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Last week I ran across a post by a well-known food-industry critic warning that beloved snack crackers Cheez-Its are toxic. Cheez-Its contain soybean and palm oils treated with tertiary butylhydroquinone (tBHQ), a fairly common preservative. According to the post, tBHQ is “one of the worst additives to be avoided” because it’s “created from butane (a highly toxic gas)” and it’s banned in Japan. The post was shared almost 150,000 times on Facebook, and most of the 10,000 comments shared either profound gratitude for the information or rage at the FDA and our current food production system, both of which are actively trying to kill us.
Most of the information in the PSA is BS, of course. Butane is a precursor of tBHQ, but ingesting the preservative is not remotely close to drinking lighter fluid. It’s like stating that eating bread is hazardous because raw eggs might contain salmonella. tBHQ is an extremely effective antioxidant, so the amounts found in food are miniscule and far from the amounts known to cause health problems. While the original blogger is widely considered pseudoscientific and discredited, she remains a stalwart promoter of chemophobia: the irrational fear of chemistry or chemicals.
 Outrage over food processing and preservatives has been newsworthy for some time. Opponents of food chemicals usually invoke the “back to nature” argument, claiming that ingesting food with long, difficult to pronounce names can’t possibly be good for us. Given that universal nutrition labels have only been standard in the US since 1990, it seems like the outrage over chemical names might be a bit hysterical. Do enough research in this area and you’re bound to find jokes about the lethal dangers of sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, and even dihydrogen monoxide. (Conversely, natural-sounding ingredients can often be more hazardous or negative to our health than they sound. For example, the benign-sounding brown rice syrup, a common leading ingredient in granola and energy bars, has a glycemic index value significantly higher than table sugar, belying how sweet a product actually is.)
To be sure, continued investigation and testing of what goes into our food can’t be a bad thing. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, for example, boric acid was widely used as a food preservative, but regulatory agencies banned it shortly following World War I for being a little too toxic for general consumption. Given the evolving nature of scientific understanding, a little more analysis sounds great to me.
But many food chemists are quick to point out that our food has never been safer, and that many if not most additives improve its safety. Sodium nitrate has been used in sausages and cured meats for centuries, and the additive has recently been linked to elevated risk of cancers of the colon, stomach, and esophagus. Despite these risks it’s highly effective at inhibiting the growth of botulinum toxin, the most acutely toxic substance known to science (which is incidentally naturally occurring). Eating botulism-tainted meat kills, and kills quickly. Given the choice between an elevated risk of a single type of cancer vs. certain death from botulism, most people would probably choose the former.
Looking past the ongoing food wars, broader chemophobia has existed in some form since the earliest days of chemistry. To the public chemistry seems to represent everything artificial, toxic, and hazardous about society. While chemophobia is usually irrational, it’s sometimes inspired by legitimate fears about chemical warfare or industrial disasters. A 2013 article posits that modern chemophobia began in the mid-1960s with the publication of Silent Spring and kicked up after the chemical-related disasters in Times Beach, Missouri and Bhopal. But our current fear-based media culture does little to help, and some believe that the carcinogenic effects of many substances are exaggerated. Well-known physicist and science writer Philip Abelson was particularly critical of injecting lab animals with massive doses of substances to test for carcinogenic aspects, seeing even positive correlations as “phantom hazards” that distract from the real hazards to our health.
Of course, most people are blind to the fact that everything on earth is chemical. As knowledge of chemistry advances, more and more chemicals will be discovered, and there will probably be fear-mongering about those as well. And most will probably feel better about buying or ingesting natural substances rather than synthetic ones.
Image credit: Mike Licht / CC BY 2.0
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Re: Chemophobia (Or, The Dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide)
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