It's a lie. The effects are always beneficial except in extreme doses. No dose that makes no difference is exactly what you would expect from a nutrient.

Lead activates the proteins it supoosedly poisons: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12425341_Inorganic_...

Yes, teeth and bones use most of the lead that you consume. But why is there lead in the teeth of neandethals? https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2018/250000-year-o...

Yes, iron overload seems to interfere with lead. Calcium not so much, it seems it rather makes lead used for building more bone. Licking lead causes cravings for calcium rich food.

Where's the evidence that those proteins need "activating"? The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized.

For that matter, activating and poisoning aren't even mutually exclusive, you can run an engine too fast and burn it, work out till you get rhabdo and your P looks like T, etc.

To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible.

The neanderthals probably ate stuff from lead rich soil or something, that doesn't prove it wasn't harmful. Lots of stuff is just mildly bad, it kills some people, sickens others, but not enough to affect population growth so Darwin continues not caring while people die and suffer.

Maybe they had some lead containing tools or medicines or something, of the sort we can avoid now because of safety standards.

Our ancestors were exposed to lots of unhealthy stuff, including battle axes, most of us would prefer to minimize it to below that level, and continually improve things.

>The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized.

We're arguing what the 'default' is. I'm arguing the default state is with lead. It would be strange for a protein to evolve to get so easily activated by a toxin.

>To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible.

I thing it's completely uncontroversial that the current typical human health is at the historic rock bottom.

There is no reason theoretical or not to believe it is toxic in the first place, except for the strange claim that the body uses it in error.

>The neanderthals probably ate stuff from lead rich soil or something, that doesn't prove it wasn't harmful.

That's an absurd claim, and really grasping at straws, don't you think? Mote that the remains aren't many. It isn't that they sieved through thousands of teeth to find a couple that were poisoned.

You're absolutely wrong, why don't we start consuming things like poneratoxin? Proteins evolved to be activated by it right?

I don't think it's uncontroversial at all. People's health is better for lots of reasons unrelated to lead, so it's very hard to compare. We no longer die of pathogens and injuries as much, even COVID is not as bad as some historical plagues.

There's new hazards that didn't exist then, but a some of them are exactly due to the body doing harmful things with surplus nutrition, that's what obesity is.

Toxins activate things all the time. Just because it can be activated doesn't prove it should be activated at any more than the baseline level, and some things might be better off activated less.

There's various papers on "ultratrace elements" and a few old ones on "lead deficiency" talking about impaired lipid absorption, and reduced Hct and Hb(Isn't lower but still normal hemoglobin a good thing?) but people are likely already getting more lead than 100 years ago.

Even if there's some role for lead and the papers aren't getting it wrong, everyone's probably getting more than the optimal point. Unless they study that optimal point it could be above, the same as, or well below what our ancestors got.

Or perhaps the optimal point has even changed. Maybe lead helped them have Moe Hb, which helped them persistence hunt or something, but now we don't need any boosts like that to meet typical or even optimal levels of excercise, and it just puts unneeded stress on the heart.

We do have studies like this showing detrimental effects to people with increased lead, even within the typical range(https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.6...)

>any more than the baseline level

Again. Can't you see it's a circular argument? How did you determine that it's the 'baseline'?

>people are likely getting more lead than 100 years ago.

People used to get much more. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...

"baseline" meaning "the minimal level of activation one gets without any currently-uncommon exogenous thing that activates it.".

There are lots of experiments where they give mice a gene for reduced function of something, or knock something out entirely and they actually live longer.

To me that shows that some functions might exist for increased performance or endurance, to a degree no longer needed in civilized society, at the cost of more disease risk, and we might not necessarily want everything firing on all cylinders.

Without further study, I don't see why we'd assume that activating proteins indicates it's a good thing.

That lead thing is from one specific study in Japan. They(Like most places) did not have a long life expectancy before modernization, and they mentioned they probably got it from white lead used by their mothers, which would not be a global universal thing.

Their life expectancy was also rather short back then in seems, probably for reasons unrelated to lead, but that still means it's close to impossible to say whether they had good nutrition or not, since even absolutely terrible diets might not have effects for a decade, unless there's enough total food for obesity to happen.

Ver, the guy is a bot pushing a narrative that will harm anyone following it, contact an HN mod and flag his post. That's all you can really do.

The mods will deal with you for breaking their rules. You are not my problem to fix.

I don't think I broke any rules, and my comments are on topic. Anyway, why do you fight so hard? You would get cured too.

Single-purpose accounts aren't allowed on HN. We don't want flamewars either, which is what you've been creating and fueling in this thread.

I think it's weirdly interesting that you're advocating for lead as nutrient, but accounts that post this kind of thing usually overdo it, since they have a pre-existing agenda and are not using the site for curiosity. We may need lead, but we don't need that, so please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I know you really mean it! but that really doesn't change any of the above. In fact it makes it more important, since it's harder to stop posting like this when you really mean it.

It's difficult and frustrating to represent a minority view on the internet, especially one as rare as yours, which the vast majority of the audience is simply not going to understand or accept. What we often see is that contrarian/minority commenters compensate for this frustration by digging in and becoming sort of fixated on the point, intensifying their advocacy for the truth as they see it.

This can get you sucked into a reinforcing loop where you keep turning up the volume and frequency of your posts in order to try to get a hearing, or to lash out at the majority, who often respond unfairly,—but all this only intensifies the resistance and outrage the majority comes back with. The way this dynamic ends is that we have to ban the account that's provoking the continued conflict—even if they're the one who is right (which sometimes, of course, a contrarian is). That sucks, but the only alternative would be flamewars everywhere, and that would suck worse.

The only thing I know that can help with this is accepting in one's heart that humans are nearly entirely wrong about nearly everything, and making peace with it. For this it can help to realize that it's probably as true of oneself as it is of anyone else. Also, people don't choose their views—for the most part we're conditioned by our backgrounds. Those don't move easily, so it's hard for anyone to change their views, and it's certainly not going to happen in response to an internet commenter who appears intensely fixated on a minority topic.

That last point has a significant consequence: it's not in your own interest to post like this, because it will actually entrench the others in their opposing view. If you allow yourself to keep upping the ante, you end up discrediting whatever truth you're trying to advocate. The only way to avoid this to deflate 90% if not 99% of the pressure you're putting on the topic—which I know is not easy, when you probably have many reasons to feel strongly about it.

Here are some past explanations I've made to other users in similar situations, in case any of it is helpful:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Thanks for writing this, Daniel. Your cool-headedness and willingness to spend time defusing an conflict is an inspiring example. Favourited this wise comment.

Thanks also Weneedlead for actually trying to argue your case in a relatively civil way after I and others attacked it, and I'm sorry if I raised the temperature. I think those of your arguments which I actually read are highly unconvincing (because toxins usually are functional analogues -- e.g. of calcium in the case of lead), but I freely admit that I'm biased against giving them a fair hearing, because a priori I predict an extremely low chance of it providing me any benefit for my time spent. Doesn't mean I'm absolutely 100% certain you're wrong.

FWIW I flagged a comment because of the potential harm in spreading misinformation, not because it was uncivil, however in hindsight maybe in a forum like this where people have proper debates it's better to discuss than to moderate misinformation.