succumbed to the arguments made by the people who were protecting their own bottom line.
Technicallythetruth
Yes we do. It's silica sand.
Don't forget teflon...
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Artificial sweeteners
ToS for digital products
Artificial sweeteners. Everyone is so obsessed with whether or not they cause cancer that their other potential effects get much less attention. There's a major industry push to keep them on the shelves, and we still have only recently discovered the gut microbiome.
I would probably say either alcohol or microplastics. Both are carcinogenic. At least alcohol is avoidable, but microplastics pretty much saturate all of our environments. It reminds me of when they were doing experiments to figure out the impact of lead, they couldn't even open the door to the lab, because the airborne concentration of lead would throw off the readings. We might not ever know what real health is like without walking around with grams of microplastics inside us.
Probably digital screen exposure. The impact of the digital age on mental health, especially due to increased screen time, is an area of active study. Some early research suggests potential risks, including impacts on sleep, attention, and mental well-being.
Cars
Gas cooking ranges
Edit to clarify: they're way too normal for how toxic they are.
Soft drink. They are just sugar water and color chemistry that give color and flavor.
E-cigarettes
It is advertised as a safer option, but it is not.
Fossil fuels.
Things have slowly drifted from "we might wanna consider doing something before this becomes a problem" to "we need an immediate and concrete plan" to "anything short of immediate and drastic action is killing and will continue to kill people" over the course of the last decade or two.
Teflon.
Sugar
TikTok
It's been way more than one dangerous product per generation. So people should feel free to choose multiple current ones.
Pretty sure we're gonna regret the micro plastics.
vapes
Literally everything to do with modern life.
I'm not saying that we should all pull a BSG and give it all up to be cavemen again.
But our bodies most certainly didn't evolve in order to sit at desks, stare at screens, communicate without physical contact, and avoid sunshine like the plague.
We evolved to be active, but developed the technology that allows most of us to be sedentary 99% of the time, and then we wonder why obesity and chronic back pain are pandemics.
We've known lead is bad for you for thousands of years.
Complete shot in the dark but my brain can't let it be (also fuck it, thats the point of this topic):
Surfactants, specifically modern soap and soap products. I strongly suspect that petroleum based soaps cause damage and issues.
When you wash your glasses in a dishwasher, pour some water in after it is dried. Look at how many bubbles are formed on the surface. Pour it out and do it again - usually there will be less bubbles. That means you are ingesting leftover detergent that wasn't rinsed off. Can't be great for you.
It feels like the WHO - or more realistically - the media is/was trying hard to make aspartame this by claiming it causes cancer. They're certainly annoying the soft drinks vendors using them.
Great avatar btw.
Perhaps microplastic? I know it already kills by choking turtles or so but no answer yet if it can cause some health effects.
Edit: Just saw the comments now, microplastic seem to be the most common comment. So here is another go, The chemical they used in cars I think it's VOC/ also known as new car smell currently it can make some people sea sick. Right now there is lack of study that it is actually toxic.
Most Vegetable and seed oils. They are a silent killer and they are in everything now including French fries to replace beef tallow.
There's hardly a processed food that does not contain them and they are terrible for cardiovascular health.
Along with the fake sugars and sugar substitutes they will be among the things we will look back on and ask why.
The toxic substance put in nearly all the plastics made in China. If it smells sickeningly sweet or fumey, it's toxic.
SOCIAL MEDIA
The internet
cell phones/screens
Social media.
But it should be the microplastics in furniture foam.
Some that haven’t been mentioned:
Prolonged Sitting Prolonged Loud Headphone Use Off-Label Drug Use (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy) Sun/Heat/Poor Air Exposure Thiamine/B1 Deficiency via Alcohol Consumption
We know they’re all dangerous (to wildly varying extents), but I don’t think we’ve had enough moments-of-reckoning, like with emphysema and lung cancer following long term smoking.
Damn. Prolonged sitting while listening to loud music outside in the sun and using using off label drugs is one of my favorite past-times
Hey man, I do it all - waiting for it to catch up with me :)
Life is short, so what's the harm in making it a bit shorter?
Plastic
Coffee, I think. People think coffee help you stay awake and boost your productivity.
But I think, coffee put you into unnecessary stress (stress while sitting still ? Is it natural ?), Disruption sleep pattern,...
Will cause lot of issues if you keep consume few cup daily
I’m reading this list and thinking we’re screwed
I think people are a little overly dramatic, tbh.
Please don't be it Wifi or cellular.
Pfas
Plastics in general.
Smartphones and Internet usage. We know it, but no one cares.
Artificial sweeteners?
Aspartame, apparently
That whole thing turned out to be a nothingburger. The report said that if you drink like 9 cans of diet soda it could possibly cause cancer. If you're drinking 9 cans of diet soda a day aspartame is the least of your problems.
It was more like 26 cans I believe. Stupidly high.
My wife has been telling me for years that research was still ongoing about aspartame being potentially carcinogenic, so I should be careful with my at most one diet soda a day. When the news first came up that the WHO was about to classify it as such, I was like “oh shit, it’s happening?”
And then the details came a few days later, and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. 😆
The state your kidneys would be in
*possibly
progestin-based contraceptive implants
The internet. I'm sorry.....
AI. We've seen the movies. We know it's coming - the one robot that doesn't follow the rules and then becomes the leader of the rest.
Coal.
Javascript
singularity
Now I've got rid of all my plastic kitchen stuff, it'll be the silicone I've replaced it with
Blue light.
how is that harmful? ambient light is blue most of the day
It's one of the markers that your brain uses to control its circadian rhythms. During half of your 24 hour cycle its fine. Our devices push that balance too far though, contributing to stress and insomnia by disrupting that regulatory mechanism.
Wouldn't be too different from living in the artic circle during the summertime, except without blackout shades and we're doing it to ourselves with tvs, computers and mobile devices.
RIP everyone who doesn't live exactly on the ecliptic.
The amount of time which the sun shines has very little to do with half of 24 hours most of the year where I live.
Half was a rhetorical estimate to attempt to communicate a basic idea, not an attempt to use an accurate academic term. Look it up if you want to know more, quit arguing with me. What I am describing is not new or cutting edge. We have oodles of data you can look at.
Mmh i can see that yeah that can be a bit of a stressor, but idk.. it's already known to be "less than ideal", blue light filters are super common and the body is pretty good at regulating and adjusting sleep.
Buuut i guess that's what we thought about other issues too.
Is coffee dangerous because drinking it at 11pm each night keeps you awake too? I think that's overstating your case, although I think there is a minor benefit to limiting blue light.
personally, I have all the lights set to turn red an hour after sunset and it has had a much larger effect than limiting screen time at bedtime, which is what most people seem to focus on.
Depends how sensitive you are to caffeine. I strongly suspect sensitivity to blue light is similarly varied between individuals. I am not a doctor, however, and I honestly don't give enough fucks to try to convince you.
Only when you're trying to get to sleep
Not exclusively, the body's systems are far more complex and interconnected than that. It's really just the need to have some kind of nighttime for your overall well-being. It's what we evolved around.
Silica Sand. And just like asbestos it's in quite a few products, many of which you will find in your home.
Meat and any other animal product. They come from needless power abuse and demand forced work, murdering, torturing and rape.
Actions lead to reactions/consequences. Our reality is worse/more chaotic because of this.
antipsychotics
Resentment
Social media.
But it should be the microplastics in furniture foam.
Meat and animal products in general.
Linked to quite a lot of health problems, kills the climate and billons of innocent individuals are dying needlessly in the process.
Sorry, i can't look in the future.
You saw the new emplemon video 😃
There is an ongoing study showing that artificial sweeteners (Aspartamein particular) cause cancer.
All those people trying to stay healthy to drinking diet things... are giving themselves cancer instead.
5G
Just kidding... :D
mRNA
The internet.
More precisely algorithmic gaze harvesting and targeted advertising.
That's a naive generalization.
Could be smart watches. Don't quote me on this, but wearing a watch 24/7 that emits light to constantly track your heart rate cannot exactly be good for your health (unless you truly need it)
Is Tobacco dangerous? I thought it was mostly the ridiculous amount of chemicals they soaked and resoaked it in when making cigarettes that made it especially bad.
Animal products. Animal agriculture.
[e] Your downvotes make me horny.
GO VEGAN!
Vaccines
I know this is a bait comment, but I'll entertain it a bit.
Extra estrogen actually does increase your risk of certain medical conditions like endometrial cancer (cancer of the uterus) and blood clots (potentially leading to things like a stroke or heart attack).
However, cisgender people still do need to have hormone supplementation at times for various reasons and doctors are generally able to mitigate the risks fine/the risks are not overly high. So I can't see this causing some sort of major health incident.
The difference being taking hormone therapy because one needs it vs taking hormone therapy just because. There could be legitimate medical reasons for hormone therapy.
What about GAC that cis-gendered people access that is arguably not medically necessary? Such as HRT for menopause, hypogonadism, or sexual enhancement? HRT adds to quality of life (and affirms one's gender, looking at you, Viagra) but is arguably not at all medically necessary in most common use cases.
Or going past hormones, what about body augmentation incl. things like aesthetic or reconstructive surgeries, hair transplants or removals?
I was going to post something like this in response, but you beat me. Well said. There are so many medical treatments we do that aren't medically necessary to sustain life, but are instead used to improve quality of life. It would be odd to start drawing the line and denying quality of life care arbitrarily like that.
Not sure if you actually meant that in response to me?
I was pointing out to that guy that GAC isn't exclusively for trans people, and that by their logic, if you want to deny it for one group then it should be denied for all people unless life-critical. I think certain people forget their little blue pills are about affirming their identify as men.
What an insane comment. Something that pertains to 0.1 of .01% of the population is the equivalent of the magnitude of tobacco on the world, lead, or asbestos