We don’t know the full impacts of the majority of our industrialized food system. Emulsifiers, perservatives, flavouring agents and pesticides all are relatively new and their effects, impacts, build ups, and mixtures in the human body are not fully studied or understood yet.
The issue is a lack of money studying them, as the only group with the money to do all the studies needed are the ones producing the pesticides, and they have a dedicated interest in only doing enough studies to prove that there are no immediate issues with their products.
It’s a conflict of interest unless if there’s more government funding into examining these sorts of things, as there are no other major forces that don’t have a invested interest in making sure that the studies make the products look good.
Even then, human lifespans can reach 100 years, some of this stuff simply hasnt existed in our food supply to truly know what a lifetime of consumption can cause. Many of these additives and pesticides are tested to be safe per individual food and the total ingestion control is left to the consuner, who may be uninformed on their consumption rate, especially considering the increasing background presence of these substances in our water and soil.
About fifteen years ago, it was popularly believed within the science communities that the first bicentennial person had already been born, and some of the recent breakthroughs suggest that most of us under 50 might really be able to achieve that.
Of course, that’s presuming that the stuff we’re eating isn’t killing us on a timescale that only the advances of curing the major diseases of today will make relevant.
It will be sad if we manage to cure all the diseases that prevent most of us from reaching 100, only to find out that the food we’re eating is what’s preventing most of us from going much past that. And honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes something like that before money is directed towards properly studying all our additives and pesticides to check for which ones are doing us in.
