Please don't post snark like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.

I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.

My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o

EDIT: grammatical cleanup

I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore

This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.

Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.

There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5

I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients