...implications, specifically Cassava, which apparently contains a number of cyanate related neurotoxins. I personally never heard of this before, but a glance at Google Scholar seems to indicate a fair amount has been written on the subject. It's intriguing enough, that I may look into it.
It's not all that surprising that diet can have a deleterious effect on health.
Many insecticides are designed to interfere with neurological signals, specifically acetylcholine esterase inhibitors. Some organic phosphoesters used as insecticides, including over the counter consumer products, are disturbingly structurally similar to certain nerve gases used as warfare agents.
I have made personally some disturbing anecdotal observations in my neighborhood on this score, but they are just that, anecdotal and hardly systematic.
This is why I'm rather fond of genetic engineering of foods, since it enables the reduction in the utilization of many of these compounds.
No choice of any technology is without risk, and every choice will exhibit some losers and some winners. The idea is to combinatorially optimize outcomes so as to choose solutions and processes which will provide large benefits that will outweigh the negatives.
It is very clear that feeding 7 billion people on the planet, with many suffering from inadequate nutrition in any case, involves no perfect technologies.
Some technologies of course, persist as obnoxious habits and are clearly unnecessary in the present time, although they may have provided some benefits in a previous time when the scale was smaller. Coal fits this case. It is an unnecessary fuel. All dangerous fossil fuels are in fact unnecessary, and thus the spread of neurotoxins, in most cases heavy metals like Pb and Hg, using dangerous fossil fuels is just, at this point, stupid.
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