>You're probably not going to get IRB approval for raising kids on any vitamin deficit.

You can't do that, but can't you select a group of children and give some of them supplements? If some of the kids in the control group don't get enough of certain nutrients...well, that was going to happen anyway.

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I feel like this post is getting a lot more hate than it deserves. OP is asking something a lot of people ask. It may be ignorant of a lot of important facts, but asking questions and having them answered is a big part of how you remedy ignorance. OP is clearly trying to do that, and is taking the responses seriously, and changing their view of things as they get new information. That sort of thing should be encouraged.

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600 million years before the Earth becomes too hot to support the carbon cycle.

Safe to say humans will have problems long before that.

although even 1000 years is a very long time with our current rate of technological progress. credible plans exist to change the orbit of the Earth to keep us in the Goldilocks zone.

edit: for the doubters/downvoters.

https://lifeboat.com/ex/lets.lift.the.earth

There's an idea in philosophy, tabula rasa, or blank slate. The basic idea is that everybody is an empty slate waiting to be filled when they are born. You can apply this to the body, too. A person's immune system can only react to what it has encountered before. Babies haven't encountered much.

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The word botulism refers to a disease caused by the botulinum toxin, not to infection by the bacteria itself. In babies infection that then produces the toxin is the bigger risk, but in adults the larger risk is poisoning from food that has been contaminated with botulinum and that has not been stored in such a way to stop the bacteria spores germinating. So you would not have had a gut infection as I've described, you would probably have eaten the cheese and your gut would have killed off the bacteria but absorbed the toxin.

I am interested that it's cheese though! Botulism is usually associated with canned/preserved goods, and it's an anaerobic bacteria, so I wouldn't expect it to like cheese. When you say 'separated,' do you mean curdled/separated into curds and whey? I found this article that shows that dairy with botulinum contamination does curdle (as curdling is a chemical process and not an organic one, many milk contaminants do not cause it): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10456739/

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Botulinum spores can withstand fairly high temperatures and is an anaerobic bacteria; that makes it hardy against for the two major features of cans that keep the food safe. One of the real dangers of botulinum is that food safety rules that protect against other bacteria are insufficient.

A can doesn't need to be burst or leaking to get the bacteria inside because the spores are probably already there. It's when the can or jar was heat-treated at a temperature which was too low (still hot enough to kill off everything else!) or the conditions inside are not acidic enough that it will germinate from the spores and start producing botulinum toxin.

And, because it's the toxin that causes the disease, not the bacteria, re-cooking the food to temperatures that we would usually consider safe might kill the bacteria but the toxin is still there.

What definition of temperature are you thinking of? The only definition I know is based on how the entropy changes with energy, which clearly makes negative temperature objects extremely hot.

Botulinum is a sporing bacteria, like anthrax; in conditions it can't reproduce well in, it forms spores, basically dormant versions of the bacteria inside a protective shell that can then withstand environmental conditions, including honey.

Honey is mildly antibacterial because it has such a strong concentration of sugar that it forces all the water out of bacteria by osmosis. Botulinum in a spore can survive that and then germinate into the active bacteria if it later enters safe conditions.

The other reason honey is specifically a risk is bioaccumulation. Botulinum spores naturally occur at low levels in most soil, which means there are tiny tiny traces on most things, including the surfaces of flower—not enough to do anything most of the time. But honey is made with of a lot of pollen. It can potentially build up in the honey the same way that eg. mercury builds up in tuna; tiny fishes absorb a little environmental mercury, but tuna eat a lot of tiny fishes in their lifetime, and they can't eliminate the mercury, so they consume far more mercury than a fish the same size would absorb from the water.

We talk about science. The art of science is it to put the real world into categories. No categories no science.

I wonder what "Hybridization is very common in the animal kingdom" does mean. Any data? Usually Hybrids are sterile, so there is no effect on natural occurring species - see here. And: Hybrids are no species. I understood that occuring hybridization is a result of the anthropocene.

Taxonomy may be old but species is the central unit of evolutionary biology. The concept was developed by Ernst Mayr, who knew about DNA. Indeed the idea behind it all is that genes can be shared by all members of a given species. When gene flow is hampered by barriers populations can differentiate. Genetic differentiation will lead to phenotypic differentiation. New species are born.

This is actually nonsense since the sun is not actually hot, the surface is but not the space around it. The sun rays hitting the atmosphere creates heat. Its actually very cold high up in the earth atmosphere where oxygen is low the sun is not heating up space. As long you have liquids distance don't matter much it could support life.

Canned food is cooked while inside the sealed can. You get botulism from canned food when the can is compromised or leaking, allowing the bacteria to get in and grow on the food.

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You don’t have to design the trial that way to assess if vitamin supplements improve the treatment outcome. You would just have 2 treatment arms: standard of care (SOC) and vitamins + SOC. This is how many cancer trials are set up. You could also have a vitamin only arm since untreated ADHD isn’t a death sentence. You don’t learn if vitamin insufficiency causes ADHD, but you can at least learn if it treats it.

There’s a big problem with your proposal for discovering if vitamin deficiencies cause ADHD, though. Even if you show a causal link, it doesn’t mean that’s the only cause, or even the proximal cause, of ADHD. For instance, you might establish that a lack of cobalt in the diet is linked to ADHD symptoms, but then find that in the ADHD patient population that cobalt deficiency is not detected. What’s going on? Likely, cobalt deficiency is an upstream trigger for a common pathway to ADHD symptoms that also has multiple other endogenous and exogenous triggers. So, not only does a trial design like your example put the participants at very high risk for poor health outcomes, it also likely leads to no actionable results. This is what the IRB is going to cite when rejecting the proposal. (NB: cobalt relationship with ADHD is just a placeholder example, not a hypothesis or statement of fact).

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To add to this, adults generally ingest preformed toxin from canned foods. Meanwhile, as already noted, babies get sick from the spores (commonly in honey) because their gut flora is immature.

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Animals are no longer used for epinephrine production. If we still did this, it would be pretty harmful to the animals and the environment. I imagine we would not use the same animals used for food. They would be raised in labs. If there was a use for other organs, we might keep those but most of the animal would be incinerated. BUT! that's not happening anymore. The precursors are just mixed together and probably there's some heating and maybe some refluxing and some form of purification. No animals necessary. That's way too expensive and wasteful.

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