Comment by Retric
9 years ago
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.
9 years ago
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?
Nothing. The toothpastes without SLS made me gag. My dentist said using no toothpaste was fine. My Sonicare toothbrush and flossing does the job just fine, and the floride in the water handles the rest.
17 replies →
A pinch of baking soda will have the same abrasives.
Chewing neem twigs
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?
I use Green beaver toothpaste http://greenbeaver.com
Calcium Carbonate, Aqua/Water/Eau, Sorbitol, Glycerin, Hydrated Silica, Mentha Piperita (Peppermint) leaf Oil, Menthol, Xylitol, Citrus Medica Limonum (Lemon) Extract, Xanthan Gum, Coco-Glucoside, Calcium Ascorbate, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil.
I still use toothpaste, but I've found that using a sonicare toothbrush made a huge improvement in preventing cavities. Also flossing is important.
3 replies →
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481632
I just use water and a toothbrush. It works well.
SLS is organic.
10 replies →
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.
Actually, most types of Sensodyne have SLS in them too. The "Extra Whitening" type doesn't, so I use that.
Once I switched to that, I stopped getting so many canker sores almost immediately.
1 reply →
so what do you use now? Coconut oil or something similar?
https://www.quora.com/How-much-less-effective-is-brushing-yo...
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.
> What's "greener" is just a matter of your definition of it.
What i means was that the "promoted" part is soon to change, because of the greater understanding of the drastic public health consequences.
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.
What about all the people who die from diesel particulates? Failing to consider that is exactly the mistake Europe is still making.
5 replies →
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.
and alcohol
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.
Organic is pretty easy to get information on. https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/organic-standards
From what I've been told, there are definitely some things you can do that would increase sustainability that would cause you to lose your organic label. E.g. substituting a biodegradable material that doesn't list its ingredients could cause you to lose the label when using plastic wouldn't.
What about people that are living in more rural parts of Europe?
There are a lot of small time farmers there that still grow the same sheep/cows/animals their grandparents grew 100 years ago.
They grow the same veggies on the same rotated soil that was grown 100 years ago, the same way.
Sure it may be a niche but if I'm living around there and eating that food, I think it's pretty darn close to what our ancestors were eating a century ago.
1 reply →
Agreed!
However it's still probably better to eat organic than something which doesn't even pretend to be safe. It's all relative in the end.
I hope one day I can control the sources and attributes of all the food that I eat. However till then I will try to do my best with my available time and money.
"simple ingredients" ... like the coke in Coca Cola?
1 reply →
> 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).
Little of that life expectancy had to do specifically with worse nutritional quality of food. Access to food, nutritional understanding, and food spoilage, yes.
Much had to do with a lack of awareness of germ theory, with waste disposal -- both human and trash -- with pollution of water supplies, and with poor or limited public health measures against community-propogating infectious disease.
The highest mortality rates were among infants and children, which did a great deal to reduce total life expectency at birth, but had compartively far less an effect on adolescent and adult life expectency.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
At birth, in 1850, white male life expectency was 38.3 (additional years of life), but 48.0 at age 10, and 40.1 at age 20.
In 2011, the comparable values are 76.3, 66.9, and 57.2.
The increase was initially rapid -- by 1929-31, rates had reached 59.12, 54.96, and 46.02, respectively.
While there's been some improvement in later years of life, it's been far less. If you survived to age 50 in 1850, you had a life expectency less than 10 years shorter than in 2011.
2 replies →