1930 - first cigarette company uses physicians in their ads
1950s - evidence starts mounting that smoking causes lung cancer
1964 - US Surgeon General report on the link between smoking and cancer
1998 - cigarette companies still maintained that the link is controversial
So it takes 70 years, or nearly an entire generation, before all of the machinery at play (businesses, government, healthcare, scientists) can effectively come to the conclusion that they messed up badly and sold people poison. Grim.
>(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)
I don't get it. Are you saying that grain shouldn't be a food group? I think for the purposes of categorizing foods, "starchy staples" is a pretty useful categorization, even if the recommendation to eat 8 servings a day or whatever is misguided.
He's probably referring to the food pyramid, in which those food groups were put forth as foundational building blocks of a healthy diet according to the USDA. [1] That saga overlapped with the sugar lobby blaming fats for heart issues [2], and using their weight with the FDA to keep % Daily Values for sugars off food labels until very recently. [3]
This is why there is supposed to be separation of church and stage, but such rules didn't anticipate "science" becoming religion that is exempt from the criticism of religion. We need some updated principles that separate dogma and faith from legitimate motivations
some humans have been drinking animal dairy for so many thousands of years that some ethnicities have evolved to have a lactose breaking down mutation into adulthood
The concern about soy in infant food is well placed, but your broad statement is hyperbolic.
I don't know where you are, but I'm in the US, where 2/3 of adults are overweight, and half of them are obese. Whatever effect soy has on our endocrine systems, it is dwarfed by the effects caused by body fat itself.
As for the effect of soy on adults, for most people there is no problem unless they have excessive soy consumption, and those problems are fixed simply by eating less soy. Soy also has known health benefits, and an honest discussion would weigh the two.
"Neuroendocrine disruption by soya isoflavones in mature neuroendocrine systems is by and large reversible with dietary modification and thus, with the exception of some hypersensitive groups such as hypothyroid and oncology patients, soya likely poses no long term health risk and may even confer modest benefits."
I agree with you on all points, but I will say that the thread topic is specifically about headlines 75 years from now rather than what current authorities claim today...
So naturally, every correct answer would be controversial in the present.
The truth eventually wins. It is no soy for my family.
> Now go take a look at the protein in every store bought baby formula option
Cow milk; the major infant formula brands, in their main product line, may include soy oil (they use a variety of oils depending on changing supply circumstances) which is not a protein source, and do not include any other soy products.
There are soy protein formulas for infants with galactosemia, who can take neither breast milk nor cow milk based formulas, but that's a fairly special niche.
> any store bought nutrition shake
Very often, cow milk (whey protein isolate and/or milk protein isolate are common), though soy and pea protein are also common.
Question: How do we reconcile "soy is poison" with the fact that some cultures include massive amounts of soy in their diet with little known detriment?
For instance, the Japanese seem to eat tons of the stuff in various forms all the time but they seem to lead healthy lives.
I have no authoritative knowledge here, but the typical answer is they eat mostly fermented soy. I personally have no idea if that actually matters, but that's the answer I've heard.
In China for example, tofu is one of the cheapest possible protein sources (think in terms of a massive pallet of it sold for five dollars) but people are generally aware that it is poisonous in some weird ways that won't kill you. Males are generally urged not to consume it.
This could be a knowledge of just the upper class, though. An unspoken suggestion to leave the tofu and soy for the poor.
According to this (https://www.otsuka.co.jp/en/nutraceutical/about/soylution/en...) Japan consumes 8.19 kg/year/person of soy, while the US consumes 0.04 kg/year/person. That's 200x difference. Japanese life expectancy is half a decade longer than the US, not to mention 1/10 the obesity.
Asian cultures also have some of the shortest people, lowest testosterone men, and physically weakest men in the world. Whether this is worth a few more years of lifespan is up to the eater.
Not necessarily evidence that it isn't problematic for other people. The Japanese seem to be different in ways we are still trying to sort out.
The prevalence of cigarette smoking among Japanese men has been consistently high compared with Western males over the past 30 years. However, during the same period, the incidence of and mortality rates for lung cancer have consistently been lower in Japan than in Western countries ('Japanese smoking paradox').
It may not be soy per se. It may be GMO soy that's the problem. From what I gather, a very high percentage of soy is GMO, far more than is typical for most food items.
No, to the extent there are endocrine issues with soy, it has nothing to do with GMO soy.
I was responding to the first assertion -- that it's "poison." I don't know enough about this topic to really argue about what it does to the endocrine system.
94%, about the same as corn @ 92%.
94% sounds pretty freaking high to me personally.
Thank you for putting some numbers to that for me.
I don't have sources, sorry, and probably shouldn't have replied because my remark falls under what HN likes to dismiss as anecdotal:
I have trouble tolerating soy. Someone I trust suggested to me it might not be soy per se that I have an issue with. It might be GMO soy that is an issue for me.
Some years ago, I did look up stats verifying that soy was GMO at a shockingly high percentage. I had no reason to track those sources and haven't revisited it recently.
In my case, this seems like a plausible explanation for my issue. Though I have a genetic disorder and I'm very sensitive to all kinds of details of food chemistry and pay close attention to such for my health. But "It works for me" has never been respected anywhere on the planet as any kind of meaningful observation that anyone wants to hear.
Trouble tolerating soy is one of the more common problems with food tolerance.
> Someone I trust suggested to me it might not be soy per se that I have an issue with. It might be GMO soy that is an issue for me.
It's theoretically possible that this could be the case, even though GMO foods are much more extensively tested for general safety than crops developed through means that aren't technically GMO (including ones that produces larger and less predictable genetic changes, like modifying the genetics by mutagenesis), but it's kind of a weird thing to suggest, given how frequently soy is a problem (which has been true longer than GMO soy has been on the market) without some very strong reason to believe it's not just a problem with soy as such.
I've been here more than twelve years. I've interacted with you enough that I'm fairly confident you are someone who recognizes my name.
I get endless flak from the world for me being me. One part of that is that I have a genetic disorder -- which I'm quite open about -- and I'm getting well when the entire world tells me that's simply not possible and openly hates on me for -- as best I can tell -- being a former homemaker who spent years homeless who has the audacity to be so incredibly rude as to figure out how to manage my condition with diet and lifestyle instead of drugs and surgeries, thereby making doctors and scientists look "stupid" I guess and we can't have none of that, so no one takes it seriously that I know anything at all about medical anything -- and yet there is this comment about how fluid circulates in the human body with 121 upvotes for whatever damn reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427090
And the way I get treated on HN on that detail of my life aggravates me to no end because I feel like the evidence that I'm not lying or making shit up can be found in my twelve plus year track record of posting here in that my comments are no longer routinely typo-riddled gibberish like they used to so frequently be because I'm generally in less pain, etc these days, having gotten myself healthier.
And in spite of my significant handicap, I seem to be the only openly female member who has ever made the leaderboard and I've done it twice under two different handles, yet the degree to which I get treated differently from other members and also told it's not due to my gender persists and makes me nuts, which may or may not be a factor in me spending less time here in recent months. I really don't know what exactly is driving that. There are too many confounding variables for me to sort that question myself.
Feel free to chalk this up to "Doreen is a loon imagining she is getting better when everyone knows that's not possible, so let's just say she's crazy because her experiences rudely fall outside the all important Overton Window of what people are allowed to believe. And this is one of those utterly nutty things she says rooted in her delusion." and please move on because other than "anecdote" and "I think I know stuff because my damn body works better than it is supposed to" I don't have a leg to stand on here and I am so sick of this entire thing.
With all the smart self made millionaires and people with PhDs and what not that hang here, you would think someone would be able to think for themselves and conclude "Maybe the lady is not nuts and not making shit up and in actual fact has done what she claims."
But, no, no girls actually allowed in the old boys club filled with the best of the best of the best, sir!
Unfortunately, especially historically, psychiatry intersects with "managing bothersome people". Children who wouldn't sit still. Elders who wouldn't stay quiet. Wives with independent personalities. Lobotomies fixed those "problems".
It hasn't really fully separated itself from that today. Some cynical types describe the extremely high rates of psychotropic drugs used in American schools and retirement homes as "chemical lobotomies". In many cases, the drugs are being used to make someone "manageable" (i.e., quiet and compliant) rather than improving their health or quality of life.
(Of course, a mentally sick person who's truly unmanageable, is in fairness, unlikely to have much health or quality of life. But that's the linchpin of justification both historically for actual lobotomies, and today for the widespread use of these drugs. Much caution in medical treatments to make it more convenient to "manage" people is warranted.)
I can think of some recent experimental treatments recommended by the medical establishment that appear less effective than advertised and the long term effects unclear.
That's a great reminder to not get too dogmatic about anything, even when business, government, healthcare and scientists are all aligned.
I'm curious if there were doctors and scientists who dissented from the cigarette consensus prior to the 60s? And how were they treated in such an environment?
There certainly were doctors and scientists who saw the harm of smoking prior to the general consensus. It seems as though this consensus is a result of both mounting medical evidence and a fundemental shift in the way medicine approaches disease, with the field of epidimiology expanding from the study of infectious disease to include a variety of chronic disease and cancers. IIRC, I've read references and anecdotes of smoking and tobacco having obvious negative health impacts as far back as the US Civil War (1860s).
There's a good record in "Research on Smoking and Lung Cancer: A Landmark in the History of Chronic Disease" (The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 1989) [0]:
> By the 1930s, some evidence had been obtained that the
incidence of lung cancer among males was increasing. The evidence came from three sources: official mortality statistics, pathologists' reports of autopsy findings, and the observations of physicians who specialized in the treatment of lung disease.
> Speculation about these factors continued, but there was also much criticism of the view that the reported increase in lung cancer was credible. . . . Factors which were listed as likely to be responsible for an artificial increase were better diagnosis of the disease and increased longevity of the population.
The tech industry is way ahead of any hint of regulations with regards to things like privacy, security or safety. New generations of people are brought unwillingly onto social media by parents. Some problems are hard to reel in by design.
And this is for something that the scientific community did not have vested interest in protecting. That is, the scientific community did not come up with smoking as some boon to humanity.
Now imagine if that was the case here; That the big business and the scientific community had a natural alignment in promoting and protecting a practice with huge commercial interests...
The time to reach that level of consensus for lots of things is longer than 70 years - it can easily be infinite. It's not really clear why the final date in your timeline is 1998 since it doesn't mark a time when 'all the machinery in play effectively came to the conclusion'. The dangers of smoking tobacco were widely known through much of the period you've picked and this is also reflected in your timeline.
From the article, 1998 was the year that the Tobacco Institute and the Committee for Tobacco Research disbanded, which I am perceiving as symbolic of the last formal resistance to the idea that smoking causes cancer.
Sure but it's a pretty arbitrary cutoff. Many other significant limits on smoking (workplace bans, indoor bans, airlines, etc) and various limits on tobacco advertising happened both earlier and later. Some big tobacco lawsuits happened later. Just about any doctor in the 70s, 80s or 90s would have told you smoking is bad for you, public perception and knowledge of the dangers changed over time, etc, etc, etc. The whole thing doesn't really fit in a neatly bracketed time period in a meaningful way.
The tobacco lawsuits of the 90s brought the episode to a close. Tobacco companies now have to admit the health harms of smoking. Philip Morris does so at the top of marlboro.com and in several other places.
there was plenty of research available that smoking was bad as early as the 1920s, it just got silenced. Mainly because Germany was one of the countries that led the movement. Plus billions of dollars working to stop anybody trying to end the money printing from the tobacco industry
>In 1930s Germany, scientific research for the first time revealed a connection between lung cancer and smoking, so the use of cigarettes and smoking was strongly discouraged by a heavy government sponsored anti-smoking campaign
>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism
>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism
That's really interesting. I dug a little more into it[0]. Apparently the underlying reasoning was that the Nazis associated smoking with "degenerates" and damage to "bodily purity." So when the research hit the US, people must have associated anti-smoking with those Nazi ideas. I wonder if tobacco companies latched onto this momentum to keep their public image healthy?
That tradition hasn't died out yet. There are a ton of common sense things done in many European countries that aren't implemented in the US because of apparent links to "communism."
Could you give some examples? I am from a post communist country and am interested in what could be percieved as communist in the US. My guesses are publi transport and universal health care on the top 2 spots.
Depends how deep into the south you go. It fares from clear ones, like government run anything, to extremes like mixing races, homosexuality, and anything the CDC says right now.
Basically Fox news uses "Communism" as a synonym for "things I don't like"
It is different, because USA was never communist country. And those who argue by "it is like communistm" typically have only very superficial understanding of history of Comunism and of culture it had. Or none at all often.
When did Big Tobacco start using all of the additives to up the addictive level of the things? Does that correlate to the timing of when they started using the "physician approved" nonsense?
I don't have a citation, just a hunch this coincided with the chemical revolution of the 1950's. I strongly suspect though smoking may have been correlated with poor health before then, that there probably were not 400K Americans dying of smoking-related illnesses every year until after the chemical revolution and the cigarette industry intentionally taking advantage of addiction by standardizing on precise and elevated nicotine-dosing as well as the infusion of 300 some carcinogens. So Big Tobacco loses a big case in the 1990's, must pay billions of dollars for intentionally making their product extremely addicting, but this punishment is lifted in the early 2000's without full payment. But, astoundingly, the Big Tobacco case and settlement overlooked a major detail (that the intentional addition of 300+ carcinogens, for the purposes of increasing addiction, were, in fact, extremely deadly, and that the industrialized process of creating deadly cigarettes isn't at all necessary for producing and selling tobacco products), which allowed Big Tobacco to continue creating a far more deadly and far more addicting product than tobacco, and thus, inexplicably actually, go on killing 400K Americans annually, and however many more worldwide. It really is the craziest thing.
It's longer than that, the term "tobacco heart" was around in 1880! I remember reading a short story from around then (I think by Mark Twain), where the character is criticized for the unhealthy habit of smoking.
Maybe lung cancer was 1950s, but health in general? Much, much earlier than that.
The issue is that with wealth comes an ever increasing focus on risks as you address the most severe first.
Come visit a developing country and you’ll find that wearing a seatbelt or drinking clean water is still not widely accepted. They have bigger problem right now.
