• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    Okay, look. Atoms, in all their wonder make up pretty much everything known to exist in the universe. Chemistry, the science of chemicals, is just taking that understanding we have of atoms and applying it to how the atoms interact based on what atoms are there, their charges, bonds, etc.

    Thus unless it’s on the periodic table, where it would be an element, then it’s a chemical.

    Even assuming that instead of “chemicals”, people mean synthetic chemicals… To that I say… Who cares?

    Synthetic chemicals come in two forms: a synthesized version of a chemical that is naturally occurring, where synthesis is a more commercially viable way to obtain that chemical, or a chemical that isn’t found naturally, which undergoes significant scrutiny before anyone is allowed to put it in your food and sell it to you.

    We generally give “natural” chemicals less scrutiny than synthetic chemicals. And I’ll remind everyone that cyanide is a naturally occurring chemical. Though it’s natural, we don’t general add that to our food. Some food contains cyanide naturally, like cherry pits, but that’s usually a part we don’t eat.

    The WHO has a whole article about toxins in food… https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/natural-toxins-in-food

    So yeah, it might be made of synthetic chemicals, which have been researched, scrutinized, and peer reviewed before being approved for consumption and being put in my food. I can’t say the same for literally anything “natural”. We just ate that shit and if you died from eating a thing, nobody else ate that thing. And that was the way of things before modern science and chemicals

    So fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.

    • sobchak@programming.dev
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      22 hours ago

      As someone wholly uneducated on these kinds of things, I just choose to use the heuristic of defaulting to using/ingesting natural substances, as much as practical, because we evolved with them and it would seem more likely our bodies (and the ecosystem) know how to deal with them. I also don’t trust the government to be discerning/uncorruptible enough to not allow stuff to pass that shouldn’t, especially now. Peer review is more trustworthy though, and gets more trustworthy the longer something has been around and studied more.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        I feel you’re mixing stuff up here, don’t eat processed food, buy “bio”/“ecological” if you’d like less bad stuff in your food.

        Belladonna is natural and saves lives, take too much and you die. This whole “natural” thing is so infested with scammers, it’s just not “the government”.