Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

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Sibling discussions seem to contain a lot of hand-waving. I'd love to know the truth about the safety of stainless v plastic v glass etc but we seem to consistently run into two problems. 1. Chemistry is hard and 2. Biology is hard and slow.

The way we describe chemicals is usually component based and not functional. H2O and H2O2 look similar but water and hydrogen peroxide have radically different properties. One is good to drink regularly, the other deadly. Reading that something contains anionic chlorine might be bad, but then again it might be table salt. For more complex chemicals this gets even more confusing.

Then you take this extremely-hard-for-lay-people-to-parse language and try to use it to predict interactions with a human body. Moreover you really care about not just acute (strong, fast) effects but long term cumulative effects. The article is discussing acute effects for allergy sufferers, but what about 10 years of exposure to small amounts of leached nickle? 20? 30?

The possible number of variations on chemicals, the biological systems they can interact with, and the time/effort required to perform rigorous epidemiological studies for each seems like a herculean task we are ill equipped to tackle. I'd love to be told I'm wrong, but it just seems like any discussion of these topics is not just fruitless but genuinely dangerous as it's possible, given the lack of a credible causative structure, to convince ourselves of anything.

> The way we describe chemicals is usually component based and not functional. H2O and H2O2 look similar but water and hydrogen peroxide have radically different properties. One is good to drink regularly, the other deadly.

I don't think this is a fair characterization.

In inorganic chemistry, the ions do matter. Saying that something contains Fe ions is basically all you need to know; Fe 2+ and Fe 3+ can be easily converted into each other through redux reactions, so distinguishing them doesn't provide value.

If you are honest in your communication, you also distinguish between H20 and H2O2, precisely because they aren't equivalent.

> Then you take this extremely-hard-for-lay-people-to-parse language and try to use it to predict interactions with a human body.

This part I agree with.

Remember the "free radicals" craze of the 90s (or was it early 00's?) Biologists talked about free radicals in the blood being a potential cause of some damage (was it cancer?), and people started to eat food that would bind free radicals, completely ignoring all the chemistry of the digestive system that stands between the food and the blood.

> I'd love to be told I'm wrong, but it just seems like any discussion of these topics is not just fruitless but genuinely dangerous as it's possible, given the lack of a credible causative structure, to convince ourselves of anything.

Basically all research that is published, by its very nature, contributes a small piece of the puzzle. But it's the job of other researchers to interpret that and work towards a fuller understanding, until we have something that is ready for general consumption, both in terms of validating it, and putting it into context.

This is something that we as a society haven't figured out yet. Media loves to report on new science publications, and has a hard time putting the maturity (or lack thereof) and actual impact on daily life into context. But we cannot just blame "the media", we also have to blame ourselves for consuming it.

> I'd love to know the truth about the safety of stainless v plastic v glass etc

I think the only thing we can say with certainty is that things that have been around long enough (like cast iron, clay cooking ware etc.) is most likely safe, otherwise we would have noticed it by now.

> I think the only thing we can say with certainty is that things that have been around long enough (like cast iron, clay cooking ware etc.) is most likely safe, otherwise we would have noticed it by now.

Agree, I think this is the most important part. I think we obsess too much over things that might possibly have some small effect 1% of the time after 30 years or something after you apply a bunch of tricky statistics. Anything that has been used by millions of people for decades, centuries, would have been extremely obvious if it did anything bad.

I won't put too much stock in unglazed clay cooking ware.

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