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More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

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141–150 of 183 posts

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#141
post #79

Okay, this Environmental Working Group found traces of pesticides on produce. That's not terribly unexpected, given how most produce is, well, produced. What this article annoyingly neglects to mention, is the _numbers_ attached to those traces of pesticides. Where there large amounts of trace chemicals, such that the levels exceed the EPA's recommended safe exposure levels? Were they so high that dangerous levels of…

Well, so here's the other side of the coin-- nobody actually has any idea what's definitely safe. Do you trust that because the EPA has put a number on a chemical that it can't be wrong? Why don't you guess what percent of the time when the EPA calls an exposure level safe does it go back and change its mind and decide it wasn't safe after all? Also, why are you confident the EPA knows all the long-term biological an…

> Well, so here's the other side of the coin-- nobody actually has any idea what's definitely safe.

I'm going to disagree with that. I think there is a great deal of information available on what is and is not safe, available to those who will look. I think it is a gross overstatement that nobody has any idea what's definitely safe. Is that data perfect? No. But the data I'm able to find seems to have been workable so far.

> Do you trust that because the EPA has put a number on a chemical that it can't be wrong?

> Why don't you guess what percent of the time when the EPA calls an exposure level safe does it go back and change its mind and decide it wasn't safe after all?

Nope, I don't blindly trust the EPA, they've been wrong in the past, and they're going to be discovered to have been wrong here in the future, because like you and I, they are fallible humans, and sometimes shit slips through. However, I am willing to look at the data available and evaluate for myself whether the declaration of safe or not (and to what degree) is correct, and what to do about it.

> Also, why are you confident the EPA knows all the long-term biological and cross-generational effects of all these chemicals when nobody can decided yet if coffee is good for me?

I'm not necessarily, and I think you misrepresent my point above to insinuate that I do. My protest with the original article is that it is thin on data. That someone is worried about pesticide residues on food is not immediately actionable data for me absent other data which the article lacks. Absent said data, I'm going to stick to my currently successful MO of washing my produce before use, and not worrying about it until given a convincing reason to do so.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#142
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet that mercury toxicity is incredibly underdiagnosed, especially if it's not acute. Fatigue, insomnia, and a host of other symptoms are fairly common and not easy to spot as a part of a bigger problem. Anecdata: when I went to a large hospital they laughed off my idea that I have heavy metal poisoning and didn't even have the facilities to test for it. Only months later after visiting a naturopath and getti…

What was the treatment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_detoxification

Dialysis and depending on the metal Chelation. Both suck and neither were likely prescribed by a naturopath.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#143
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet that mercury toxicity is incredibly underdiagnosed, especially if it's not acute. Fatigue, insomnia, and a host of other symptoms are fairly common and not easy to spot as a part of a bigger problem. Anecdata: when I went to a large hospital they laughed off my idea that I have heavy metal poisoning and didn't even have the facilities to test for it. Only months later after visiting a naturopath and getti…

https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/hea... Naturopathy (like most pseudo sciences) thrives on taking things undiagnosed and giving concrete answers. There likely isn't a person out there that wouldn't test positive for heavy metal poisoning. Go retest with a different naturopath. I'm almost certain you'll still test positive (even though they likely gave you a bunch of vitamins and herbs to cure…

I'm not sure what you're basing your opinion on, but I wasn't directly tested by a naturopath. You get a urine sample that's later shipped to an accredited lab and they provide you a detailed report with reference ranges, recommendations, and caveats.

I don't know what other NDs are like, though I'm sure many make a living by overselling supplements.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#144
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet that mercury toxicity is incredibly underdiagnosed, especially if it's not acute. Fatigue, insomnia, and a host of other symptoms are fairly common and not easy to spot as a part of a bigger problem. Anecdata: when I went to a large hospital they laughed off my idea that I have heavy metal poisoning and didn't even have the facilities to test for it. Only months later after visiting a naturopath and getti…

It's actually common in startup founders who sell their startups and then start eating expensive sushi all the time. My understanding is that several billionaires in silicon valley have mild Parkinson's-like tremors because of this.

High end omakase meals generally come with 1 or 2 .5 oz pieces of tuna. Even at 3x a day it would be comparable to one can of tuna. Of course mercury varies heavily from fish to fish but unless they were living on tuna/swordfish this sounds like an urban legend or could be something else in raw fish like liver parasites or bacteria.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#145
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skepticism doesn't imply trust-by-default. This article is an example of the shoddy work that is often performed by bad science "journalists" and used by the Chemophobic to push bullshit such as essential oils, naturopathic medicines, and MLM crapware. If you can't recognize that this is bad journalism that's not my fault. Its not that I "trust" the herbicide/pesticide companies that produce and manufacture these che…

Stillbourne, you seem to have a lot of trust in science funded by chemical companies. Remember how tobacco companies lied about the health impact of cigarettes?

I know right, it almost like there are no studies conducted by the NIH, the EPA, the FDA, all major Universities including Yale, Harvard, Stanford or any other independent group such as NIEHS. NOPE, ALL pesticide and herbicide research on toxicological properties of chemicals is only ever conducted by BIGAG. You know, just like all of those vaccine studies that show efficacy and safety are only ever conducted by BIGPHARMA. Nope, if you support science, skeptical inquiry and chemicals other than those that occur in nature you must be a shill.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic pesticides and their interactions aren't that well known... hell, all around the interactions of most of the foods people eat, gene expressions and even gut flora leave most data almost meaningless. Eat food you make from mostly whole sources, avoid sugars (especially refined), avoid grains (especially refined), avoid refined seed/vegetable oils... do those things and you're still doing better than most of th…

Toxicity and microbial selectivity are not the same. Whole food's positive biotic selectivity benefits could be negated by toxins present. I'm not really sure what "doing better" means bc it depends on the individual. Less likely to have endocrine disruption? Cancer risk? Better cardiovascular health? The optimal diet depends on your risk profile.

Take any 10 people and give them trace amounts of X (whatever X is) over the course of 5 years... they won't respond the same. Some will go through it easier than other. Some may have allergic response, others won't.

As for the general advice to avoid sugars, grains and seed oils. These are all things whose consumption correlates the most to increases in heart attacks, obesity, dementia and many related diseases. They are absolutely not required for anyone and for most of the population consumed in quantities that cannot be justified as healthy or safe.

Eating lots more vegetables (in scale and variety) and some more fruits (keeping sugar manageable) generally corresponds to better health. Regardless of other macro nutrition (though I feel that meat, eggs and fish are fine). "OPTIMAL" historically speaking has mostly come down to cost and availability. Optimal for man, in general comes down to what could be raised, gathered, hunted or foraged relatively locally. That would include regular periods without food, and a few in excess.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#147
post #72

Sola dosis facit venenum. It's not about that its there, its about how much there is. My guess is not enough to warrant the effort it took to write this article.

Have you forgotten the PBA studies already? Microdoses of some compounds can interrupt signaling in the endocrine system. We don’t know which yet, but we know the phenomenon exists. A cautious person would assume that lack of proof (or more accurately, lack of information proving or disproving) doesn’t mean lack of harm.

I am not familiar with those studies would you mind linking them or referencing the doi? I have a subscription to most science journals so I can read anything you link usually without additional cost.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#148
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you to second guess? The burden of proof is on the assertion.

Unless discussion is just going to be about scoring points, the burden of proof is on anyone who is intellectually curious.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#149

If the US government is willing to directly subsidize corporate farms with corn subsidies, the least they can do is regulate them.

totally agree. If subsidies are given then the it should be possible to tell farms to go organic or whatever.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#150
One problem is that we usually take the easy approach to designing pesticides. They tend to be poisonous to a wide variety of animals, instead of just to the specific pests we are actually trying to kill.

Then we have to come up with some way to try to keep things other than the pests from getting exposed. Maybe we try to make it break down into something safe before it gets farther up the food chain. Maybe we make it so it washes off easily so cleaning the food is good enough (and hopefully we do something sensible with the runoff from that washing...).

There's another way, but it takes a lot more work and so it isn't done much. This is to study each specific insect you want to control, to develop a deep understanding of its life cycle. You identify the hormones that are involved in regulating and timing the life cycle.

You then make your pesticide based on those hormones, so that when exposed to it the insect's life cycle gets messed up. For example, suppose you've got an insect that mates and lays eggs during the warmer part of summer, and you find that the eggs need that heat to develop and hatch. Identify the hormones that regulate that, and you might be able to make a pesticide that causes that insect to lay its eggs too early, and the next generation dies out.

The beauty of this approach is that since the hormone your pesticide is based on already occurs naturally in your target insects, whatever is above them in the food chain has already evolved to not be bothered by it. All you are doing is messing with the timing of it in the insect, not its existence. So that hormone based pesticides are inherently much much safer than the general poison based pesticides.

But as I said, this is more expensive. Each species is probably going to require a pesticide specifically for it. This would probably take several PhD entomologists per species working for years.

If you do study a given insect and its life cycle to that extent, you also might be able to learn to control it without pesticides, especially in the case of invasive insects.

For example, lets say you've got an invasive moth that is attacking your crops and devastating them. In its native habitat, that moth's population is kept in check by parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in the moth's larvae. You might be able to deal with the invasive moths by importing those wasps. But you only would want to try that if you knew enough about the wasps to know that they would not become a problem too. If you know that the wasps only lay eggs on the larvae of that one moth species, great...bring a ton of the wasps, they'll wipe out the moths, and then the wasps won't have any place for their eggs and they die too.

Something like this was actually tried once, with an invasion of some Florida pest attacking California citrus groves. They brought in the wasps (or whatever--I don't actually remember if it was wasps, or something else)...and the wasps all died without harming the moths.

Later, they figured out that what they had thought was one species of parasitic wasps was really two very similar species, and only one of those two would control the particular pest they were trying to eliminate. There were only something like two parasitic wasp experts in the whole US at the time, and there are an unbelievable number of different parasitic wasp species so most of them have never been studied extensively.

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