It makes me angry to think of how wreckless the generations before millenials were. Lead's risks and damages were well-known long before 1996. And they still didn't ban it until then.
Same goes for sugar. We know the dangers it poses, we are also seeing how much it increases risk of death due to covid.
I don't think we should be surpsied, as much as pushing to regulate this garbage.
As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
There should be no surprise that capital takes precedent over health in our current system / culture.
Arguably, we should care more about sugar than we do about covid.
> As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
My kids school lunch now is all packaged sugary crap. Corndogs, cinnamon buns for breakfast, Trix yogurt, etc. Even the milk is gross - lowest bidder swill that tastes like wax.
The hot food items are all oven-baked, in plastic wrappers. It’s essentially the same crap that you would see in a university vending machine.
Process is much easier to change then changing people. Its why the government deducts taxes from you, instead of you paying at the end of the year (both because you'd spend it all, and you'd be pissed doing a bulk sum payment).
Likewise we have levers, should we be selling soda / pop with outrageous amounts of sugar in them without some sort of healthcare tax? I don't mind sugar being available, but right now its subsidized by our health care fees. My insurance is more expensive because of diabetes, heart disease, etc.
Except that presumably includes the current generation, instead of everyone pre-millenial. There is certainly not any real consensus or meaningful action being taken in regards to sugar. It is as prevalent now as it ever was.
Indeed. Added sugar and high fructose corn syrup is in everything. I have to go out of my way to find a brand of bread that doesn't have added high fructose corn syrup. It's ridiculous.
I havent bought bread in probably 4 Years now. Investing half an hour of work (distributed over the day) every other week for a 2kg Bread. Half of it goes in the freezer.
Also buying fresh vegtables and cooking instead of buying ready made dishes helps.
You're probably right, but that's still a lot better than manufactured foods. Also the funny thing with fruit and veg is that the opposite can happen, with the "Red Delicious" as the leading example, bred for looks and lost all the taste.
Even without human interference, fruit can actually be bad for you if you eat it at the wrong time and in the wrong quantities - fructose has the same effect as sugar - but now we are basically getting into nutrition more generally which is a tricky subject. Fruit still comes with many other nutritional benefits compared to sugary manufactured snacks, and even fibre that make it worth while (note that orange juice, as minimally as we are processing the fruit, still allows you to consume it in unnatural quantity and concentration, which can be very bad).
Not really. That's exactly when I had in mind when I said "vast majority of people". The biggest problem is access to a cooking fire and some sort of refrigeration you can rely on for most of the year.
It does require spending a little time cooking and probably to shop around rather than getting everything from a (possibly overpriced) supermarket depending on how much you can spend. So it's strictly an inconvenience, it requires stretching the argument really thin to view it otherwise.
I have a simple rule: If it has processed sugar in the ingredient list _anywhere_ I don't buy it.
If everyone did this, less processed sugar would be in our food supply. (corn syrups especially but also weird stuff like stevia, sneaky stuff like maltodextrin, etc..)
Everything is a choice to some extent. You could have gone and lived in the middle of a forest to avoid the lead poisoning.
The problem is there are far too many pollutants for everyone to be able to educate themselves about every one, and take steps to avoid them. Instead, it's the role of government to decide in each case whether to allow, ban, tax, inform or restrict each type of pollutant.
Between the marketing for children, the many "sugar holidays" (Valentines, Easter, Christmas, Halloween, etc), the widespread use of processed foods in children's diets, the fact that every single grocery store in America puts sugar products on loud display, and that some restaurants only serve sugar based drinks, I would argue that it is not possible for American children to avoid sugar.
An adult can choose to eat it or not (I'm ignoring the addictive nature of concentrated sugar), but our public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy. It's about as natural as cocaine is. Sure, it comes from a plant, but it gets refined and concentrated into levels that are unheard of in nature and toxic to the body.
Virtually my entire extended family are working class people, and they all were feeding their kids apple/orange juice on a regular basis without diluting it. When I showed my sister that she could literally do a 5% solution of apple juice in water, and it still tasted sweet, she was blown away. I'm pretty sure most members of the laptop class know that juice is bad for kids (gatorade too), but that message hasn't filtered to most of the population. And these kids are too young to know how toxic it is for them.
> public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy.
Can you cite specific examples of the public health establishment pushing juice as healthy? I got a minor in nutrition over a decade ago and back then, public health officials were very quick to call out the juice industry for its predatory tactics on kids and false equivalencies. This doesn't match my experience in university at all.
You're exactly right. Public health in general has not pushed juice, but what I should have stated is they have been complicit in not condemning it and pushing for prominent labeling on juice. They've sat back and allowed it to be marketed aggressively, to a point where the mayor of NYC exempted fruit juices from the proposal for a sugar tax. The general public thinks juice is healthy. That's easily remedied with public health messaging, but we all know why it hasn't: farmers/USDA/lobbyists.
Sugar is bad, but it's only one part of the picture:
"Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (e.g., sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat."
This might seem far fetched, but I think it's pretty accurate.
When tobacco was at it's height most people didn't really think it was bad for you - which gradually turned into a denialistic "yeah but it's not that bad" - it took a long time for society to come to terms with just how harmful it is.
The quantity of sugar in every day food has increased dramatically over time, and our attitude to it has been similar to the denialistic phase for tobbaco - "yeah it might hurt my waistline a little bit but it tastes too good" - Making people think if they aren't fat then it's ok, when really the consequences are far worse, sugar is pretty much poison for our bodies, it's bad for every single part of it (melts teeth, causes gum disease which poisons your bloodstream, ages skin, causes inflammation, causes heart disease, causes diabetes, affects the immune system, messes with cognition, makes you more hungry by sharply switching off ketosis, and finally displaces nutritional food making your body even more susceptible to aforementioned ailments).
I wish I understood this better when I was growing up. Thankfully I had a parent who never encouraged sugary food, and put in the effort to cook good meals... but many people don't and are at the mercy of what super markets sell, which is increasingly extremely sugary food.
If there is a single leading harmful substance that is as prevalent as leaded petrol was - i think it's probably sugar (in the west at least).
One major aspect that makes sugar a category of its own is that there is a safe dose, and the safe dose isn't small. It's very easy to count how much you consume and not all cultures suffer from overconsumption.
Same for industrial seed oils. We know it's dangerous.
But monied interests and some vegetarians who think all things that come from plants must be good for you, prevent this from being shoved into near all packaged foods.
>As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
Well also, the right-wing culture war machine decided Michelle Obama was taking everyone's children's freedoms away.
> Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise
You know, I wouldn't mind this as long as the scale of the donation was big enough. If they donated $1000 per american to the US government, who could use it to reduce taxes or improve life for americans more than the sugar decreases quality of life through illness and poor health, that would be great.
But they didn't. I bet their donation was $100k or so, or less than 1 cent per american.
I don't think it helps to make this a generational warfare issue. Especially since it's not like every person in a particular generation had a say in these decisions.
It's also too easy to cast judgement backwards in time, given the lack of context and the benefit of hindsight. Better to look forward.
As true in 1888 as now, Froude: "Each age would do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them, instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage."
Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
We saw it with tobacco/lead/etc, so it's only natural/right to apply that experience to other things. Theorizing that sugar/THC could also fall into the same model is not wasting of anyone's time. If evidence is found that it is bad, then good can come from that knowledge. If evidence is found that it is not bad, then party on Wayne. But the studies should be conducted. Let's look forward to having actual knowledge rather than just blindly carrying on in the dark with no flashlight to guide.
We should definitely move away from leaded gasoline and housing should not be allowed to develop near airports. Phrasing the conversation around "showering it over the land below" is to the point of fearmongering. The airplanes burning 100LL today consume gasoline at the same rate as an old pickup truck - they go about 12 miles per gallon. Lead pollution today due to aviation is a fraction of what it was in the past and is unlikely to even be the largest environmental exposure for most children.
yeah i live under the flightpath of a lot of flight school traffic and this weighs a bit on my mind. pretty busy flight area too. Who knows the damage really? are there tests you can take?
yeah the area overhead is very literally a training path where they do a lot of circling stuff in small planes. they do have a decent amount of jets flying very high though.
I agree that people have been reckless with population safety in past, but your comment seems to imply that the Millenial generation are somehow flawless with regards with this subject. While safety is now more stringent than in the past, I very much doubt that this is the case.
Physical safety is more stringent. You can't swing a dead cat without a horde of people with safety vests and clipboards writing you up for it.
However, the planet is arguably the most ideologically polluted it's ever been. First world cultures have developed an aversion to individual and organization/group responsibility. Democracy is not doing great. Many institutions are bankrupt. Hardship is looming. We're in for a wild ride.
Both are a product of the same process of privileging of commodity production for profit over overall collective well-being.
And yes, I'm aware that said commodity production produces wealth which also improves well-being. But there's a contradiction there in our economic model that is not serving us well.
EDIT: I should add to my point above that what's common with both these is one overarching world altering product that has completely transformed the world: the automobile.
Ribbons of tarmac lace the earth (it wouldn't surprise me if this is a long term environmental problem, too), even in some of the most remote sections of the planet.
Cities are built around them, privileging automobile use above a bunch of other aspects of quality of life.
Road transport is 75ish% of global CO2 emissions.
And, yeah, leaded fuel poisoned our bodies, minds, and the environment for decades.
Economics has a term for this: negative externalities. A buys a snowblower from B, gaining 4 health for not shoveling and reducing everybody's health by 3 from pollution. B buys a leaf blower from C, gaining 4 health from not raking and reducing everybody's health by 3 from pollution. C buys a lawnmower from A, gaining 4 health from not scything and reducing everybody's health by 3. Each seller gets 4 health from the money. Every trade is beneficial to both parties by 1 health unit, but now, everybody is worse off by 1 health unit than they would be had the trades not happened. In practice, we're usually D-Z, who participated in no trades and get a net reduction in health of 9.
The way it usually goes is "everyone is +5, except the village that shares the watershed with the mine"
On anything but the shortest timeline things like like wealth, health and productivity are fungible at the societal level.
If the net cumulative effect of the externalities wasn't smaller than the benefits of the progress then the progress wouldn't happen because more people would be worse off and things would grind to a halt because the gains would be more than offset.
Not only is it not naive, but avoiding these scenarios woth market regulation is one of the main purposes of modern government. Hence, vaccination policies and CFC regulation. Libertarians like to believe that negative externalities and other market failures don't exist, that the invisible hand is always benevolent, but examples abound for those who do not follow a religion that forbids them from noticing.
>Not only is it not naive, but avoiding these scenarios woth market regulation is one of the main purposes of modern government. Hence, vaccination policies and CFC regulation. Libertarians like to believe that negative externalities and other market failures don't exist, that the invisible hand is always benevolent, but examples abound for those who do not follow a religion that forbids them from noticing.
It's still naive, or maybe obtuse. Repeating the "negative externality" buzzword doesn't give you a blank check to peddle your preferred ideology (government intervention/regulation) while crapping on the other team.
Without regulation we get lithium batteries and a couple dozen poisoned watersheds.
With regulation we get slightly more expensive batteries and fewer poisoned watersheds.
Regardless of how you or I or anyone else feels about regulation it's somewhere between farcical and deceitful to pretend that the economic activity in both of those situations doesn't help more than it hurts. If it didn't work this way progress would grind to a halt because the increased material wealth of having the batteries would be more than cancelled out by the problems that poisoned watersheds create, to run with the existing example.
Examples where most people are worse off are easy to think of. I gave an example where everybody is worse off because it is an interesting scenario. I made no claim about how often that situation occurs. There is no reason for overall progress to grind to a halt — the Nash equilibria for a game can be arbitrarily bad. There is only the obvious conclusion that governments should get involved to fix these problems when they occur, including regulating lead use, given that we see plenty of governments that have not and have suffered the consequences.
As of 2021, out of 432 members in the house of congress, a scant 31 are millenials. In the senate, just 1.
Millenials are -not- the ones responsible for disastrous policies (yet). They haven't been around long enough yet. It's mainly boomers, some gen x, and a few silents.
edit: Added "(yet)" because it's not obvious, I suppose. My point here is that the actual policymakers in congress, right now, are majority "not-millenials". So stop blaming millenials and/or gen-z when they're not the ones currently writing legislature...
Correct. I've no doubt that the new generation will also make some terrible calls thanks to lobbying being legal. I believe the environment will be much more prioritized, but we'll have to see.
However, I'm tired of silents/boomers/gen-xers making comments about and blaming millenials as if it's somehow our fault the boomers and silents in congress are out of touch. A quick look at voting demographics and the demographics of congress dispels that notion (for now, as of 2022).
Edit: That struck a chord with millenials, ha! Tell your friends that bitching does not help, voting does. Boomers seem to understand this and so they have a disproportionate amount of influence. You want it to stop? VOTE.
> Edit: That struck a chord with millenials, ha! Tell your friends that bitching does not help, voting does. Boomers seem to understand this and so they have a disproportionate amount of influence. You want it to stop? VOTE.
There is, still, a statistical bump in the boomers, hence the baby boom.
There is just more of them, and they vote. They've only just started dying in big numbers.
Plus the older voters get the more they tend to vote, for various reasons.
It's my understanding that millenials and gen-z make up 31% [0], as of -2020-. Boomers and older still make up 44%. So sure, go ahead and blame millenials and gen-z for policies made in 2020 and onward.
We are just as dumb. Processed meat causes cancer, micro plastics are doing all sorts to us: arguably, we are dumber, because we know all about the harm that lead and cigarettes cause and yet… we haven’t applied that lesson. Do you eat meat?
It didn’t even stop then. My own city (Portland) has been regularly exceeding EPA lead action levels since 1998[1].
All they need to do is treat the water to raise ph like every other city with a large lead solder install base, but they’ve been dragging their feet for literally decades while the people they serve get lead exposure.
People didn't wear seatbelts in the 1950's. Infant mortality was 10% before the age of 1 in 1910. At the same time, homeless children would roam the streets of cities and orphanages were common. The #1 form of surgery back then was amputation.
To make such a statement implies how little perspective one might have for how hard life was, the risk and tradeoffs being made, especially when there were unknown - and especially for 'how good we have it now'.
I'm not even that old, but I have the lived experience from my grandparents who were born on farms without electricity and I believe without a doubt that we have crossed the line into 'civilizational wealth'. We are really rich for the first time in history. Unequal, yes, but even lower-middle class people have access to vast material bounty: actions, travel, decorative clothing, choices, opportunity, education, amazing produce throughout the year, entertainment, technology, delivery, amazing health care innovations. Heck .... people are even less afraid of getting shot these days because we know how to stabilise and save people. Getting 'shot' used to mean 'pretty much going go die'. Even 'heart surgery' is now done on an outpatient basis these days like getting an oil change.
'Millenials' have already let loose Facebook and other completely destructive technologies, and are taking absolutist views on necessarily complicated things like gender identity (and more) and I'm 100% certain that history will come back like a wrecking ball on at least those things, of course it's already happening with Social Media.
The issue with lead is hard to fathom, it's still a bit grey, I'm wondering what the effect of some other things are going to be i.e. micro plastics, and the steroids they use on livestock etc..
I'm not 'organic' by ideology but I'm wary that there's a lot of risk in those kinds of things.
And it goes further: lighting in the cities all night, and noise pollution in the city and with our gadgets. It should be mostly dark and quiet at night.
That comment seems to blame a large group of people for something a small group did. The problem with lead is the same problem it always was and still is, a small group of people benefit and are able to make everyone else suffer. We clearly need to fix that, probably with specific measures to limit undue influence in congress. We should focus on those specific measures instead of divisive generalizations.
I hate that everything has to devolve into some kind of "this generation sucks" debate. Whether or not we can blame boomers does not matter, at least not until we have a time machine to go remedy stuff. The fact is that the decisions have been made, the damage is done, and we need to figure out what to do now, regardless of whose fault it is.
It seems like so many of these conversations end at the "who is responsible" part, without the understanding that we really shouldn't care.
I wouldn't complain if they were already unable to do anything, but many of them are actively preventing further improvements. Often due to it coming at a cost for them. Their unwillingness trickles down to other generations both in teachings and in pressuring the next generation what can and can't be done, and how to respond. Most of late gen X has also thrown in the towel, leaving the future generations to solve it themselves.
This despite the fact leaders are overwhelmingly at/past middle age, as is wealth required to make moves as an individual.
Sure, but I think that it's needlessly divisive to pin it on a generation, particularly when I can find counterexamples for each.
I have no issue whatsoever with complaining about individuals who are destroying the world right now [3], I'm certainly not going to sit here and defend basically any fossil fuel executive, but I think saying it's a generational thing is needlessly reductive and doesn't buy us anything. I don't think Noam Chomsky [1] or Bernie Sanders are destroying the world [2], and I don't think millennial/gen-z bozos like Charlie Kirk are helping it.
[1] I realize he's older than a boomer, but I think my point still fits.
[2] At least not advocating for stuff that's destroying the planet. I am not trying to take a directly political stand.
It's pretty insane. I was born in 1981, and near as I can tell, I'm likely a bit luckier than most other Americans my age because I grew up in such a sparsely populated, rural area. Still, there's no question that even people living in areas like me were impacted since most of the population drove old trucks, including my family.
It's crazy to think about having a lower IQ than I was capable of having for something that could have been solved a few decades previously.
There are a lot of things wrong with this take that others have pointed out, but for some reason no one noted that as the article points out, the people most impacted by this were born in the late 60s and 70s, and those people are Gen X. We didn't choose this, we just suffered for it. Someone born in 1976 didn't vote until 1994.
Recreational marijuana and JUUL is very much a millenial/gen Z hobby, and it is being pushed with a fervor that glosses over serious studies any potential health risks.
IMO weed will be in 50 years where "big tobacco" is right now.
Smoking something is obviously bad for your health, I don't need a study to tell me that, you are literally inhaling smoke. Followed by masses dying of cancer.
Eating marijuana can have some negative cognitive effects but its pretty obvious it doesn't do anything terrible looking at all the old hippies.
For one thing, has anyone actually looked at all the old hippies? And if they have, the old hippies probably didn't have access to anything as potent as we do, and I'm assuming today's edibles are (or eventually will be) full of all sorts of nonsense additives, because that's what we do.
I'm not saying I know either way, but this seems like an easy thing to be wrong about.
I mean we're not talking about additives, there are additives in lots of stuff that makes it harmful. And yes the old hippies didn't have as strong of weed, and there may be some threshold at which bad things happen more frequently, but just looking at the big picture it doesn't look all that dire.
It definitely hurts parts of cognition, and is linked to certain mental illnesses, there are other odd and end health concerns that pop up rarely. Overall marijuana is pretty gentle when ingested, you can just tell from your own health when consuming it.
When I smoked cigarettes I felt terrible all the time, and when I stopped it was night and day. Consuming edibles I feel pretty darn good actually, less stress, better sleep, and when I get off them I don't feel like I've been harming my body. This opinion is shared by pretty much everyone I know
Speaking as a millennial, don't praise us too soon. We haven't really gotten the reins of power yet, so it's easy to claim that we'd do it better. In reality I imagine we'll still succumb to various corrupting forces just like every other generation.
Granted I still think we have a more enlightened perspective on some issues as a generation just due to better education overall, but at best we might manage a marginal increase in overall quality of life for people.
Plus the basket of crises we've faced starting with the Great Financial Crisis has allowed many to blame external factors for their situation and not take personal responsibility, even when they clearly should. I've met plenty of unwise/stupid millennials who could do more to better their situation, but are happy to just sit still and bitch about everything but their self-destructive habits.
It's like how the Boomers got associated with Woodstock/the hippies/counter-culture, but in reality most Boomers didn't rebel all that much. Boomers elected Reagan, and he ran in part as an anti-counter-culture figure.
Fantastic answer. In 30 years time we have no idea how the youth then will view our race for urban living, yoga, tech hustles and high inequality, juice and vegan diets, electric cars, open concept houses, social media, tech surveillance and screen addiction and various other things which are less cutesy and more sinister.
One thing that already gets me thinking of future generations looking down on us will be this quest for travel and high living especially for social media glamor and the new keeping up with Jones'. This increases more flights, polluting untouched places and how bad it is for the climate.
similarly, the second leading cause of death is cancer, and yet we willingly bask in cancer-causing substances all the time. future generations will probably look back and think, wtf?
It's easy to point the finger at boomers, but where they maybe killed us with lead, we're killing the next generation with plastics. Sure, plastics were started in earlier generations but we're showing no signs of slowing down in usage.
So is fluoride’s neurotoxicity[1], especially for developing brains, and we still insist on using it, to just give one example. We’re no less reckless than prior generations and our children will be just as baffled looking back at us as we are now.
Yes I’m aware that idiots are also fixated on fluoridation. That doesn’t make the science wrong though.
Neurotoxicity appeared to be dose-dependent , and tentative benchmark dose calculations suggest that safe exposures are likely to be below currently accepted or recommended fluoride concentrations in drinking water.
That the authors felt the need to pack four weasel words into the sentence saying maybe it’s ok doesn’t indicate that they believe it’s safe.
The fortification properties afforded by fluoride are entirely topical, meaning that fluoride-containing toothpaste can be considered beneficial. You use it and then spit it out. Drinking fluoridated water can hardly be considered helpful. Most of the fluoride content of water goes directly into the stomach where its effects are strictly not studied, and if you know anything about the fluoride ion, the effects are most likely detrimental, and possibly horrendous.
