Nima Majd

@bryan_johnson Totally agree with this take. But to actually fix the problem (not just throw another label on it), test-based certification needs 3 things: (1) Scalable testing: It must be cheap and easy enough for anyone to use (brands, regulators, even consumers). No labs, no PhDs. No $500 test per sample. Think COVID test simple. And testing once a year or even once a month isn’t enough. Every batch or statistically relevant per-animal test needs to be tested. And “batch” needs to be clearly defined and transparent. Anything less just opens the door to fraud (the world we live in today). (2) Real sensitivity: A lot of companies say they’re testing, but if you're only detecting things at 0.1 ppm, you are so far away from actually testing effectively. You need to get down to parts per billion or trillion, depending on the contaminant. (3) Full coverage: For example, “pesticide-free” or “antibiotic-free” is meaningless if you’re only testing for a handful of contaminants. There are over a hundred antibiotics used in animal ag. If you don’t test broadly, you're just certifying a narrow slice. And ultimately calling it clean/free is just misleading. To actually solve this problem, we need to test more often, test more deeply, and test the full range of what is used.

@bryan_johnson Totally agree with this take. But to actually fix the problem (not just throw another label on it), test-based certification needs 3 things: (1) Scalable testing: It must be cheap and easy enough for anyone to use (brands, regulators, even consumers). No labs, no PhDs. No $500 test per sample. Think COVID test simple. And testing once a year or even once a month isn’t enough. Every batch or statistically relevant per-animal test needs to be tested. And “batch” needs to be clearly defined and transparent. Anything less just opens the door to fraud (the world we live in today). (2) Real sensitivity: A lot of companies say they’re testing, but if you're only detecting things at 0.1 ppm, you are so far away from actually testing effectively. You need to get down to parts per billion or trillion, depending on the contaminant. (3) Full coverage: For example, “pesticide-free” or “antibiotic-free” is meaningless if you’re only testing for a handful of contaminants. There are over a hundred antibiotics used in animal ag. If you don’t test broadly, you're just certifying a narrow slice. And ultimately calling it clean/free is just misleading. To actually solve this problem, we need to test more often, test more deeply, and test the full range of what is used.

Test-based certification is the only way forward in food, eager to see more over time. Food is not simple anymore - it is a complex, industrial product with global supply and processing chains. Contamination can be introduced in many stages along the way from farming to harvest, processing, packaging, transport and preparation. Examples include pesticides, nitrates, heavy metals, plastics, bacteria, etc etc. So it's not just about what food to eat, it's about which specific food item SKU, from which specific supplier, and the only way to know is to test. E.g. these two cat foods look the same, the ingredients might look the same, but the one on the left is 1000X higher in glyphosate and 100X in lead. Or e.g. this baby food formula or turmeric is loaded with heavy metals, this canned seafood, your local boba or this milk brand is seeped in plastics, or this breakfast cereal way way too high in glyphosate (real examples). I used to think that the FDA exercises oversight but the reality is that it doesn't have anywhere near enough resources to do it thoroughly and their focus is a lot more on e.g. acute microbial threats (like Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, ...) that immediately hospitalize people, less on the rapidly growing diversity of compounds that may or may not deteriorate health over decades and that are basically treated as innocent until proven guilty under GRAS and so on. Meanwhile, the public health macro picture looks not so great - obesity up, type-2 diabetes up, fertility down (sperm count/motility), weird endocrine trends (e.g. testosterone down in men), depression and anxiety up... It wouldn't shock me if modern industrial food turns out to be a major contributor.