We are routinely warned by earnest websites, advertisements, and well-meaning popular articles about 'nasty' chemicals lurking in our homes and kitchens. Many tout the benefits of switching to a 'chemical-free lifestyle.' 1
Along this line a recent study reveals that nearly 40% of Europeans want to 'live in a world where chemical substances don't exist.' Another 82% didn't know that table salt is table salt, whether it is extracted from the ocean or made synthetically. 2
Such scientific ignorance is common in the US as well, and can have a harmful influence on government policy. 3
However, there is no way to get away from chemicals since everything we eat is made of chemicals. There simply is no such thing as a 'chemical-free lifestyle
A report in the journal Nature Chemistry covered a survey conducted to gauge Europeans' attitudes toward chemicals. Researchers had about 700 respondents from each of eight countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, for a total of 5,631 participants. 4
The first series of questions was designed to measure chemophobia, the irrational fear of chemicals. Results revealed that 30% of Europeans reported being 'scared' of chemicals, and about 40% try to 'avoid contact with chemical substances' and want to 'live in a world where chemical substances don't exist.' Obviously this is impossible. Everything- the water, food, your smartphone- is a chemical or a combination of chemicals.
The second series of questions was designed to assess basic chemistry and toxicology knowledge. The results were far worse: 82% of respondents didn't know that table salt is table salt, whether it is extracted from the ocean or made synthetically. Another 91% didn't know that 'the dose makes the poison' is true, even for synthetic chemicals.
“What is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. It is only the dose that makes a thing a poison.”
How can people be so uneducated in a society that has access to all knowledge ever produced by humanity? The authors offer a quite plausible explanation. They note that the public is far removed from the processes required to produce the materials that we use on a daily basis. People simply don't understand how food safely arrives on their plate or a smartphone lands in their pocket. Because of this, people rely on mental shortcuts (simple heuristics) to make decisions. The decisions are usually wrong because the heuristics are logical fallacies. 2
For instance, the authors cite the common 'natural is better' fallacy, in which people erroneously conclude that things found in nature are safer than synthetic versions. Another is the 'contagion' heuristic, in which it is believed that even the tiniest amount of a toxic substance is harmful and 'contaminates' everything with which it comes into contact. Under this strange light, a single molecule of a toxin is just as dangerous as a metric ton.
Every piece of food we eat, every breath we take, every move we make results in the ingestion of a chemical of some sort. Every chemical has the ability to kill, but only if the quantities are high enough. As the Swiss physician Paracelsus stated, “What is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. It is only the dose that makes a thing a poison.”
This principle put forth by Paracelsus is detailed in the following table:
Lethal dose of certain chemicals in a number of foods:5
Chemical
Lethal Dose
Caffeine
100 cups of coffee
Solanine
100-400 pounds of potatoes
Oxalic acid
10-20 pounds of spinach or rhubarb
Hydrogen cyanide
3.7 pounds of lima beans
Malonaldehyde
3.8 tons of turkey
Acetyl salicylic acid
100 aspirin tablets
Water
17 liters in a very short time
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Bruce Ames and his colleagues have shown that many of our foods contain pesticides created naturally by plants for self-protection. We ingest at least 10,000 times more, by weight of natural pesticides than of synthetic residues. These natural toxic chemicals vary enormously in chemical structure, appear to be present in all plants, and serve to protect plants against fungi, insects, and animal predators. 6
Then there are synthetic pesticides which concern a lot of folks. As Ross Pomeroy points out, “Rest assured, synthetic pesticide residues on food are safe in the miniscule amounts present. We're talking parts per billion. What's more, many are even less 'toxic' than substances you encounter each and every day, For example, glyphosate, the most commonly used herbicide in the US is about three times less deadly than Tylenol and thirty times less deadly than caffeine.7
The shelves of a supermarket might be thought of as a chemical museum if one could see all the chemical compounds in the goods displayed there. 8
A very large body of knowledge about food chemicals has almost been forgotten or is ignored. A monograph Edited by Liener contains some 3,000 literature references on thousands of chemicals isolated from common vegetables that have been shown to have the potential to cause negative effects on human and animal health. 9
Besides food, we are exposed to a variety of chemicals in air and water. Air is a mixture of 16 primary natural constituents and countless 'trace' substances, which vary with time and location. One review listed more than 100 organic chemicals
found in rain water, in addition to various inorganic salts and dissolved gases.10
Here is something else to think about. What do radiation, hypochlorite, nitrogen oxide, cyanide, ozone formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, 1,4-dioxane, trichloroethylene, and chloroform have in common? One answer is that they all bring to mind scary, perhaps carcinogenic agents, created in most part by industry. Another answer is that these are all created by ourselves, within our own bodies, without any help from outside forces such as industry or the environment. For example, the average human body contains enough sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make seven bars of soap, phosphorus to make 2,200 match heads, and enough iron to make a three inch nail. 11
The EPA concerns itself at ambient air concentrations less than one-ten-thousandth the level found in normal intestinal gases. The typical human body exhausts 20 grams of organic product per day in intestinal gas, sweat, urine and feces.
The medical community has long recognized that humans exhale volatile organic compounds. The major VOCs in the breath of healthy individuals are isoprene (12-580 parts per billion, ppb), acetone, (1.2-1,880 ppb), ethanol (13-1,000 ppb), and methanol (160-2,000 ppb). 12
At the concentration secreted by the stomach lining, hydrochloric acid (pH 2.0) is deadly to living cells and powerful enough to dissolve zinc (more corrosive than coke). 13
Our own bodies create formaldehyde as a normal by-product during amino acid synthesis and overall metabolism, including breaking down antibiotics and other medications., It's also in drinking water and the air we breathe. Ninety percent of the formaldehyde around us is natural occurring, with 60 percent of that coming from plants and trees, yet it's still perfectly fine to walk though the woods. 14
Many foods contain naturally occurring formaldehyde. 15
A cup of coffee is estimated to contain more than 2,000 natural chemical compounds and just one cup has fifty times the mutagenic activity of the smoke absorbed from smoking a single cigarette. There are more rodent carcinogens by weight in a single cup of coffee than potentially carcinogenic synthetic pesticide residues in the average US diet in a year, and this doesn't count the 1,000 or so chemicals yet to be tested. 16
Summary
The bottom line- there is no such thing as a chemical-free human body, food or the environment. Everything is made up of chemicals, even yourself.
References
Chris Thompson, “Everything you eat is made of chemicals,” asch.org, April 12, 2016
Alex Berezow, “Chemophobia: nearly 40% of Europeans want a chemical-free world, acsh.org, December 18, 2019
Ilya Somin, “Study finds almost 40 percent of people in eight European nations would like to live 'in a world where chemical substances don't exist,'”, reason.com, December 23, 2019
Michael Siegrist & Angela Bearth, “Chemophobia in Europe and reasons for biased risk perceptions,” Nature Chemistry, November 7, 2019
M. Alice Ottoboni, The Dose Makes The Poison, (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1997) 43
Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold, “Environmental pollution and cancer, some misconceptions,” in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Editor Jay H. Lehr, (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 153
Ross Pomeroy, “Plants make their own 'carcinogenic' pesticides, and you eat of lot more of them,” realclearscience.com, January 7, 2020
A. R. Michaelis, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 21, 130, 1996
Toxic Constituents of Plant Foodstuffs, Second Edition, I. E Liener, Editor, Academic Press, New York, 1980
Chemicals in the Human Food Chain, C. K. Winter, J. N. Seiber and C F. Nuckton, Editors, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990
Jack W. Dini, “The carcinogenic body,” Plating & Surface Finishing, May 2005
J. D. Fenske and S. E. Paulson, Journal of Air & Waste Management Association, 49, 594, 1999
Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 23
Tara Haelle, “No more formaldehyde in baby shampoo,” slate.com, March 3, 2014
“Foods known to contain naturally occurring formaldehyde,” World Health Organization, April 3, 2015
Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
We are routinely warned by earnest websites, advertisements, and well-meaning popular articles about 'nasty' chemicals lurking in our homes and kitchens. Many tout the benefits of switching to a 'chemical-free lifestyle.' 1
Along this line a recent study reveals that nearly 40% of Europeans want to 'live in a world where chemical substances don't exist.' Another 82% didn't know that table salt is table salt, whether it is extracted from the ocean or made synthetically. 2
