I think we're gonna have several asbestos/lead moments in our lifetimes. PFAS, micro plastics, endocrine disruption, I'd also wager marijuana is likely to have its own big tobacco moment eventually, I've heard fruits and vegetables have slowly been losing nutrient density over generations but I have not looked into that yet. There's more nebulous things like the impact of AI or the way we now communicate (or don't communicate in many cases)...
We have a lot of problems or potential problems that are going to be relatively subtle and or persistent over years and decades and I don't feel we are really taking them as seriously as we should. One thing that really worries me is how many of these various things may interact, we see this in pharmaceuticals where it's very hard if not impossible to rigorously test all the potential interactions. We have introduced a tremendous amount of changes to our lives in increasingly short time frames.
Nutrient density in food has decreased due to the switch to synthetic fertilizers used by intensive farming practices. Man-made fertilizers contain only the big three (phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen) nutrients, leading to the slow depletion of micronutrients in the soil. Without an abundance of those other elements, plants cannot incorporate them and the resulting crops will lack them. As a result, modern industrial food contains a fraction of the micronutrients as compared to the same food from a century past, and there has not been a widespread effort to fix the problem.
