Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field

All that aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about but it’s not a basis for any kind of personal health recommendation and the authors state that. I have relevant expertise and this is a very complicated area that people routinely want to be boiled down into black and white simple advice. What this article seems to say is that lotion can affect the oxidation chemistry nearby it, but it’s not yet known if that is an effect with consequences that are on the whole negative or positive.

I would criticize the authors for their use of the word disrupt, because of the negative connotation carried by that word when talking about human biological systems. They use a softer, more neutral word, perturb, to express the same idea later in the article, which I think better expresses the idea without an emotional tinge to it.

Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely. The ancient Greeks got some things right.

What evidence can you point to that supports this "most likely" assertion that isn't purely naturalistic fallacy?

> The ancient Greeks got some things right.

The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?

Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.

Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic. When we are working with incomplete knowledge (e.g. lack of studies on phenoxyethanol), naturalism is a useful probabilistic heuristic because we are /generally/ adapted to what was in our ancestral environment. It's also a useful heuristic to defer to things we have a significant amount of understanding of (olive oil) than things we have little understanding of (a concoction invented in the 2010s).

When we say "natural", by the way, we are approximately referring to what humans adapted to by natural selection. Eating large amounts of cyanide isn't "natural" just because it's in nature; that's semantic confusion.

No one objects to saying a zoo animal should be eating its "natural" diet, and that its enclosure should represent its "natural" habitat, because this is a generally true useful heuristic. Maybe the apes are going to be healthier if you put them in a VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx and feed them protein shakes -- where's the research? -- but I'm not going to put that on equal footing until the research is out. Until then, I'll go with naturalism.

There are artificial things that are very good for us, such as vaccines. But we know this because we have sufficient research. When we don't have sufficient research, heuristics like naturalism are going to give you better results on average.

>The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?

He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.

> Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic.

They are using a purely appeal-to-nature-and-antiquity-without-any-other-justification heuristic. If your objection is that I should have said "appeal to nature and antiquity without any other justification" because you think "naturalistic fallacy" means something else (which it might), then ok let's go with that, but otherwise it's very appropriate.

"Most" likely is a decision about the balance of merit.

Show something beyond "people did it without chemical analysis" that doing one is actually better than doing the other, especially in the way being discussed by the article. Show that rubbing olive oil on your body won't likewise disrupt your oxidation field. Show that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in olive oil aren't individually disruptive to skin chemistry despite suspected or known links to cancers, cardiovascular disease, and poor fetal development.

> He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.

Picking which things were right and which ones were wrong requires analysis of the merits. They did none of that.

ps. Do we have a reason to call them "he"? I didn't see anything in their profile or comment history.