Comment by timr

Untrue, you can buy burnt bread at most grocery stores. Go to the bakery, look at the ends. Many will have burnt tips.

Also: I've never bought this, but I just found this premade product, which is sold in my grocery store and is known to the state of California to cause cancer.

https://www.safeway.com/shop/product-details.197151007.html?...

A good example is the cancer causing aflatoxin on peanuts.

https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...

You could be enjoying some all natural peanuts and be exposing yourself to a highly carcinogenic byproduct of a fungus that grows on them.

Hell, people were doing that for millennia until some scientists actually discovered it.

Acrylamide is in all baked bread. It's formed during high temperature cooking - like baking.

Toasting just increases the amount present.

I sure can get it in a restaurant.

Ultra processed foods are usually unhealthy because of the relative high amount of additives that are 'needed' to proloung their conservation. Those additives can be natural, like sugar and salt, but still are unhealthy in large quantities. Also heating, which can be seen as natural, can proloung conservation, but often have the side effect of chemical reactions into unhealthy molecules.

The better alternative is to eat non processed food, but only early after reaping. Otherwise the natural (!) chemical reactions like oxidation makes them unhealthy.

The plants in my garden are all natural. I don't use chemicals. Still half of them contain poison like blueacid.

Just to say, natural doesn't mean healthy. Processed doesn't mean unhealthy.

> But there is a clear basis for eating food that your great grandparents would recognise.

I’m quite confident every health metric is better for the Red-3-eating cohort than the great grandparent cohort. Being a great grandparent is associated with cancer, dementia, and near-unity death rate.

Sugar and simple carbs are natural, but are probably the cause of the majority of the world’s healthcare problems.

> I’ll ignore for a second you completely avoided the point to move the goal posts.

Which goal posts did I move? Directly addressing a foundational claim isn't moving goal posts. You said that very few natural foods are directly linked to cancer. That's demonstrably false, as red meat almost certainly is. To your next point:

> Alcohol isn’t a natural food, it’s a result of food rotting.

I genuinely have no idea what you mean by natural then. At what point does something become unnatural? Alcohol certainly occurs in nature quite a bit, and I don't know that I'd call all the instances "rotting". Leavening bread with yeast produces noticeable amounts of alcohol. Orange juice famously contains a surprisingly high level of alcohol.

> Red meat has positive benefits from its consumption, as does fish.

Of course they do and that's why I never claimed they didn't. I would assume all foods have health benefits (beyond the obvious one of course). However, you claimed that most natural foods don't have links to cancer in particular.

> What is the benefit of red5?

I only just realized you said "red 5" earlier. I assume you're referring to red 3 (erythrosine), though I don't think the specific dye matters here.

> If aren’t going to address that, I’ll assume you aren’t interested in anything but whataboutism and aren’t actually engaging in a good faith discussion.

I'm not an expert on the dye in question and know little about it so I purposely didn't comment on it. I don't think I need to do so in order to address your central claim, which seems to be--and correct me if I'm wrong--that to lower our cancer risk we shouldn't add things to our food chain which aren't naturally in our food chain. That claim relies on 1) being able to distinguish what is natural to our food chain, and 2) for natural things being less likely to cause cancer than unnatural things. I believe 2 is flawed for the reasons I already gave. 1 is a famously thorny subject. Even pre-history human diets were varied enough for adaptations for different regions to evolve.

Anyway, I'm an idiot on the subject of dyes but if you want my argument: adding regulations isn't a zero-cost thing. We shouldn't add them without solid justification. I don't have enough knowledge about this subject to know whether or not such justification exists for the red dye in question here. However, your proposed alternative doesn't sound well-defined enough to be argued without you being clearer about what you mean.