- Amazon is so completely irresponsible for their marketplace that recently, shopping for a glass oral thermometer (because the digital ones suck) I stumbled on reviews with photos showing products that had no mercury inside and actual blobs of mercury stuck to the tip that goes in your mouth. These were still for sale.
I feel like even 10 years ago, online marketplaces would have taken measures to prevent stuff like this.
From that perspective, all of these services that rate products still place all the onus on the individual consumer. What would be really "luxury" in the modern context would be an online marketplace that vetted every product and whose primary product was trust, as opoosed to logistics and convenience. I'd much rather pay $150/yr for a service that vetted its products and took a week to deliver them, than to have a bunch of worthless or dangerous junk delivered the next day.
by klevertree1
8 subcomments
- I'm tackling part of the issue of food toxin remediation with my new venture, NeutraOat (neutraoat.com). It's a modified oat fiber supplement that selectively traps BPA, PFAS, and plasticizers in the gut and reduces levels in the blood serum.
The funding for this is tough, though. Everyone loves the idea, but it's difficult to find people to fund R&D to make sure the product actually works over brand building and marketing. I've had to be very scrappy. Hopefully this will change in the future as we build momentum and awareness, but for right now it's tooth and nail.
- This is precisely why I happily pay for an annual subscription to ConsumerLab[0]. It's largely just for supplements and a few functional foods, but with a tiny staff they are doing more work to help the public on the unregulated medicine market than the entire FDA, IMHO.
[0]https://www.consumerlab.com/
- Empowering individuals to solve collective problems rarely work.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178680>
The appropriate solution is legislation.
by SuperNinKenDo
0 subcomment
- When I was a baby we lived virtually directly under the Sydney Harvour Bridge, I got lead poisoning as a result of runoff from the bridge. The combination of leaded petrol and leaded paint runoff poisoned the soil in playgrounds and the area more generally.
My case and probably those of others lead to a huge cleanup of the bridge.
My life has been absolutetly plagued with chronic health and "developmental" problems. Neurodivergence and other conditions litter my family tree, but they seem to effect me much more severely than they do most of my relatives.
I often find myself wondering these days if my life would have featured significantly less hardship were it not for the lead poisoning.
- > This was lead poisoning. ... Nobody knew.
Good article. But just to note, lead was already a known poison at the time when it was added to gasoline. Significant concerns were raised. Production was even halted for a while in the US due to health incidents.
- The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.
The FDA, FTC, EPA, etc should be involved here.
by mr_johnson22
1 subcomments
- If the incentives of private business are what got us in this health crisis, why should private business be trusted to get us out of it?
- The Austrian consumer protection association has just released results on tests of headphones: https://vki.at/Presse/PA-Kopfhoerer-2025 (German article), and found that 40% contained possibly harmful chemicals, including the parts that touch your body.
It's wild. I have children, and I spent a great time researching foods, bottles, toys, etc., but I would've never thought much about doubting the (big brand) consumer electronics that we all use every day.
- Equally as large and interesting is the industry of targeting and subverting consumer watchdog groups. Wirecutter's infiltration and takeover is a fascinating example.
- The reality is that poison is dose dependent, and we’ve mostly identified all the dangerous things and their doses. That lead in the bottle and the formaldehyde in your cheap clothes is bad … but not in a way that will detectably cause you harm or impair your life
by coppsilgold
5 subcomments
- Bloodletting is a solution. Donate blood as frequently as they allow you. Plasma donation works even better (higher frequency) if you trust the machines and the process.
Sadly, it's not a complete solution as some harmful substances bio-accumulate in other tissues. A benefit may be had regardless as some substances leach back into the blood if the concentration gradient is sufficient.
by supportengineer
0 subcomment
- The trend of making these medical tests cheaper and easier to obtain is going to result in a lot of positive change. Certainly for individuals and hopefully the anonymized data helps get the spotlight on larger trends.
- If you have ever visited the ruins of Pompeii, you might have seen all the lead pipes that provided water to the city. I wonder how that affected the health of the citizens back then.
by IlikeKitties
1 subcomments
- > All the exhaust fumes pooled and hung in the air there. And these were the 1970s: literally all the gasoline was leaded.1 This was lead poisoning. Over the years, the children were getting brain damage.
And if you live in a city today it's only marginally better. Remember that everyone selfishly driving their car is choosing to poison you rather than dealing with public transport. They give you lung cancer from their exhaust and microplastics in the brain from their tires. And if that wasn't enough, year after year the cars get bigger and survivability for pedestrians in an accent, especially children becomes less likely the larger the car.
The inconvenient truth is that car drivers are horrible humans causing harm to their direct environment they themselves have to life in but we as a society deem that totally a-ok. And the Road accidents every year? Necessary and unavoidable of course. But then the same people argue about gun control. The double-think is astounding.
- I totally agree. I actually started Wyndly (https://www.wyndly.com/) because I realized I was poisoning myself with antihistamines every single day for my allergies. I did the research, and antihistamines are know to cause anxiety, depression, weight gain, and brain fog!
I applied for YC. We got in!
And now we're chipping away at this corner of human health: treating the root cause of allergies with protein exposure therapy (allergy immunotherapy) instead of covering up allergy symptoms with ineffective (and, it turns out, dangerous) antihistamines.
- "This will be a big business"
No. It shouldn't be a "business", it should be laws that are enforced fast, education, public shaming of companies putting poison in their products.
Volatile Organic compounds in paint were known to be poisonous since 17th century (see Bernardino Ramazzini's works). Just listen to the goddamn scientists for once.
You can't solve a problem caused by capitalism corner cutting with more capitalism.
- Don't forget the poisons we've known for ages and yet overconsume: sugar, alcohol, ...
- I wonder how much this is causing the worldwide swing toward authoritarianism. Lead exposure can cause lower conscientiousness, lower agreeableness, and higher neuroticism.[1]
Especially considering the age of people who actually vote and who the politicians in power are (at least in the U.S.)
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8307752/
- One of those things where it’s important to make a concerted effort to limit risk.
…but then also to stop worrying after reasonable steps were taken because it’s an endless rabbit hole
- I'm no nutritional expert but from what I understand: If you look at traditional food people ate very different around the world but by some miracle all of those traditional diets cover all angles of nutrition. It seems to suggest that in the long run only cultures who eat a complete diet survive. You can of course survive for a really long time with all kinds of deficiencies but apparently time will catch up. How this happens I don't know but it isn't actually important. The point I wanted to make is that poison isn't even required. Unless you have experimental success after perhaps thousands of years of trial and error we would have to actively monitor and adjust everything with an iron fist. Specially this idea that anything goes unless harm is proven needs to go. There is an enormous amount of low hanging fruit but to do the entire job entirely will be a humongous undertaking.
by antonchekhov
1 subcomments
- A former coworker who was a serious gun enthusiast experienced dangerously high levels of lead in his bloodstream - he had chronic headaches and other bodily pains. He visited shooting ranges several times per week, and also packed (assembled? made? I'm not sure the nomenclature) his own bullets. His doctors believe he aspirated atomized lead particulate doing so much shooting practice, and/or bullet manufacture. He underwent chelation therapy (a protocol involving taking certain medications that bind to heavy metals in the blood, and the patient excretes it out via urination) to reduce lead levels.
by benabbott
1 subcomments
- Climate change seems to be a topic that's "OK" to be skeptical about because you can't see it right now, today, with your own eyes.
I wonder if folks who aren't so keen on the idea of climate change would be more open to the idea of population-level poisoning?
These two issues seem to get lumped in the same bucket but it does seem that population-level poisoning seems to be more of an acute threat. Lead, asbestos, microplastics, PFAs, pesticides... Who knows what these will do over generations, and there is certainly more chemical poisons we've introduced into our environment that we haven't even discovered.
- I'm curious, how many more years do we need to get decent data points to have a controller experiment between "people who min/maxed their health" vs an average person? Life expectancy here in Tokyo is 81/87 years (for men/women), and if constant chase for the "peak health" results in the same average... I'm not sure if it's worth it other than the general 80/20 rule of suggestions?
- This reminds me a bit of a private group that did a big study (I thought in SFBA) looking at the amount of microplastics in different stuff, for example delivered food. Just thinking about it because of the startup he mentioned and I was wondering if it was them, but can’t find the article now. I know it was discussed at length here.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525633
- > In Germany, there’s a popular nonprofit which tests consumer goods for safety and publishes the results.
In the USA too: https://www.consumerreports.org/about-us/what-we-do/
- Given almost anything can do something bad to you I've got a rule of thumb not to worry much about things unless they can quantify how many years they take off your life. There are still quite a lot of those around - smoking, air pollution and obesity being some of the top ones that can do >10 years. I'm not to bad on smoking and air pollution but could lose a pound or two. I figure central London has dropped from a couple of years off to maybe a couple of months over the time I've been around here.
- >Is the furniture I sit in every day made with harmful substances?
If I made you a chair out of wood and finished it with pure linseed oil, do you promise not to complain that it needs repainting regularly? If I make you a cushion out of horse hair and canvas, do you promise not to complain that it is uncomfortable and not flame retardant? Will you be ok that you can't wipe off stains like you could with your old one?
The convenience of modern materials is what drives this, as much as the profit motive
- i live in Europe and the public discourse around this is always very high and i don't think we have 1/10 of the problems in the article, but maybe I'm lulu
- >Only a business with this as its core competency is capable of the breadth and depth required for this Herculean task.
It doesn't have to be a business, and it absolutely should not be. Preventing poisoning of people, animals, and the environment is something capitalism has proven utterly incapable of, and in fact (literally) violently opposed to.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be done at the government level. The goal is societal benefit, not profit.
- This is probably the most 1st world thing I've read this year.
by jonstewart
3 subcomments
- [flagged]
by weregiraffe
4 subcomments
- What's worse, damage from lead or damage from constant obsession about lead?
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