People who are hung up on ingredients being "natural" drive me nuts. I'm 100% for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe and allows the creation of higher quality food, it shouldn't matter it is natural or not. Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural" either...
There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
The desire for things that are "natural" arises from the wariness of ingesting something that hasn't been tested by time and human history. There's a long history of commercially-common chemicals that turned out to have tremendously bad impacts on human health (e.g. trans-fats, lead in gasoline).
Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and immediately obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use. In comparison, the only benefit from chemical food additives is usually saving a few bucks.
> Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and immediately obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use.
Vaccines have an enormous amount of data logged, an actual trust fund dedicated to paying out if there is even a whiff of an issue, and regulators who oversee them.
At no point has anyone shown a modern vaccine (last 20+ years) to be unsafe. Period. Quit spewing your uninformed opinions.
This is in stark contrast to the food chain where quite a bit of it is uninspected.
> At no point has anyone shown a modern vaccine (last 20+ years) to be unsafe. Period.
That is simply not true. I am pro-vaccines, but your sentence is false.
Simply google: rotavirus intussusception and you will see.
His point about vaccines is 100% correct: Until the vaccine has been on the market for 10-30 years we do NOT know that it is safe. We might consider the risk worth it, but do not confuse that for "safe".
This is equally true for all the non-natural food additives. The natural ones have the benefit of decades, centuries, or millennia of testing. (The only exception would be things like vanillin that are exact copies of known natural additives. I consider them just fine even if they are classed as artificial.)
Yes, let's (even though 1999 is almost 26 years ago, but okay, I consider anything after about 1990 to be "modern"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus_vaccine
"In 1998, a rotavirus vaccine (RotaShield, by Wyeth) was licensed for use in the United States. Clinical trials in the United States, Finland, and Venezuela had found it to be 80 to 100% effective at preventing severe diarrhea caused by rotavirus A, and researchers had detected no statistically significant serious adverse effects. The manufacturer of the vaccine, however, withdrew it from the market in 1999, after it was discovered that the vaccine may have contributed to an increased risk for intussusception, or bowel obstruction, in one of every 12,000 vaccinated infants."
Note the may. The number is so low as to make it difficult to correlate. That's 40-50 cases in a year. Aspirin kills that many in a year and we don't consider it unsafe and we take it for things which are lots less pressing.
However, they pulled the vaccine because the perception in the United States is that we have adequate treatment for Rotavirus without the vaccine and it simply wasn't worth trying to correlate.
"Meanwhile, other countries such as Brazil and Mexico undertook their own independent epidemiological studies which demonstrated that 4 deaths were attributable to vaccine, while it had prevented approximately 80,000 hospitalization and 1300 deaths from diarrhea each year in their countries."
4. You will get that many people dying of an allergic reaction to anything if you give it to several million people.
More people die of peanuts in a year. Is that "unsafe"?
The official CDC website says that they found it definitely did cause intussusception:
"The results of the investigations showed that RotaShield® vaccine caused intussusception in some healthy infants younger than 12 months of age who normally would be at low risk for this condition. The risk of intussusception increased 20 to 30 times over the expected risk for children of this age group within 2 weeks following the first dose of RotaShield® vaccine."
See http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-rotashield.... Now, that's not much of an increase in absolute terms because intussusception is relatively rare, but so is infants dying due to rotavirus infection in the US - the estimates I'm seeing are 20-60 deaths a year without vaccination. Even a relatively rare adverse reaction is enough to outweigh the benefits of the vaccine in the US.
Now, you're right that the clinical trials "detected no statistically significant serious adverse effects". That's because they were so small that, even though the adverse reactions were common enough to outweigh the benefits, they couldn't actually detect them as being statistically significant. Hell, even if the vaccine was somehow hypothetically killing ten times as many babies as would've died from rotavirus, I don't think the trials used to approve the vaccine could have detected that. That's kind of worrying.
And at no point in the last 2,000 years has anyone shown celery to be unsafe. Testing and historical use are both sources of confidence in the safety of something. Vaccines have the former, and I have quite a bit of confidence in their safety. Food additives don't really have either basis for confidence.
I'm not sure that argument holds water. Plenty of "natural" products "tested by time and human history" have ended up exposed as harmful. Tobacco is the obvious one, but folks have been grilling meat for likely hundreds of thousands of years, and that's probably riskier than many artificial additives[1].
I agree, I'm a pretty relaxed person when it comes to diet. Like the parent, I get somewhat annoyed by people who come off as judgmental and overzealous in their quest for the 'natural.'
But, when I read articles like this one about how companies manipulate and bend rules or information to omit ingredients from labels, it doesn't give me confidence they're as safe as they say. They very well could be, but hiding a chemical's use from me isn't going to build confidence.
I feel like articles like this are as useful to those of us who will drink a Coke and eat a drive-through burrito, as it is to those who might only eat 'raw.'
Trans-fats? Interesting case where factory-based food engineering based on waste products was sold as a healthier alternative to "natural" products (butter, lard).
And while it's easy to blame P&G in retrospect, trans-fats had the support of the US government food administration, reputable scientists and academics.
As for lead in gasoline, that was a case where the US government was warned of the health hazards (and workers died of lead poisoning) but still allowed it.
In both cases the government support was a result of active industry lobbying, so it's hard to see how it absolves the industry participants of responsibility.
I'm not excusing the industry lobbying: a lot of it was reprehensible. Still, a lot of America's bad nutrition advice came from bad (or at least, not very good) science.
> I'm 100% for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe a
And how many long term tests have you personally performed or at least how many scientific studies have you persnally analized to know if an ingredient is 100% safe?
"Natural" doesn't mean much these days. I presume here it means "it won't result in short or long term harm".
> Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural" either...
Yap not natural. And "new car smell" that so many people love and appreciety is pretty bad for you.
> There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
You mean real world is not 100% black and white? I think it is reasonable to assume vaccines are safe and result in a net benefit if taken yet to being skeptical of new and untested long term compounds. This has happened many times with known "safe" chemicals that let us down. BPA and plastics, DDT, medication that caused birth defects. The track record of vaccines letting us down doesn't come close to that.
(In all honesty, this proprietary and hidden labelling is what needs to go. Of course, that means people wouldn't buy these "foods", unless they had to or didn't care. I'd rather not be a guinea pig. In other words, I don't trust them to make sure what is safe or not.)
Cars for example do have a negative impact on hour health. They are unnatural prosthesis. We do not use our natural foot anymore. Therefore we are getting fat and immobile.
There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.