I'm tackling part of the issue of food toxin remediation with my new venture, NeutraOat (neutraoat.com). It's a modified oat fiber supplement that selectively traps BPA, PFAS, and plasticizers in the gut and reduces levels in the blood serum.
The funding for this is tough, though. Everyone loves the idea, but it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works over brand building and marketing. I've had to be very scrappy. Hopefully this will change in the future as we build momentum and awareness, but for right now it's tooth and nail.
Except now I have the problem of trusting that this new supplement isn't contaminated with anything, _and_ that the "microscopic pores" resulting from this "patented process" don't turn out to have some harmful effect in the body.
This is precisely why I happily pay for an annual subscription to ConsumerLab[0]. It's largely just for supplements and a few functional foods, but with a tiny staff they are doing more work to help the public on the unregulated medicine market than the entire FDA, IMHO.
Congress are the ones who define what the FDA does. Blame them and the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Congress could easily tell the FDA to do something different.
Blaming people for a problem only helps if you have the power to take away their ability to cause the problem. In this case, the most effective way to keep Congress from causing you health problems by giving you misinformation about supplements would seem to be to get your information from a source that Congress doesn't control, such as ConsumerLab. Hopefully it's a better source than the FDA rather than a worse one; but, if not, maybe you can switch to a better one, or start one yourself.
I also recently subscribed to ConsumerLab, and I'm glad I did. I wish they could test products more frequently as things are bound to change from batch to batch, but it's a whole lot better than nothing.
I don't take a lot of supplements, but I won't buy even one without some form of third party testing.
Independent lab testing for contaminants and actual active ingredient levels vs. what's stated. They also publish summaries of studies on the active ingredients that test the effectiveness against claimed therapeutic value. (It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo.)
Yes, the answer is not some business plan by which some can dodge disaster in an untrustworthy market, the answer is to recognize that this planet is a spaceship i.e. materially closed, and we are massively soiling the nest, microplastic is in steak because it's literally everywhere on the surface of the earth, etc.
Therefore, good ecological governance is a requirement, as is the analysis, as a public service, of the resources and ecosystems, and the services they provide human beings and our dependents, i.e. a democratic and just policy, not a lucrative plan to privatize yet more of public health
If one is convinced the best vehicle for the above in the near term is a business, then it had better have a different approach than is typical of personal health tech startups
Empowering individuals isn't worthless by any means but pitting one against another with asymmetric information is worse than worthless
The fundamental constraint the article alludes to is the powerlessness of consumer choice. You can’t make a better choice because you don’t have any better option. When there is a better option, you lack the tools to verify that the option is truly better vs scamming you to pay more for something which either doesn’t matter or is simply a lie.
Prior to free trade, you could reasonably sue the manufacturers or distributors for egregious harms. You could also reasonably expect domestic regulatory authorities to intervene before these harms entered the market.*
In principal, this could be done in a free trade system with counterparties who implement and enforce similar rules. But then you need all parties to agree on any new rules and enforcement mechanisms. You only need one bad actor to nuke the arrangement by growing without these burdens.
* Assuming regulations and laws are equitably and incorruptibly enforced in the local government.
That's not a solution. There is no practical solution for this, and has not been for the millennia on human history; it's only been in the recent decades where we've been able the hallucinate about knowing about toxins in our daily lives.
Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently: suing companies on a case by case basis.
This is nonsense, regulation has forced huge improvements in food quality. You don't need lawsuits if agencies are regularly testing and authorized to levy penalties based on the results.
Uh, it used to be until it was gutted in the last 30 years. Legislation and bureaucracy has been one of the most successful interventions for public health for centuries.
Read about the hole in the ozone layer. Banning lead paint. Read about the invention of public water authorities. Read Silent Spring and read about its aftermath. Look into the history of air pollution and the EPA. These are some of the crown jewels of human history.
Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.
From that perspective, all of these services that rate products still place all the onus on the individual consumer. What would be really "luxury" in the modern context would be an online marketplace that vetted every product and whose primary product was trust, as opoosed to logistics and convenience. I'd much rather pay $150/yr for a service that vetted its products and took a week to deliver them, than to have a bunch of worthless or dangerous junk delivered the next day.
I wondered that as well, but they are. I've started to think there's an organized effort by a government with a lot of state-owned enterprises to actually dispose of toxic waste by shipping it to gullible American consumers. Not that it isn't also poisoning people there.
Good article. But just to note, lead was already a known poison at the time when it was added to gasoline. Significant concerns were raised. Production was even halted for a while in the US due to health incidents.
> Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
That guy's entire wikipedia page is an almost surreal read. For introducing lead into gasoline and the proliferation of CFCs, he was termed a "one-man environmental disaster". His death is equally fascinating. He invented a mechanical device to help him out of bed because of his polio-related infirmity, and ended up getting strangled by it.
Lead in gas increased compression rations and allowed us to build higher horsepower engines. Lead is still used in avgas for this reason. Engine knock was a big problem at the time.
> Oil companies and automobile manufacturers (especially General Motors, which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley) promoted the TEL additive as an inexpensive alternative superior to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit.
Functionally, as others have commented, it is there to reduce knocking. But lead was used instead of ethanol (aka alcohol) because it was more profitable despite being poisonous.
Equally as large and interesting is the industry of targeting and subverting consumer watchdog groups. Wirecutter's infiltration and takeover is a fascinating example.
The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.
The trend of making these medical tests cheaper and easier to obtain is going to result in a lot of positive change. Certainly for individuals and hopefully the anonymized data helps get the spotlight on larger trends.
This reminds me a bit of a private group that did a big study (I thought in SFBA) looking at the amount of microplastics in different stuff, for example delivered food. Just thinking about it because of the startup he mentioned and I was wondering if it was them, but can’t find the article now. I know it was discussed at length here.
If you have ever visited the ruins of Pompeii, you might have seen all the lead pipes that provided water to the city. I wonder how that affected the health of the citizens back then.
My understanding is that the high calcium content in their water supply formed a lining on the inside of the pipes which largely prevented any exposure.
Yeah, the water problems in Flint weren't the pipes directly, but that the water had changed so the lead was no longer protected from getting in the water.
When I was a baby we lived virtually directly under the Sydney Harvour Bridge, I got lead poisoning as a result of runoff from the bridge. The combination of leaded petrol and leaded paint runoff poisoned the soil in playgrounds and the area more generally.
My case and probably those of others lead to a huge cleanup of the bridge.
My life has been absolutetly plagued with chronic health and "developmental" problems. Neurodivergence and other conditions litter my family tree, but they seem to effect me much more severely than they do most of my relatives.
I often find myself wondering these days if my life would have featured significantly less hardship were it not for the lead poisoning.
>Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.
It doesn't have to be a business, and it absolutely should not be. Preventing poisoning of people, animals, and the environment is something capitalism has proven utterly incapable of, and in fact (literally) violently opposed to.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be done at the government level. The goal is societal benefit, not profit.
This article’s just trying to hype a stealth startup, but beware of those selling you the Herrenvolk. I’m all about mitigating negative pollution but there are plenty of things in nature that are bad for you, too.
Oh, I am not at all implying or insinuating this article is connected to populism, nationalism, etc., or advocating for them, nor mean to impugn the author through association. Lead is bad. PFAS and microplastics are bad. Glyphosate maybe is bad. I identify as a mild/moderate environmentalist (while also a mild/moderate yimby; I don’t see a necessary contradiction).
But to be more explicit, I think there’s an undercurrent of Blood and Soil at work in the USA today, it’s seen a little bit explicitly in MAHA, and I’m worried, a lot, about the future political implications, where the real damage we’ve done to the environment becomes an excuse for… more bad things.
sounds like you accidentally consumed media poisoned with FUD and propaganda, having a federal department of health or food for your nation is nationalist, running it properly and keeping it away from corporate influence is anti-fascist, the modern day fascism is when corruption steers the health department away from serving the people’s health and instead locking it towards allowing “big pharma” to dictate regulations and review for their own benefit at the expense of the people’s taxes and health, the irony is watching the people trying to dismantle this fascism being called fascists
I'm tackling part of the issue of food toxin remediation with my new venture, NeutraOat (neutraoat.com). It's a modified oat fiber supplement that selectively traps BPA, PFAS, and plasticizers in the gut and reduces levels in the blood serum.
The funding for this is tough, though. Everyone loves the idea, but it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works over brand building and marketing. I've had to be very scrappy. Hopefully this will change in the future as we build momentum and awareness, but for right now it's tooth and nail.
> it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works
In the US it doesn't matter. Just talk about the problem and pretend like it works. You'll be rich.
Except now I have the problem of trusting that this new supplement isn't contaminated with anything, _and_ that the "microscopic pores" resulting from this "patented process" don't turn out to have some harmful effect in the body.
Not sure or the US programs are running, but check out SBIRs
I wish you luck!
Good luck. I'll order some if it works.
This is precisely why I happily pay for an annual subscription to ConsumerLab[0]. It's largely just for supplements and a few functional foods, but with a tiny staff they are doing more work to help the public on the unregulated medicine market than the entire FDA, IMHO.
[0]https://www.consumerlab.com/
Congress are the ones who define what the FDA does. Blame them and the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Congress could easily tell the FDA to do something different.
Blaming people for a problem only helps if you have the power to take away their ability to cause the problem. In this case, the most effective way to keep Congress from causing you health problems by giving you misinformation about supplements would seem to be to get your information from a source that Congress doesn't control, such as ConsumerLab. Hopefully it's a better source than the FDA rather than a worse one; but, if not, maybe you can switch to a better one, or start one yourself.
I also recently subscribed to ConsumerLab, and I'm glad I did. I wish they could test products more frequently as things are bound to change from batch to batch, but it's a whole lot better than nothing.
I don't take a lot of supplements, but I won't buy even one without some form of third party testing.
What does a subscription to ConsumerLab provide you? Is in in-depth product-reviews? e.g. you are curious of a supplement, you check there first?
Independent lab testing for contaminants and actual active ingredient levels vs. what's stated. They also publish summaries of studies on the active ingredients that test the effectiveness against claimed therapeutic value. (It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo.)
Shout out to examine.com, they also do a great job summarizing studies on supplements.
> It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo
Look at it another way, isn’t it good to know you probably don’t need suplements.
Subscribed. Thanks!
Empowering individuals to solve collective problems rarely work.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178680>
The appropriate solution is legislation.
> legislation
Perhaps more generally phrased as governance
Yes, the answer is not some business plan by which some can dodge disaster in an untrustworthy market, the answer is to recognize that this planet is a spaceship i.e. materially closed, and we are massively soiling the nest, microplastic is in steak because it's literally everywhere on the surface of the earth, etc.
Therefore, good ecological governance is a requirement, as is the analysis, as a public service, of the resources and ecosystems, and the services they provide human beings and our dependents, i.e. a democratic and just policy, not a lucrative plan to privatize yet more of public health
If one is convinced the best vehicle for the above in the near term is a business, then it had better have a different approach than is typical of personal health tech startups
Empowering individuals isn't worthless by any means but pitting one against another with asymmetric information is worse than worthless
The fundamental constraint the article alludes to is the powerlessness of consumer choice. You can’t make a better choice because you don’t have any better option. When there is a better option, you lack the tools to verify that the option is truly better vs scamming you to pay more for something which either doesn’t matter or is simply a lie.
Prior to free trade, you could reasonably sue the manufacturers or distributors for egregious harms. You could also reasonably expect domestic regulatory authorities to intervene before these harms entered the market.*
In principal, this could be done in a free trade system with counterparties who implement and enforce similar rules. But then you need all parties to agree on any new rules and enforcement mechanisms. You only need one bad actor to nuke the arrangement by growing without these burdens.
* Assuming regulations and laws are equitably and incorruptibly enforced in the local government.
That's not a solution. There is no practical solution for this, and has not been for the millennia on human history; it's only been in the recent decades where we've been able the hallucinate about knowing about toxins in our daily lives.
Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently: suing companies on a case by case basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...
> Legislation is just paper, you have no enforcement mechanism beyond what you already have currently
really one of the dumber things I've read on this website and that's quite a high bar to clear
This is nonsense, regulation has forced huge improvements in food quality. You don't need lawsuits if agencies are regularly testing and authorized to levy penalties based on the results.
Uh, it used to be until it was gutted in the last 30 years. Legislation and bureaucracy has been one of the most successful interventions for public health for centuries.
Read about the hole in the ozone layer. Banning lead paint. Read about the invention of public water authorities. Read Silent Spring and read about its aftermath. Look into the history of air pollution and the EPA. These are some of the crown jewels of human history.
Maybe so, but in the meantime I'll take all the empowerment I can get.
Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.
From that perspective, all of these services that rate products still place all the onus on the individual consumer. What would be really "luxury" in the modern context would be an online marketplace that vetted every product and whose primary product was trust, as opoosed to logistics and convenience. I'd much rather pay $150/yr for a service that vetted its products and took a week to deliver them, than to have a bunch of worthless or dangerous junk delivered the next day.
Why are they even selling mercury thermometers for oral use when an alcohol one (the red liquid) does fine
I wondered that as well, but they are. I've started to think there's an organized effort by a government with a lot of state-owned enterprises to actually dispose of toxic waste by shipping it to gullible American consumers. Not that it isn't also poisoning people there.
> This was lead poisoning. ... Nobody knew.
Good article. But just to note, lead was already a known poison at the time when it was added to gasoline. Significant concerns were raised. Production was even halted for a while in the US due to health incidents.
Lead had been a known poison for nearly 2000 years when it was added to gasoline.
The guy who owned the patent for leaded gasoline and who promoted its use even got lead poisoning himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
> Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
That guy's entire wikipedia page is an almost surreal read. For introducing lead into gasoline and the proliferation of CFCs, he was termed a "one-man environmental disaster". His death is equally fascinating. He invented a mechanical device to help him out of bed because of his polio-related infirmity, and ended up getting strangled by it.
Midgley's paralysis, as I understand it, was probably not due to polio but to lead poisoning.
it's incredibly surprising to me that lead was added to gasoline specifically at all.
I'd always assumed it was some expensive-to-remove byproduct of manufacture or something, so they left it in to save costs despite the risks.
Why did this happen?
Lead in gas increased compression rations and allowed us to build higher horsepower engines. Lead is still used in avgas for this reason. Engine knock was a big problem at the time.
As I understand it, both tetra ethyl lead and ethyl alcohol are anti-knock agents.
Lead was used because it was cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiknock_agent
Tetraethyl Lead was an octane raiser - an anti-knocking compound.
according to the article
> Oil companies and automobile manufacturers (especially General Motors, which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley) promoted the TEL additive as an inexpensive alternative superior to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit.
Functionally, as others have commented, it is there to reduce knocking. But lead was used instead of ethanol (aka alcohol) because it was more profitable despite being poisonous.
It also gave better gas mileage.
It allowed people to use engines with better gas mileage, what is a different thing.
Just adding the lead addictive to gasoline reduced your gas mileage. But it made better engines work.
Equally as large and interesting is the industry of targeting and subverting consumer watchdog groups. Wirecutter's infiltration and takeover is a fascinating example.
I was appalled to see that apparently Which? has a website funded by affiliate marketing links.
The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.
The FDA, FTC, EPA, etc should be involved here.
The trend of making these medical tests cheaper and easier to obtain is going to result in a lot of positive change. Certainly for individuals and hopefully the anonymized data helps get the spotlight on larger trends.
One of those things where it’s important to make a concerted effort to limit risk.
…but then also to stop worrying after reasonable steps were taken because it’s an endless rabbit hole
This reminds me a bit of a private group that did a big study (I thought in SFBA) looking at the amount of microplastics in different stuff, for example delivered food. Just thinking about it because of the startup he mentioned and I was wondering if it was them, but can’t find the article now. I know it was discussed at length here.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633
I was just going to ask if this was it...
https://www.plasticlist.org/
...and then I saw your link. I'll leave this comment here for the convenience of others.
If you have ever visited the ruins of Pompeii, you might have seen all the lead pipes that provided water to the city. I wonder how that affected the health of the citizens back then.
My understanding is that the high calcium content in their water supply formed a lining on the inside of the pipes which largely prevented any exposure.
Yeah, the water problems in Flint weren't the pipes directly, but that the water had changed so the lead was no longer protected from getting in the water.
They doubled down on the exposure by adding lead to wine though.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6750289/#:~:text=The%20custo...
When I was a baby we lived virtually directly under the Sydney Harvour Bridge, I got lead poisoning as a result of runoff from the bridge. The combination of leaded petrol and leaded paint runoff poisoned the soil in playgrounds and the area more generally.
My case and probably those of others lead to a huge cleanup of the bridge.
My life has been absolutetly plagued with chronic health and "developmental" problems. Neurodivergence and other conditions litter my family tree, but they seem to effect me much more severely than they do most of my relatives.
I often find myself wondering these days if my life would have featured significantly less hardship were it not for the lead poisoning.
>Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.
It doesn't have to be a business, and it absolutely should not be. Preventing poisoning of people, animals, and the environment is something capitalism has proven utterly incapable of, and in fact (literally) violently opposed to.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be done at the government level. The goal is societal benefit, not profit.
“Blood and Soil”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil
This article’s just trying to hype a stealth startup, but beware of those selling you the Herrenvolk. I’m all about mitigating negative pollution but there are plenty of things in nature that are bad for you, too.
Suggesting a connection to Nazi ideology just because someone wants to help people avoid toxins seems a bit over the top to me.
Oh, I am not at all implying or insinuating this article is connected to populism, nationalism, etc., or advocating for them, nor mean to impugn the author through association. Lead is bad. PFAS and microplastics are bad. Glyphosate maybe is bad. I identify as a mild/moderate environmentalist (while also a mild/moderate yimby; I don’t see a necessary contradiction).
But to be more explicit, I think there’s an undercurrent of Blood and Soil at work in the USA today, it’s seen a little bit explicitly in MAHA, and I’m worried, a lot, about the future political implications, where the real damage we’ve done to the environment becomes an excuse for… more bad things.
sounds like you accidentally consumed media poisoned with FUD and propaganda, having a federal department of health or food for your nation is nationalist, running it properly and keeping it away from corporate influence is anti-fascist, the modern day fascism is when corruption steers the health department away from serving the people’s health and instead locking it towards allowing “big pharma” to dictate regulations and review for their own benefit at the expense of the people’s taxes and health, the irony is watching the people trying to dismantle this fascism being called fascists
I did read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, it’s true.
What's the relationship?
I have no problem with calling out fascists but I don’t see any connection here.