This is a tongue in cheek question, but here is the background:

Some weeks ago, I bought a bottle of "organic" water at lunchtime. Then I watched some TV commercials about plenty of "chemical-free" products, although any plant or animal is full of chemicals, of course. There is a large emphasis on "natural products" as healthier alternatives, although tobacco, marijuana and alcohol are perfectly natural.

Here is a quote I used in another thread:

Herbal remedy. One which is natural and therefore safe. See tobacco.

I was reminded of all these incidents and quotes while watching a movie called Sunshine State, where one of the characters (a real estate developer) says "Nature is overrated". Is it?

While I think nature IS overrated, I do believe that chemicals are somewhat underrated. I’d rather take a double-whisky than an Excedrin any day, processed alcohol or not. I’m something of a believer in moderation. A moderate ribeye for dinner, a moderate bottle of Chardonnay to go with it, a moderate eight cups of coffee with breakfast, a moderate pizza for lunch. A moderate pack of cigarettes daily. I used to quite like marijuana, but it’s not legal here so I eschew it.

Strangely, I’m almost never sick. Chemicals, antihistamines, analgesics, steroids, iboprophenes, hormone supplements, any other goofy supplements, antidepressants, snake oil and loopy juice are simply not for me. I find the "health" shelves at the supermarket just amazing.  

- PW

[quote author=KatyBr link=board=omni;num=1064789022;start=0#3 date=09/28/03 at 23:02:34]
I sincerely hope it stays that way for you, that you die a robust cowboy at 120 when a runaway bull knocks you to the ground.

I sincerely hope so too, although it seems unlikely. But I made my point badly. I detest chemicals. I’d rather die of natural causes. Being hit by a garbage truck, for example.

Veering off-topic for a second (I know, I know). I was recently asked by my life insurance inquisitor what my mother died of. Old age, I said. He became a tad confused. There wasn’t a box for that on his questionnaire, apparently.

- PW

One of my points is the use of the word chemical, because chemicals are naturally everywhere: we are made of them. Incidentally, wine is pretty much a natural product: fermented grape juice. It is possible to buy wine without any additives. Same thing for beer (not the grapes part, of course). Petroleum, the acetyl group (CH[sub]3[/sub]C(=O)- ), several acids are natural products.

One of my points is the use of the word chemical, because chemicals are naturally everywhere: we are made of them.

OK, OK. I know we’re dealing with a biometrics boffin here.  :)  Are you saying that there are ‘good’ chemicals and ‘bad’ chemicals? I can see how there might be.

- PW
is getting confused. Again.

As I understand it (and I’m not a chemist) chemicals are any substance used in or resulting from a reaction involving changes to atoms or molecules. The elements from the periodic table are any of the 105 substances (of which 93 occur naturally) that consists of atoms with the same number of protons in their nuclei. These elements combine to form molecules, which are the simplest unit of a chemical compound that can exist, consisting of two or more atoms held together by chemical bonds. Definitions are from Collins.

Some examples of well known (and completely natural molecules) are chlorophyll, present in plants and responsible in part of their green colour (C[sub]55[/sub]H[sub]72[/sub]O[sub]5[/sub]N[sub]4[/sub]Mg) and haemoglobine that gives red blood cells their colour.

PW, I suppose that I want to say that 1. there are "good" and "bad" chemicals and 2. Everything depends on the dose.

From uncronopio:

. . . This is a tongue in cheek question, but here is the background:
Some weeks ago, I bought a bottle of "organic" water at lunchtime. Then I watched some TV commercials about plenty of "chemical-free" products, although any plant or animal is full of chemicals, of course. There is a large emphasis on "natural products" as healthier alternatives, although tobacco, marijuana and alcohol are perfectly natural. . . .

From Katybr:

. . .  Brown willow bark, when made into a tea, is quite efficacious for mild pain and relatively free of side effects, but the ASA that is made artifically to give the same benefits as Brown willow bark, salicylic acid, becomes Acetylsalicylic acid (not at all sure of this spelling, no doubt some nice officious person will correct it) is harsh and hard on the stomach. . . .

From Uncronopio:

PW, I suppose that I want to say that 1. there are "good" and "bad" chemicals and 2. Everything depends on the dose.

[rant]

It’s been 30 years since I got my degree in chemistry, and I’ve worked in computers ever since, but I seem to recall that "organic" chemistry is the chemistry of hydrocarbon compounds.  Water has the hydrogen but not the carbon, so water a priori is not "organic" unless it also contains dissolved organic compounds.  A 50/50 mixture of water and alcohol would be an example of a "good" "organic" water better known as 100 proof vodka, but a mixture of water and 2,4,5-tricholorphenoxyacetic acid (a chemical defoliant) is best used as broad-leaf weed killer on your lawn and not as a beverage.  

Katy, willow bark may be fine for minor pain, but ASA (acetyl salicylic acid—better known as aspirin) probably works against better against stronger pain.  However, even though aspirin is also good at reducing fever, it has been associated with Reyes Syndrome, as have other salicylates, so your willow bark would also be unsafe for use in children under 19 who have a fever.  The drug of choice for fighting fevers in children is acetominophen, of which the most widely know brand name is Tylenol.  

I don’t know how many gallons of willow bark tea one would have to drink to fight the pain of arthritis.  Aspirin, which also has anti-inflammatory properties, was once the drug of choice, but the side effects of theraputic doses (stomach problems and tinnitis (ringing in the ears)) led to the search for other drugs.  

As Luis said, "Everything depends on the dose."  PW’s double-whiskey won’t hurt him unless he imbibes too many of them; teenagers have been poisoned by alcohol, usually by drinking too much hard liquor on a dare.  

Back in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s I heard about a book called Natural Poisons in Natural Foods.  The one example I remember was the pre-Darwin Award fool who figured that apples were good for you, so apple seeds must be too.  After all, if he ate a few when he ate the apples it didn’t bother him.  So, he went to a cider mill and came away with a large quantity of apple seeds and ate them like peanuts.  As the story goes, apple seeds have cyanide in them, but there is not enough in the few seeds in an apple to hurt you.  Start eating them in industrial quantities, however, and you soon become a Darwin Award nominee.  

While on the subject of nuts (present company excepted), there are some people who are violently allergic to peanuts (how much more natural can you get?), so much so that some schools ban peanuts outright.  They are as dangerous to these kids as bee stings are to others.  The day-care center/pre-school where my wife works has to keep an adrenelin "stick" in the refrigerator because one child is allergic.  They’ve had to use it on several occasions.

As for "good" and "bad" chemicals, if you think about it, the "stuff" we flush down the toilets is a natural product, especially so if all you eat are "natural" foods, but I don’t see anyone encouraging us to save it or just toss it anywhere.  

[/rant]

(Well, there was one time in history when some of it was saved.  The first person who was almost saved by penicillin was a British firefighter who was severerly burned.  Such burns usually led to infection and death.  In desperation they tried their limited supply of this new drug penicillin and he started making an amazing recovery.  Unfortunately, they ran out of penicillin and he started to relapse.  It would take too long to make more, so they collected his urine and recovered the penicillin eliminated by his kidneys, but it was not enough to save him.  The experience did, however, demonstrate the effectiveness of antibiotics.  And the rest, as they say, is history.)

Wow.  Interesting post(s).  I wish I’d seen this earlier.  I especially liked PW’s first post, as it reminds me of something I am fond of saying, which is "I prefer my moderation in moderation" (always a hit at dinner parties, I must say).

I find that the whole organic/chemical free advertising scheme is simply a way that marketers have found to dupe the unwashed masses (or overly washed, as the case may be) into paying a premium for an item with less of something or another.  Chemicals tend to scare people.  Gosh, chemicals have been linked to cancer in rats, so they must be bad for you!  Or so the thinking goes.  Just as an example, there is somewhere on http://www.snopes.com (I don’t have the exact location handy) a story about a kid who polled people about what they thought of the use of dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO).  Most respondents were against DHMO.  Of course, this is simply another way of saying "water", so I wouldn’t worry to much about it yourselves if I were in your positions.

Personally, I drink enough Diet Mello Yellow (full of aspartame, caffiene, and who knows what else) just to stay awake at work that some would be horrified.  I seem to be doing OK so fa…......urk

Not all joking aside, I understand both sides of the "chemical" question.  The points being: (1) long term studies have not been done on the effects of (now) common household and food additive chemicals, (2) these effects would be very hard to isolate from other enviromental chemical exposures, and (3) there does seem to be evidence that young girls are reaching puberty earlier and earlier, that human sperm count is down around the world, and that many of the current pesticides are estrogen-like compounds.

And, lastly, do you imagine that eating non-food, non-nutrient chemicals is good for the human body?

Sitran
who loves chemicals of all sorts!

Do men really NEED estrogen?

Only when we want to show our feminine side. Cough.

Actually, I believe the latest silly word is "metrosexual".

- PW

It’s precious, isn’t it?  ;D
I wonder what the opposite is. Rurosexual, perhaps?

- PW

[quote author=uncronopio link=board=omni;num=1064789022;start=0#0 date=09/28/03 at 18:43:42][center]...[/center]
I was reminded of all these incidents and quotes while watching a movie called Sunshine State, where one of the characters (a real estate developer) says "Nature is overrated". Is it?

Tongue in cheek or not, uncronopio, you take up a very important matter. My suggestion is that, rather than being over-rated, Nature is simply the only game in town. The problem is, of course, is that the game doesn’t seem to be particularly solicitous of its players or their welfare—at least not if it is we who are to be considered the players. Some plants, for example, produce far more toxic alkaloids than does Nicotiana tobacum, and the production of deadly toxins by animal and bacterial species is know to us all. Nothing is «good» for us, just because it is natural and, indeed, all the things we produce, from plastics to DDT to gene modified organisms are natural, in the sense that they are produced and exist in accordance with the laws of Nature, which were there before H sap sap made its entry onto the scene, and presumably will be around when we are long gone.

The problem with some of the things—or some of the categories of things—we produce is not that they are unnatural, but that they have effects on our environment that we do not desire (Nature itself could care less). A polar bear in Miami is not a happy combination, although the former, at least, is certainly natural. Our penchant for producing insecticides or pharmaceuticals (sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference) with chlorine atoms attached to phenyl rings is unfortunate, not because such compounds are produced in despite of the laws of Nature, but because they are introduced into environments that are not yet able to break them down. Given enough time, some enterprising bacterium is sure to emerge which can utilise the energy bound in these compounds and eat them up, but presumably this will take more time than we care to wait. Introducing organisms genetically modified to resist herbicides into the environment is fine with Nature—but if these genetic modifications are passed on to organisms we regards as weeds (not a scientific category) and of which we wish to be rid easily and cheaply, then we have a problem. Same thing with the plastics to which Katy referred ; Nature doesn’t give a f f, but we might not like the consequences of our and other species becoming reproductively hampered (read Vonnegut’s Galapagos for a vision of what happens when nearly all of humanity becomes infertile due to a virus). We have had these big brains of ours for nigh on 100000 years, and as a result of our cultural evolution (transmitted by what Dawkins calls «memes») during this time, we now are in possession of some pretty powerful tools to change things around us. Great power should go hand in hand with great caution—as we know, however, that is not always the case. But Nature doesn’t care….

Henri

[quote author=KatyBr link=board=omni;num=1064789022;start=15#22 date=10/09/03 at 09:31:22]Henri, could you please begin to use paragraphs and spaces to make your long texts easier to read? ...

Is the above a little better, Katy ?

Henri

I just received the following, which I reproduce here as it deals with the upper end of the scale of Nature, thereby, perhaps, putting our own concerns into perspective….

Tantalising evidence hints Universe is finite
 
19:00 08 October 03
 
Special Report from New Scientist Print Edition.[center]...[/center]  
Perplexing observations beamed back by a NASA spacecraft are fuelling debates about a mystery of biblical proportions - is our Universe infinite? Scientists have announced tantalising hints that the Universe is actually relatively small, with a hall-of-mirrors illusion tricking us into thinking that space stretches on forever.

However, work by a second team seems to contradict this, and scientists are now busy trying to resolve the conundrum. "Whether space is finite is something people have been asking since ancient times, and probably before that," says mathematician Jeffrey Weeks from Canton, New York. "If we resolved this and confirmed that space is finite, this would be an enormous step forward in our understanding of nature."

At the centre of the debate are observations by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in 2001. The probe measures temperature ripples in the "cosmic microwave background", the afterglow radiation from the big bang fireball.
[center]...[/center]
Astronomers are interested in how strong different sizes of ripples are, as this reveals vital information about the early Universe, and might tell us how big the Universe is today. Many astronomers suspect that the Universe is infinite.

In that case, the microwave background ripples should have an unlimited range of sizes. But while WMAP’s observations of small-scale ripples have matched predictions for an infinite Universe almost perfectly, the large-scale measurements have not. On the largest scales, WMAP has shown that the ripples almost disappear ([...]).

[center]Hall of mirrors[/center]

It could just be down to chance. Computer simulations that model the birth of the microwave background create this pattern once every few hundred runs. But it could mean that space itself is not big enough to support the broadest ripples, according to Weeks.

"Just as the vibrations of a bell cannot be larger than the bell itself, any fluctuations in space cannot be larger than space itself," he says.

Weeks and his colleagues, a team of astrophysicists in France, say the WMAP results suggest that the Universe is not only small, but that space wraps back on itself in a bizarre way (Nature, vol 425, p 593).

Despite being finite, the Universe would not have any kind of edge. If a spacecraft blasted off in what we’d perceive to be a straight line - the line a beam of light would follow - it would eventually end up back where it started.

Because of this odd wraparound effect, the light from one galaxy could follow two different routes to the Earth, so the same galaxy would appear in two different parts of the sky. Effectively, the Universe would be like a hall of mirrors, with the wraparound effect producing multiple images of everything inside.

[center]Identical pentagons[/center]

According to Weeks, the WMAP results point to a very specific illusion - that our Universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons, football-like shapes with a surface of 12 identical pentagons. If you exit the football through one pentagon, you re-enter the same region through the opposite face and you keep meeting the same galaxies over and over again ([...]).

Weeks says the match between the predictions of his repeating-football model and the WMAP observations is striking: "I was just blown away, the results are far better than I could have imagined."

If confirmed, they would indeed be stunning. They would mean that the Universe is relatively small, something like 70 billion light years across. What’s more, we could in theory see the entire cosmos and check that there are no hidden corners where the laws of physics are different.

For instance, it would rule out exotic ideas such as chaotic inflation, which suggests our local Universe is just one of myriad expanding bubbles beyond eyeshot, each with slightly different physical laws.

It would also banish the philosophical paradoxes of an infinite Universe, such as the idea that every person on Earth has an infinite number of alien doubles leading parallel lives. "If we could prove that the Universe was finite and small, that would be earth-shattering," says David Spergel of Princeton University in New Jersey. "It would really change our view of the Universe."

[center]Matching circles[/center]

However, in response to Weeks’s report, Spergel and his colleagues have announced evidence that contradicts the findings. They showed previously that if the Universe does produce a hall-of-mirrors effect, it should be possible to find a pattern of matching circles in the microwave background around which the fluctuations are identical (New Scientist print edition, 19 September 1998, p 28 ).

Weeks’s theory predicts six specific pairs of matching circles in the sky, but Spergel’s team has had no luck finding them in WMAP data. "Weeks’s team has a very powerful model that’s nice because it makes a very specific prediction about the pattern we should see on the sky," says Spergel. "However, we’ve looked for it, and we don’t see it."

Spergel and his team are now working with Weeks to see if they might somehow have missed the circles. And there is a further test of the dodecahedron model. It predicts that a key measure of the density of matter in the Universe, which governs its curvature, is equal to 1.013.

Completely flat space corresponds to 1, while values greater than or less than 1 would create a curved Universe. Observations of the microwave background radiation so far suggest the value lies somewhere between 1.00 and 1.04. Further observations by WMAP and other instruments should give a more accurate answer within the next few months.

[center]Supercomputer cycles[/center]

In the meantime, Spergel’s team is continuing to use the matching-circles technique to see whether the Universe might be small and finite but with some other possible shape.

Computers at two universities and at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are scanning the WMAP results for all the possible patterns of circles that might exist on the microwave background. "We’re burning up a lot of supercomputer cycles on this," says Spergel’s colleague Neil Cornish of Montana State University in Bozeman.

Cornish says his team believes it has already ruled out almost half of the possible small-Universe shapes - including football and doughnut shapes - and he suspects the work will probably turn up nothing, meaning that the Universe is either very large or infinite.

"We’re disappointed because we favoured the small-Universe idea," says Cornish. "But I guess you’ve just got to take the Universe you’re given."
 
Hazel Muir

Henri

PS : Katy, I’ll try to remember to be better about paragraphing !...

[quote author=Sitran link=board=omni;num=1064789022;start=0#13 date=10/08/03 at 20:31:49] . . . (3) there does seem to be evidence that young girls are reaching puberty earlier and earlier, . . .

I remember reading that many years ago, but it was in relation to Russian farm girls.  There was a correlation between the early onset of puberty and an increased exposure to light made possible by electrification and electric lights in the post-WWII era and the resulting ability to stay up way past dark and a normal bedtime.

Any Gyn’s or other physicians out there that can confirm this?

I seem to recall that there is a dirtect link between the moment a girl reaches her puberty and her weight, ie: it starts when the girl reaches a certain weight. Since girls in many, though not all, parts of the world are better (or at least more) fed than they used to be, they reach this particular weight at an earlier age and therefore have an earlier puberty. Unfortunately, I can’t put a number on this weight, which adds a nice bit of mistery to my explanation. I’ll try and look it up if I find the time.