Are questions about short-term effects of food on your body on-topic?

Question

We definitely do not allow questions about long-term effects of food on your body (aka health and nutrition), for a lot of very good reasons - notably, the science is often very unclear, so they tend to solicit opinions and sketchy answers, and not a lot of expert knowledge from cooks.

However, people also sometimes ask about short-term effects, for example whether a food is edible, or will have some mild undesirable effects:

• (migrated) https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/77007/is-aquafaba-readily-digestible
• (closed) Can we digest raw starch?
• What can I do to help prevent flatulence from beans?
• How does adding baking soda to soaking beans/lentils reduce the gas they make you have?
• Can bitter almonds(or other nuts containing amygdalin) be made edible?
• Are nectarine seeds edible?
• Are avocado seeds edible?
• Is methyl cellulose edible?
• Are bay leaves dangerous to (unwittingly) eat?

What questions in this vein, if any, should be on-topic? If any are, how do we decide where to draw the line?

The fact that we haven't closed most of those examples suggests that people aren't terribly opposed to them, but a strict reading of overall policy (no health questions) suggests they might be off-topic. Some relevant previous meta questions:

• Closing for "nutrition or health"--where is the boundary? (the focus of the question is on questions clearly about nutrition/health, but an answer does say "what a specific food does to your body after you eat it: close")
• Should we answer questions about biology, if they are food-related? (+4/-1 in favor of allowing biology questions with culinary relevance)
• Is it okay to mention nutrition in a question? (it's okay to mention it as background, just not to ask about it)

(Please feel free to edit more of those in; I haven't done a careful search.)

Answer 1

As an oversimplified standard, I'd suggest:

Do I need to know this in order to reasonably serve X to people without immediate, observable consequences?

The "immediate" is important - we only want to allow things that are direct enough that people could've really figured out how they work. I'd rather not quibble about a precise definition of "immediate"; minutes or even a few hours are probably okay, days are probably not.

This feels fairly consistent with how we handle questions about cooking the food; we'll certainly take questions about immediate effects of handling an ingredient (e.g. burning hands from hot peppers), while we'd be more skeptical of questions about long-term health effects.

This would allow all of the questions I mentioned (including the couple closed ones): you want to know if something is inedible, or dangerous to eat, or will cause flatulence, before you feed it to all your guests. (Some might still benefit from editing and reframing, to focus on the actual consequences, not the physiological details.)

It still excludes the usual health and nutrition sorts of things. Those consequences aren't immediate, and beyond that, we're pretty happy to serve people ice cream and decide for themselves whether it's so unhealthy they're not gonna eat it.

It also still excludes less directly relevant things; serving a food won't ever require you to know details of digestion of a compound, or how exactly alcohol affects your brain, or how mercury poisoning works.

I'd favor using our best judgment about the inevitable gray areas. If someone has some crazy conspiracy theory, we can still close it, probably as primarily opinion-based - we don't have to seriously entertain "do black olives make your feet tingle?" If a sane question attracts conspiracy theory answers, we can flag and delete them, and try to edit the question to avoid them. If we think a question is silly and close it, but it turns out to have a legitimate answer, we can reopen it.