Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) “This weekend falling deeper into the rabbit hole of contaminants exposure in dai” — TopicDigg

This weekend falling deeper into the rabbit hole of contaminants exposure in daily life... I am a bit surprised how weak the U.S. regulations are compared to other countries around industrial chemical use. E.g. the lab @plasticlistorg recommended for testing had this infographic on their website. There are thousands of pesticides, herbicides and various synthetic chemicals banned in other countries that are ok for use in the U.S. It doesn't help to know that you should be eating organic kale when the one you bought shows "disturbing" levels of known toxic chemicals. It doesn't help to eat a Sweetgreen Chicken Pesto Parm Salad when it randomly tests in the 99th percentile of DEHP. Or dark chocolate apparently steeped in heavy metals. The other thing is that there are known good mitigations for many of the risks if you do some research. E.g. in water treatment you want a Reverse Osmosis system at home. For air there are some pretty good HEPA air filters on the market. For clothing you want natural materials (cotton, wool, linen, hemp etc.) instead of synthetic fibers that you inevitable breathe in. You have to know to avoid plastics everywhere (esp warm) and including in secret locations you wouldn't expect them in (e.g. lined *inside* aluminum containers). You have to know about PFAS in your cosmetics. You have to know that you want a stainless steel or cast iron pan. You have to know how to read food packaging ingredients because some brands give you the thing you want, while some brands add 50 other things - emulsifiers, preservatives, "natural and artificial flavors" stuff like Yellow 5 (gross!), "fragnances", high fructose corn syrup, cellulose, artificial sweeteners. You have to stumble by the BobbyApproved app for help. Food is the big wild card that will probably take a while to sort through. A lot of the burden of wanting to live a simple, natural, uncontaminated life turns out to fall on the consumer, and it also seems hard to spend a marginal dollar to decrease your risk exposure without having to run a full research program. But it's okay, I'll run mine and I'll try to write something up when it reaches some maturity.