Preservatives Probably Aren't Killing Us All
Why the scary headlines got it wrong.
There’s nothing in science that makes headlines quite so readily as nutrition. It’s fascinating to see just how interested humanity is about the data on the things we eat. For every story about breakthroughs in cancer medication, I come across at least five talking about diet and how to optimize it for the best health.
The new furore over preservatives comes as no surprise. Preservatives are a broad category of products that are used to prevent food from spoiling, and they are in a plethora of the foods you eat. Modern supermarkets, to an extent, only exist because we have discovered and use preservatives to give our food enough shelf-life that it can make it to the shelves in the first place.
And according to recent headlines, they are also killing us. Specifically, there is new evidence that common preservatives may be giving us cancer and diabetes.
Terrifying stuff, if true.
Fortunately for all of us who like to eat, well, food, the data isn’t nearly so clear. There may be a risk from some preservatives, but a more realistic viewpoint is that this story just shows the limitations of nutritional epidemiology.
Let’s look at the data.
