zlacker

>>geox+(OP)
We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale.

We keep encountering situations like this where a new chemical compound was introduced, becomes ubiquitous in our diets or environments and only later do we find out "Oops, it has serious health or environmental consequences."

It is worth the cost of slower introduction of new materials to take the time to ensure that those materials are safe. We're still paying the cost of introducing lead into our environment in a myriad of subtle ways. We still don't fully understand what the cost of the introduction of microplastics or PFAS is going to be. And regardless of the whether this particular study holds up under replication it is looking increasingly likely that aspartame is not something we should be consuming.

And what's most frustrating is that the people who profited most from these compounds never pay for the damage they cause to generations.

>>dbingh+55
Europe has, I will not say a perfect, but a saner approach to these sorts of things, in general. They take a more precautionary view. The notion that we must allow arbitrary things into our foods is nothing short of worshiping at the altar of "Progress"™, and Profit. The common good is sacrificed for the sake of the inferior end of making a buck.

Artificial sweeteners, specifically, are a bandage over the festering wound of a culture of mindless consumption. Companies want you to consume more so you buy more, but as soon as people began to worry about the rather expected obesity resulting from gorging and constant snacking on food and drink, and mediocre food and drink at that, the only alternative in the unhinged profit-above-all-else logic of consumerism is to maintain or increase consumption exceeding actual need, but reduce the apparent consequences of mindless consumption.

The common good requires a conservative legal oversight in this space where weird food additives are concerned, but it also includes abstract truths like "gluttony is evil" or "making financial profit the highest end is disordered". Our cultural and civilizational demise is rooted in things like the latter, and the intellectual and spiritual rot and resulting debasement of common sensibilities regarding such intangibles. Which is to say, regulation by itself, without appropriate cultural shifts, will, at best, function as another bandage that corporations will lobby to dilute and weaken and redefine at every opportunity.

>>lo_zam+Tj
You wrote a very long and passionate love letter to the European process and how it's almost perfect.

And yet all those chemicals are allowed in Europe.

So what happened? Were they grandfathered in?

>>guraf+Gm
Aspartame is safe, that's what happened.