Comment by timewarrior
9 years ago
It took almost 50 years to starting to debunk health issues created by Sugar. It took decades to accept the health issues created by Lead and Asbestos.
Sometime I wonder if chemicals from bottled water, radiation from Cellular/Wifi/Bluetooth pose health risks and we will find it out decades later.
There are a lot of unknowns. Chances are it's not going to be Bluetooth, but some toothpaste additive, cellphone case sealant, or something else nobody really thought about that we are going to look back and cringe.
but some toothpaste additive
About 9 months ago I stopped using toothpaste (my Dentist said it was fine) because I read the canker sores I had been getting for years and years were caused by an additive in tooth paste: Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). Sure enough, I have not had a single canker sore since I stopped using tooth paste!
Don't leave us hanging... what was your substitute?
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Whenever I have canker sores I stop using toothpaste and dip my toothbrush in a cup of mouthwash and that helps the sores heal much faster.
So, what is the alternative you are using? Water and brushing? Or some organic toothpaste alternative?
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In my (limited) experience, canker sores are an allergic reaction. Raw pineapples make the inside of my mouth tingly, and then voila: canker sores. I stopped eating raw pineapple, and I've not had a canker sore since.
I used to have to use lotion on my hands constantly until I switched to castille soap instead of SLS-based detergents.
I use Sensodyne for the same reason — it's a widely available toothpaste that doesn't have SLS.
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so what do you use now? Coconut oil or something similar?
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For instance, For a long time diesel has promoted in Europe as greener than petrol. This is soon to change, because: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fum...
Diesel engines produces less CO2 by being slightly more efficient.
Pretrol engines produce less nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.
What's "greener" is just a matter of your definition of it.
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Diesel /is/ greener when you consider only CO2 emissions and energy efficiency, although turbocharged direct injection engines narrow that gap significantly. If this were the '70s though, I'd much rather have a fleet of diesel cars running around than ones with cabureted gasoline engines.
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I always assumed it would be the opposite: something that a lot of people already recognize as being dangerous, but which lacked concrete evidence demonstrating how dangerous it is. So my candidates for a future "omg we have to stop this" are:
- bad posture at office jobs (probably mandated adjustable standing desks in the future)
- stress from a long, high-traffic commute
- insufficient sleep
- per the article, high-sugar foods. EDIT: technically, a high-sugar diet. Part of the problem is that no one unit of sugar by itself is the problem, so you can't point to any one food as the culprit.
Wasn't there some news recently that sleep deficiency is positively correlated with heart disease?
Something like this http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/tiredness-and-fatigue/Pages/lack-...
There was also some news recently that working in a place that grinds coffee causes lung cancer http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/04/15/474325037/cof...
Probably if the sabre-toothed tiger gets you before the age of 35 you won't get cancer or heart disease. But if you live long enough and the cancer doesn't kill you the chemotherapy will.
You're missing the easy one, caffeine.
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Agreed! But we cannot ignore potential visible risks while worrying about unknown risks.
I use organic/natural exclusively. Try to model my life closed to simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back. I also diversify things I consume. Someone once posted on HN: His grandpa told him everything is poison, so use everything in moderation. I really liked this recommendation.
However it is very difficult to prevent all the radio waves in today's world as much as you try. Maybe it's not harmful but we won't find out for decades.
Many of the "simple ingredients" that people used 100 years ago aren't really available anymore, at least not in the US. That would somewhat true even with traditional breeding and cultivation, but over the past 100 years we've greatly improved our understanding of how breeding works, the rate that we can modify plants and animals, and with GMOs we now have a lot of direct control over the outcome. We just don't have the same plants and animals that we had 100 years ago anymore.
You say you stick to organic/natural. Well, it's all "natural", even GMOs, if you're eating plant and animal products directly. (Eg: stay away from additives and highly processed foods.) "Organic" is a bit tougher; you want it to mean that the plants and animals were raised without getting stuffed with chemicals and antibiotics, but there's a lot of wiggle room there because 'food' is made up of chemicals, and many foods and chemicals have some antibiotic properties.
In the end, if you're not growing the plants and breeding the animals yourself you don't really know if the "organic" label on them means what you want it to mean. And except for heirloom varieties, (and maybe even those) the plants and animals you're raising are still the product of the past 100 years of breeding, which usually focused on attributes other than making them healthy to eat.
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> simple ingredients people used more than 100 years back
Back when they used (natural) lead as a sweetener? :P
Seriously though, 100 years is probably not long enough ago if you're looking for "good" food. White bread was all the rage. Jello+, mayonnaise, and marshmallows were standard ingredients in "salads". Anything which actually looked like a natural food item was pretty much shunned, unless you were poor. The Edwardian focus on efficiency and cleanliness above flavor paved the way culturally for the industrial food of the 1950s.
+ They actually used sheets of gelatin to make their "Jello" as the powdered stuff hadn't been invented yet.
100 years back life expectancy was significantly worse. There are countless things in nature that can out right kill you. Your approach seems pretty ridiculous. (I did not down vote you however).
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Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk. You can stand inside the path of a microwave communication dish and receive many orders of magnitude more radiation, and what it'll do is make you warm. That's it. Soviet soldiers used to do that in Siberia to keep themselves warm, and the only risk is the dish outputting too much power and cooking you instead.
The first day in radar class the instructor put a piece of steel wool in front of a small dish and it instantly melted white and dropped molten metal onto the floor.
It always made me nervous when the class goofballs turned the horns on other people so you could feel the microwaves.
Goofball 1: 'accidentally' radiates goofball 2 Goofball 2: What? What are you doing? Oh, I'll show you - just watch me increase the power on this baby...
It turns out your testicles and eyes are a bad place to receive microwaves.
I submit to anyone thinking of attempting this: you are probably going to get the power calculations wrong and cooking human cells is not fun at all.
Yeah, there's definitely dangerous ways to use microwave emitters. But my point is that your instructor thought that it was relatively safe to give them out in radar class. If they were x-ray emitters, on the other hand...
I mostly agree with you. There are edge cases with microwave towers that can lead to vision loss as your eyes heat up, but don't dump heat very well. Further, modern cellphones don't operate in the same bands as old radio-waves.
However, this stuff is very likely to be safe at cellphone usage levels.
>Cellular, wifi, and bluetooth radiation poses zero risk
Your confidence and shortsightedness are astounding.
Do you not see that ~40 years ago scientists were saying exactly the same thing, with exactly the same conviction about Asbestos, Lead, DDT, etc.
We don't know what we don't know, but at least we should admit it.
All of those compounds interact via chemical pathways, and our knowledge of biochemistry is undoubtedly incomplete. However, we know the effect that EM spectrum has on molecules. At the wavelengths in question, it is not possible to break bonds. Thus the only plausible effects would be a result of different vibrational modes or the indirect effect of localized heating. That makes any risk from those technologies very low.
Didn't those Soviet soldiers have a greater incidence of cancer later in life?
Some people wonder if one of our cells have a process to check the DNA runs an electric current through the molecule. There is a possibility that electromagnetic fields could distrupt this. This might obviously be bollocks but to say it's only heat output is also wrong...
True. And until then if you resist such things you're labelled as a crank, luddite, anti-science, etc. etc.
Completely agreed. I have been avoiding using anti-bacterial soaps for years, because something didn't add up. I am perfectly happy washing my hands with water before meal. Sometimes if I feel that my hands are really greasy/dirty I would use a natural ingredient based soap.
I have friends who would chide me for that. And now FDA bans sale of many anti-bacterial soaps: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/science/fda-bans-sale-of-m...
I just went to gym and someone who used the treadmill just before me doused the treadmill with 10-12 pieces of anti-bacterial wipes. The treadmill was wet when I started and was giving out fumes for almost 10 minutes while I was running. I am wondering what is worse for me: potentially germs from a reasonably healthy and hygienic person vs vast array of chemicals from this cheap anti-bacterial wipe.
"didn't add up" is a very different reason than the FDA reasoning. Indeed, it's not that anti bacterial is directly bad, but the second order effects of weakened immunity and "superbugs".
It's not being correct if you act suspicious about everything, then something has a negative effect you weren't aware of.
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I never understood the point of wiping a treadmill. I only ever come in contact with it via 2 buttons (start/stop & increase speed).
If I followed that logic, I would have to wipe literally every object that my fingers touched in the gym. It would be akin to touching a door knob to the bathroom, and then wiping the entire door.
If the past is any indiction, we probably interact with several things on a daily basis that people 100 years from now wouldn't go near for anything short of crazy amounts of money, or with protective gear.
I think it's more likely that the behavioral patterns created by our constant engagement to mobile devices will carry more adverse effects to our mental and physical health than any mobile device radiation.
Fortunately we completely understand light; if you actually wonder about radio and want to bring it out of the realm of mystery potentially hiding dark magic, learn some basic quantum mechanics. As to what you ingest, learn how its made and understand the basic chemistry of the end product. No label gives insight into that, its just alot of research.
Sure, systematic disinformation campaigns are real, but in 2016 those don't eliminate the also very real and verifiable scientific knowledge.
I am sorry to inform you that we don't completely understand anything at all. We barely understand the world and universe around us. To say that we completely understand anything is a fallacy. Also with the scientific method, nothing is set in stone as fact. Anything can change our understand at anytime.
What behavior of light have we observed that the standard model doesn't accurately model? Where is the standard model inaccurate regarding light?
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The most believable claim I've seen so far is that DNA might be very slightly conductive. Just barely enough to slightly increase replication errors.
I discount it without further evidence, but sounds plausible.
> Fortunately we completely understand light
So is it a wave, or a particle?
Neither: it's a packet of information that has properties of both.
I'm sure you've already heard that the subatomic world completely defies the expectations developed from having evolved to comprehend the macroscopic world. A large part of this, which is assumed but I believe needs to be explicitly mentioned in this context, is that mammal brains are shit garbage at intuiting probabilities.
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It's going to be smartphone usage itself, especially among children. We are going to look back and cringe at kids screen-holing (this is the term me and my girlfriend use to describe it, similar to k-holing, and in social settings, assholing) at will. A whole generation's minds unprotected from the screen! It's gross.
You can count flurochemicals as one. Ubiquitous in the water supply. No good way for water treatment nor the human body to remove them. Proven harm. Not much discussion today.
Also re toothpaste additive: Colgate Total still uses triclosan, which has been removed from pretty much every other product already and declared harmful by the FDA.
Your comment sounds like the FDA declared triclosan in Colgate Total to be harmful. That is not true: http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm205999.ht...
"For some consumer products, there is evidence that triclosan provides a benefit. In 1997, FDA reviewed extensive effectiveness data on triclosan in Colgate Total toothpaste. The evidence showed that triclosan in that product was effective in preventing gingivitis."
The FDA proposed as early as 1978 to ban triclosan in consumer products.[1] The proposal was updated in 1994 but never finalized.
"At each stage of the proposed and tentative rulemaking process, the FDA has acknowledged that based on available scientific evidence, triclosan and triclocarban are not safe and effective, or there are insufficient data to evaluate safety and effectiveness."[2] (There are a number of studies you may find that show triclosan causing harm)
[1]https://www.nrdc.org/media/2013/131122
[2]http://www.hpm.com/pdf/Triclosan%20-%20NRDC%20MSJ.pdf
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"Effective in preventing X" doesn't mean it doesn't cause harm Y.
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There are so many things that we already have fairly strong evidence to worry about in our foods alone: Trans fats in all of our food (finally will be banned in a couple years), BPA all over our food containers, BPA-like mystery substances in all the BPA-free food containers, BPA gets absorbed in our skin when we touch receipts, constant listeria outbreaks, constant e coli found in factory farmed beef, homogenized milk damages the fat molecules, fracking chemicals in our drinking water, artificial sweeteners and their effects on our gut bacteria, preservatives and their effect on our gut bacteria, dyes like caramel coloring, glyphosate all over our fruits and vegetables.
That's just off the top of my head.
Radar in the near future from every self driving car on the road concerns me more than the wifi.
Not to mention the health issues caused by meat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ