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Arguments criticizing the FDA often seem to weirdly ignore the "F." For all I know food safety regulations are radically overzealous too, but if so I've never noticed (or heard a case for) this causing notable harm.
Overall, my experience as a food consumer seems decent—food is cheap, and essentially never harms me in ways I expect regulators could feasibly prevent (e.g., by giving me food poisoning, heavy metal poisoning, etc). I think there may be harmful contaminants in food we haven't discovered yet, but if so I mostly don't blame the FDA for that lack of knowledge, and insofar as I do it seems an argument they're being under-zealous.
1Criticizing FDA food regulations is a niche; it is hard to criticize 'the unseen', especially when it's mostly about pleasure and the FDA is crying: 'we're saying lives! Won't someone thinking of the children? How can you disagree, just to stuff your face? Shouldn't you be on a diet anyway?'
But if you go looking, you'll find tons of it: pasteurized cheese and milk being a major flashpoint, as apparently the original unpasteurized versions are a lot tastier. (I'm reminded of things like beef tallow for fries or Chipotle - how do you know how good McDonald's french fries used to taste before an overzealous crusader destroyed them if you weren't there 30+ years ago? And are you really going to stand up and argue 'I think that we should let people eat fries made with cow fat, because I am probably a lardass who loves fries and weighs 300 pounds, rather than listen to The Science™'?) There's also the recent backfiring of overzealous allergy regulations, which threatens to cut off a large fraction of the entire American food supply to people with sesame & peanut allergies, due solely to the FDA. (Naturally, of course, the companies get the blame.) Similarly, I read food industry people noting that the effect of the ever-increasing burden of FDA regulations is a constant collapse of diversity, as everyone converges on a handful of safe ingredients and having to outsource to centralized food processors who can certify FDA compliance; but how would you ever see this browsing your local Walmart and looking at the colorful labels at the front? (Normal people do not spend much time reading the ingredients label and wondering why everything seems to be made out of the same handful of ingredients, starting with corn syrup.)
4Those are great examples, thanks; I can totally believe there exist many such problems.
Still, I do really appreciate ~never having to worry that food from grocery stores or restaurants will acutely poison me; and similarly, not having to worry that much that pharmaceuticals are adulterated/contaminated. So overall I think I currently feel net grateful about the FDA’s purity standards, and net hateful just about their efficacy standards?
The 'Food' and the 'Drug' parts behave very differently. By default food products are allowed. There may be purity requirements or restaurant regulations but you don't need to run studies or get approvals to serve an edible product or a new combination. By default drugs are banned.
I think the FDA is under zealous about heavy metals and other contaminants. But the FDA does a decent job of regulating food. However the 'drug' side is a nightmare. But the two situations are de facto handled in very, very different ways. So its not obvious why an argument would cover both of them.
Have you ever visited a country without zealous food safety regulations? I think it's one of those things where it's hard to realize what the alternative looks like (plentiful, cheap, and delicious street food available wherever people gather, so that you no longer have to plan around making sure you either bring food or go somewhere with restaurants, and it is viable for individuals to exist without needing a kitchen of their own).
What countries are you imagining? I know some countries have more street food, but from what I anecdotally hear most also have far more food poisoning/contamination issues. I'm not sure what the optimal tradeoff here looks like, and I could easily believe it's closer to the norms in e.g. Southeast Asia than the U.S. But it at least feels much less obvious to me than that drug regulations are overzealous.
(Also note that much regulation of things like food trucks is done by cities/states, not the FDA).
Mexico and Chile are the most salient examples to me. But also I've only ever gotten food poisoning once in my life despite frequent risky food behavior.
Strong agree that the magnitude of the overzealousness is much higher for drugs than for food.
Basically, because food is a domain where there are highly negative tail effects, but not highly positive tail effects, conditioning on eating food at all, and thus it's an area where you can afford to be restrictive, and this is notably not the case for medicine, where high negative and positive tail effect effects exist, so you need to be more lenient on your standards.
I think one exception may be salmonellosis. In USA, you get 1.2 million illnesses, 23000 hospitalizations, and 450 deaths every year. To compare, in EU, selling contaminated chicken products is illegal, and when hundreds of people get sick, it becomes a scandal.
You have to refrigerate eggs in the us while you don't have to in the EU because of FDA regulations about washing the eggs.
There's a strain of pro-sugar and anti-fat policies in regards to food for which the FDA shares some of the blame. Through that they might have contributed to the obesity crisis.
It's possible that the regulations on farmers markets reduce the amount of farmers markets (which might be central to lower obesity levels in France and better health).
When asked to compare French regulations for farmers markets with the US regulations, Claude told me:
Overall, while both countries prioritize food safety, the French system tends to be more flexible for small producers and traditional methods, whereas the US system is more uniformly applied regardless of scale. The French approach often allows for more diverse and traditional products at markets, while the US system provides more consistent safety standards across diverse regions.
You likely could argue that the FDA shares part the blame for the obesity epidemic by setting bad incentives for low-fat and high fructose corn syrup foods while at the same time making it harder for farmers markets to actually sell healthy food.
Apart from that you do have people who oppose forced labeling of GMO products which is also an FDA rule.
I think there may be harmful contaminants in food we haven't discovered yet,
Do you see microplastics as "harmful contaminants that haven't been discovered yet"? It would be possible to have regulations that limit the amount of microplastic in plastic drinking bottles but those currently don't exist.
I'd be interested in an article looking at whether the FDA is better at regulating food safety. I do expect food is an easier area, because erring on the side of caution doesn't really lose you much — most food products have close substitutes. If there's some low but not extremely low risk of a chemical in a food being bad for you, then the FDA can more easily deny approval without significant consequences: Medicine has more outsized effects if you are slow to approve usage.
Yet, perhaps this has led to reduced variety in food choices? I notice less generic or lesser-known food and beverage brands relative to a decade ago, though I haven't verified whether my that background belief is accurate. I'd be curious also for an investigation in such an article about the extent of the barriers to designing a new food product; especially food products that aren't doing anything new, purely a mixture of ingredients already considered safe (or at least, considered allowed). Would there be more variety? Or notably cheaper food?
I was surprised to find a literature review about probiotics which suggested they may have significant CNS effects. The tl;dr of the review seems to be: 1) You want doses of at least or CFU, and 2) You want, in particular, the strains B. longum, B. breve, B. infantis, L. helveticus, L. rhamnosus, L. plantarum, and L. casei.
I then sorted the top 15 results on Amazon for "probiotic" by these desiderata, and found that this one seems to be best.
Some points of uncertainty:
- Probiotic manufacturers generally don't disclose the strain proportions of their products, so there's some chance they mostly include e.g. whatever's cheapest, plus a smattering of other stuff.
- One of the reviewed studies suggests L. casei may impair memory. I couldn't find a product that didn't have L. casei but did have at least CFU of each other recommended strain, so if you take the L. casei/memory concern seriously your best option might be combining this and this.
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For convenience, here's a slightly edited-for-clarity version of the abstract:
38 studies (all randomized controlled trials) were included: 25 in animals and 15 in humans (2 studies were conducted in both). Most studies used Bifidobacterium (eg, B. longum, B. breve, and B. infantis) and Lactobacillus (eg, L. helveticus, and L. rhamnosus), with doses between and 10^10 colony-forming units for 2 weeks in animals and 4 weeks in humans.
These probiotics showed efficacy in improving psychiatric disorder-related behaviors including anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, and memory abilities, including spatial and non-spatial memory.
Because many of the basic science studies showed some efficacy of probiotics on central nervous system function, this background may guide and promote further preclinical and clinical studies. Translating animal studies to human studies has obvious limitations but also suggests possibilities. Here, we provide several suggestions for the translation of animal studies. More experimental designs with both behavioral and neuroimaging measures in healthy volunteers and patients are needed in the future.
Possibly another good example of scientists failing to use More Dakka. The mice studies all showed solid effects, but then the human studies used the same dose range (10^9 or 10^10 CFU) and only about half showed effects! Googled for negative side effects of probiotics and the healthline result really had to stretch for anything bad. Wondering if, as much larger organisms, we should just be jacking up the dosage quite a bit.
On the other hand: half of mouse studies working in humans is an extremely good success rate. We should be quite suspicious of file-drawer effects and p-hacking.
I agree the effect is consistent enough that we should be suspicious of file drawer/p-hacking—although that's also what you'd expect to see if the effect were in fact large—but note that they were different studies, i.e. the human studies mostly weren't based on the non-human ones.
I was initially very concerned about this but then noticed that almost all the tested secondary endpoints were positive in the mice studies too. The human studies could plausibly still be meaningless though.
Has anyone (esp you Jim) looked into fecal transplants for this instead, in case our much longer digestive system is a problem?
In the early 1900s the Smithsonian Institution published a book each year, which mostly just described their organizational and budget updates. But they each also contained a General Appendix at the end, which seems to have served a function analogous to the modern "Edge" essays—reflections by scientists of the time on key questions of interest. For example, the 1929 book includes essays speculating about what "life" and "light" are, how insects fly, etc.
Apparently Otzi the Iceman still has a significant amount of brain tissue. Conceivably memories are preserved?
Another (unlikely, but more likely than almost all other ancient people) candidate for partial future revival: During the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius, part of this man's brain was vitrified.
I found LinkedIn's background breakdown of DeepMind employees interesting; fewer neuroscience backgrounds than I would have expected.