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[+] 50 points 4 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 67 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Asbestos really seemed like a miracle material. Its so easy to pull out of the ground and process into anything from tiles to fabric to brake disks. It's abundant, cheap, and easy to mine. In a world where it seemed everything was always catching on fire, asbestos was magically fireproof. It was saving houses and children and housewives from going up in flames if they got too near a stove or fireplace. It was revolutionising industry, making workplaces safer and more efficient. I really don't blame anyone for using it everywhere in those early years.

    But greed took over after asbestos products flooded the market and the major health hazards became apparent. The corpos and the govts were too greedy and scared to admit it was dangerous, because that would mean choosing to dismantle a billions-dollar value strong industry and start recalling everything.

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  • [–] 31 points 4 months ago

    Exactly this. I knew this old retired fighter pilot guy, and he had asbestos gloves he held onto from his service days. He let me play with them at a BBQ once. You could straight up shove your hand into a pile of burning coals, hold it in your hand. Cool to the touch. It really seemed like magic. It really is a wonder-material. If not for the afromentioned cancer....

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Like with aspartame. There was no legit long term studies done until recently and it showed that aspartame can reduce intelligence

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Wow. Thanks for mentioning this. I had no idea.

    I found this study published in the journal of the American Academy of Neurology just last year. The results are kind of horrifying. And it's not only aspartame -- they made similar connections with other low-calorie sweeteners.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    There seem to be problems with their study

    Here's the first glaring one:

    the mean consumption of LNCSs was 92.1 ± 90.1 mg/d.

    What an absolutely ridiculous range of consumption for a study population.

    Also the years they were collecting this data unfortunately had a whole pandemic occur. Covid is very well documented at causing long term mental decline. I'd like to see how many of their study group had confirmed covid infectious.

    Overall I'm not saying it's not worth further investigation, but there are far too many unknown variables that the study did not control for. Rate and frequency of consumption are huge.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Wait is this ± 1 standard deviation? So basically, it's either 0 or 180 in a binary choice?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Basically, the fact that they allowed people consuming 2 mg and 182.2 mg into the same study group is insane.

    Also considering 1 can (12 fl oz) diet coke contains about 184 mg of aspartame, they didn't even bother to study an interesting group. I'm sure you could find 100 people that consume at least 2 cans worth a day.

    Honestly I'm curious how someone consumes only 2mg of aspartame a day. That's about 1 ml of diet coke

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