Headline: That Which Doesn't Kill You May Not Make You Stronger...Though It's Probably Safe To Ingest

Tonight my friend/classmate Rich launched his new blog. (Can I get a “Whoop!”) His topic of choice was nutrition, toxins, pesticides, organic foods, etc. It was a great post, as evidenced by the fact it 1) made me think, and 2) compelled me to comment. Once I formulated my thoughts, I figured as long as I was actually typing more than a paragraph, I’d slap it on here and call it a post. (See below.)

I’ve added Rich’s blog to my list of favorites (Deep Thoughts By Rich) and I invite all my loyal readers (and again, by “all” I mean “both”) to visit. He’s a smart fellow and, were I a betting woman, I’d wager I'll be asking him for a job or voting him into public office one day in the not-too-distant future. Good luck, Rich!

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I was recently reading about "intuitive toxicology"—the mental shortcut ordinary people use to think about the risks associated with chemicals. One of the beliefs that underlie intuitive toxicology is that nature is benevolent—that human products and activities are more likely to be dangerous than the products of natural process.

As Rich pointed out, EVERYTHING is made of chemicals and, thus, EVERYTHING can be poisonous. What frightens me (typically on a daily basis) is the ability of alarmists to force broad policy change simply by playing on the fears and ignorance of members of society.

Anybody remember Alar? No? Well, I do. It was a pesticide used on apples—until the National Resources Defense Council released a study asserting that about 1 in every 4000 children exposed to Alar would develop cancer. Then, like clockwork, the media latched on and the real chaos ensued. The CBS "news" (and I use the term loosely) show 60 Minutes implied Alar was outright poison—I mean the kind Snow White's wicked stepmother/queen would use, you know? People were in a state of panic. Grocery stores refused to sell Alar apples and eventually the EPA declared it a human carcinogen—but only after Uniroyal (the maker of Alar) had already voluntarily halted all US sales of the stuff.

But here's the rub: NRDC's research was crap. They extrapolated from research conducted on mice in order to make their determinations. In order for their assertions to be true, all children consuming apples would have had to eat something like a "truckload" of apples or several thousand gallons of apple juice EVERY DAY. And even at that rate of consumption we could only expect 1 in 4000 of those children to develop cancer.

As it turns out, the real risk was something like 1 in 250,000—of course, those figures never got the same media exposure the NRDC study enjoyed. (Who cares about the truth, right?) In the mean time, Uniroyal and apple growers across America were...well, S.O.L. Their combined losses totaled somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And, in what can only be described as a cruel twist of fate, in the absence of Alar, some growers were forced to use substitute pesticides which were found to be less safe than Alar. Go figure!

The lesson here, children, is this: Resist the urge to heed the emotional call to arms on such matters. Do not add to the deintellectualization of America by buying in to any ol’ thing emitting from your television set. The world is full of people whose sole purpose is to foist off on you a load of kooky crap and all the while try to convince you it is science.

And that's all I have to say about the matter. For now.