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The WHO is about to declare aspartame can cause cancer
(www.vox.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Lead was used way past discovering it was dangerous, and is still used enough to cause problems in specific populations. Just like cigarettes. If there is a large moneymaking industry and it suddenly comes to light that what it is producing is dangerous, they have a lot of motivation to put money behind keeping that knowledge from getting out or, when it does, keep it from affecting law. They lobby/bribe, they abuse the legal system, whatever they can to avoid going under. As such, it's not safe to assume that something is not dangerous simply because it hasn't been banned.
Was there a denialism effort about lead? As far as I know there just were no regulators to crack down on it back in the day. It's still used in things where it's impractical to replace and in theory is disposed of carefully.
With cigarettes, I seem to remember that a branch of the US government declared them unsafe in the 70's. Academics usually will raise the alarm in a big way if they find something really dangerous and it's not dealt with swiftly. Legislators can be a different matter (see cigarettes, climate change and so on), but when it comes to food don't tend to get involved.
The Roman's used to add lead acetate to their wines to make them sweet. There's records of people at the time noting that drinking to much of this lead sweented wine seems to cause issues. So humanity has known that lead isn't necessarily a good thing for the human body for a very long time.
Yep. They also used mercury to refine gold, and just accepted that gold mine slaves died a lot for some reason. There was no Roman labs doing actual toxicity testing, though, and definitely no Roman FDA.