What's the difference between industrial chemicals and chemicals found directly in nature?

[Bigfoot1]

Some of these chemicals found in shampoos, soaps, pharmaceuticals, detergents, preservatives, etc are harmful, poisonous, or corrosive to the human body.

 

What makes these substances caustic or poisonous, compared to substances found directly in nature?

 

Natural chemicals are found in water, rocks and stones, plants, and animals. As far as I am concerned, nothing in nature is caustic, as I have never had water or a certain stone destroy my hands if it came in direct contact with my skin.

[liambob1]

Some of these chemicals found in shampoos, soaps, pharmaceuticals, detergents, preservatives, etc are harmful, poisonous, or corrosive to the human body.

 

What makes these substances caustic or poisonous, compared to substances found directly in nature?

 

Natural chemicals are found in water, rocks and stones, plants, and animals. As far as I am concerned, nothing in nature is caustic, as I have never had water or a certain stone destroy my hands if it came in direct contact with my skin.

 

That is a very simplistic view of the topic, a lot of the chemicals found in the products you mentioned do occur in nature. Furthermore to imply that chemicals found in nature aren't poisonous or caustic is just plain wrong. Caustic simply means it causes corrosion, and quite a lot of chemicals found in nature have that property. There are plenty of "natural" chemicals which can kill or corrode things.

 

I recomend you read this article

http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7782.full.pdf+html

Edited January 3, 2013 by liambob1

[Bigfoot1]

By reading that article, it makes it seem like almost everything we eat is toxic.

 

 

The gist I got out of that article is that we shouldn't eat food, because it has lots of harmful chemicals in it, some of them causing cancer.

[liambob1]

By reading that article, it makes it seem like almost everything we eat is toxic.

 

 

The gist I got out of that article is that we shouldn't eat food, because it has lots of harmful chemicals in it, some of them causing cancer.

My point in bringing up that article was to demonstrate the absurdity of the notion that natural chemicals are not toxic.

Its one of the fundamental concepts of pharmacology and toxicology:

 

"Everything is toxic in high enough doses"

Except chemistry, you can never have too much chemistry.

[John Cuthber]

It seems to me that nobody has yet pointed out the real difference between man-made and natural chemicals.

 

Mankind has in its stupidity, made deliberate attempts to make really nasty toxic chemicals.

The nerve gases are probably the best known of them and sarin is a fairly typical example.

Assuming it's roughly as toxic to people as it is to rats, it would take about a hundredth of a gram to kill a person.

 

Now let's look at what nature can do.

Botulinum toxin is rather better at its job.

It takes about a million times less to kill someone.

So the answer to the question "What's the difference between industrial chemicals and chemicals found directly in nature?"

is that some natural chemicals are a million times more toxic than some of the best poisons we can come up with.

 

Of course, most man-made chemicals are nothing like that nasty- they couldn't be because, if they were the lawyers would have a field day,

In the UK there has been a legal requirement (since 1988 IIRC) to use the least toxic chemicals that can be (reasonably) used to do the job.

Nature doesn't have to follow those rules.