<story><title>High prevalence of diabetes among people exposed to organophosphates in India</title><url>https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1134-6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yomly</author><text>This headline explains my general aversion to &amp;quot;chemicals&amp;quot;. This, despite the fact that everything is a chemical and that we are all little chemical machines.&lt;p&gt;The human physiology is unfathomably complex and the advent of synthetic chemistry has meant that we are now exposed to new molecules which have arisen at a rate tens, hundreds of thousands of years too early for our bodies to evolve to accommodate for them. Our exposure to these chemicals is also incredibly opaque: even eating &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; by eating fruit and veg exposes us to a multitude of chemicals that come along the pipeline including fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives.&lt;p&gt;Nature is exquisitely sensitive to chemistry - I recall reading that natural systems have evolved to exploit and dispatch behaviour based on the isotopic composition of carbon-based molecules: naturally synthesised molecules also have a different isotopic profile to artificially synthesised molecules. For the record, Carbon-13 represents ~1% of the natural isotopic abundance.&lt;p&gt;If something as granular as the isotopic distribution of elements is important to physiological systems, how can we be so complacent as to constantly pile chemicals into every aspect of our lives?&lt;p&gt;Businesses will wantonly and irresponsibly use any method to increase their bottom lines and it falls to regulators to moderate this behaviour. As an example, I recall McDonald&amp;#x27;s doping their chip oil with a known toxic organic chemical to lower the rate of thermal decomposition of their oil. This is something they could as easily avoid by replacing their oil more often, but this is costly: they instead defer this cost onto our health by exposing us to unnecessarily dangerous chemicals.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the FDA&amp;#x27;s (or indeed global regulators&amp;#x27;) thresholds for the use of chemicals is not stringent enough - humans are living longer, how do we know that prolonged exposure to any of these individual chemicals (let alone the cocktail of all of them) over a 50-100 year period are worth the risk?&lt;p&gt;For another anecdote of irresponsible chemical usage - the onset of lung cancer through smoking underwent a stepwise increase after the tobacco industry started using phosphate fertilisers to increase their crop yield: a side effect of the fertilisers was to enrich the soil in radium which would decay down to Pollonium-210, an alpha source of Russian-assassination fame. Studies have been done on characterising the sievert profile of tobacco leaves, highlighting the risk of this but no action on the tobacco industry has been taken to mitigate this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>I love this quote from E.T. Jaynes:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;A common error, when judging the effects of radioactivity or the toxicity of some substance, is
to assume a linear response model without threshold (that is, without a dose rate below which there
is no ill effect). Presumably there is no threshold effect for cumulative poisons like heavy metal
ions (mercury, lead), which are eliminated only very slowly if at all. But for virtually every organic
substance (such as saccharin or cyclamates), the existence of a finite metabolic rate means that
there must exist a finite threshold dose rate, below which the substance is decomposed, eliminated,
or chemically altered so rapidly that it has no ill effects. If this were not true, the human race
could never have survived to the present time, in view of all the things we have been eating.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Indeed, every mouthful of food you and I have ever taken contained many billions of kinds
of complex molecules whose structure and physiological effects have never been determined—and
many millions of which would be toxic or fatal in large doses. We cannot doubt that we are daily
ingesting thousands of substances that are far more dangerous than saccharin—but in amounts
that are safe, because they are far below the various thresholds of toxicity. But at present there is
hardly any substance except some common drugs, for which we actually know the threshold.&lt;p&gt;The most dangerous substances fall into a few categories. Things like insecticides (which is what this thread is about) are &lt;i&gt;designed&lt;/i&gt; to kill animals. Insects, but still, their physiology is close enough to humans. And things like heavy metals and radioactive substances. Which our ancestors weren&amp;#x27;t really exposed to.</text></comment>
<story><title>High prevalence of diabetes among people exposed to organophosphates in India</title><url>https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1134-6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yomly</author><text>This headline explains my general aversion to &amp;quot;chemicals&amp;quot;. This, despite the fact that everything is a chemical and that we are all little chemical machines.&lt;p&gt;The human physiology is unfathomably complex and the advent of synthetic chemistry has meant that we are now exposed to new molecules which have arisen at a rate tens, hundreds of thousands of years too early for our bodies to evolve to accommodate for them. Our exposure to these chemicals is also incredibly opaque: even eating &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; by eating fruit and veg exposes us to a multitude of chemicals that come along the pipeline including fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives.&lt;p&gt;Nature is exquisitely sensitive to chemistry - I recall reading that natural systems have evolved to exploit and dispatch behaviour based on the isotopic composition of carbon-based molecules: naturally synthesised molecules also have a different isotopic profile to artificially synthesised molecules. For the record, Carbon-13 represents ~1% of the natural isotopic abundance.&lt;p&gt;If something as granular as the isotopic distribution of elements is important to physiological systems, how can we be so complacent as to constantly pile chemicals into every aspect of our lives?&lt;p&gt;Businesses will wantonly and irresponsibly use any method to increase their bottom lines and it falls to regulators to moderate this behaviour. As an example, I recall McDonald&amp;#x27;s doping their chip oil with a known toxic organic chemical to lower the rate of thermal decomposition of their oil. This is something they could as easily avoid by replacing their oil more often, but this is costly: they instead defer this cost onto our health by exposing us to unnecessarily dangerous chemicals.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the FDA&amp;#x27;s (or indeed global regulators&amp;#x27;) thresholds for the use of chemicals is not stringent enough - humans are living longer, how do we know that prolonged exposure to any of these individual chemicals (let alone the cocktail of all of them) over a 50-100 year period are worth the risk?&lt;p&gt;For another anecdote of irresponsible chemical usage - the onset of lung cancer through smoking underwent a stepwise increase after the tobacco industry started using phosphate fertilisers to increase their crop yield: a side effect of the fertilisers was to enrich the soil in radium which would decay down to Pollonium-210, an alpha source of Russian-assassination fame. Studies have been done on characterising the sievert profile of tobacco leaves, highlighting the risk of this but no action on the tobacco industry has been taken to mitigate this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sebleon</author><text>Unfortunately, we are routinely exposed to thousands of synthetic chemicals daily, making it impossible to attribute future ailments to particular compounds. It&amp;#x27;s very sad that there&amp;#x27;s zero requirement to understand the long term (60 years+) effects of these new chemicals to the human body.</text></comment>