Scaring Consumers Away from Good Health
July 1, 1999
The Environmental Protection Agency, in its zeal to rid the world of pesticides, fails to mention the hazards of dangerous strains of food-borne pathogens that may be present in organically grown “natural” foods.
Featured at your local supermarket are unwarranted fear, innuendo and bad advice from the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has begun distributing brochures about pesticides in food at major grocery stores, often right in front of the fruit and vegetable cases. Considering the needlessly alarmist tone of the brochure, though, the stores ought to display them with the tabloids at the checkout counter.
Instead of helping consumers make wise food choices, the brochure will scare consumers, especially parents of young children, away from one of the best health habits known-eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. The latest studies indicate that consumers can cut their cancer risk in half by eating five servings of fruits and vegetable a day. Yet a mere nine percent of Americans currently meet that recommendation.
The brochure, titled “Pesticides and Food: What you and your family need to know,” is the result of a new federal food safety law enacted in 1996 mandating that the EPA “inform the public of the risks and benefits of pesticide use on food.” To put it bluntly, the brochure is a silly idea. It is ridiculous to try and present the “risks and benefits of pesticide use” in a four-page brochure. What the majority of the public want to know is whether or not the food at the supermarket is safe to eat-which it is-and a brochure will hardly satisfy those who already are concerned about pesticide residues on their food.
When the idea for the brochure was first raised, it did not seem so bad to the nations’ fruit and vegetable growers and retailers. Only a few months before, the National Research Council had driven the last nail in the coffin of the “pesticides-cause-cancer” argument with an exhaustive report on the health risks from pesticide residues in food and water. The NRC, part of the prestigious National Academy of Science, concluded that the risks from pesticide residues were so low that even the natural carcinogens in food may pose a greater health threat. The report further concluded that neither residues of synthetic pesticides nor the natural food chemicals pose any appreciable health risks. Actually, they identified overeating as the biggest health threat from food, citing overeating as the single largest factor for cancer risk. In light of this rosy report from one of the most respected scientific bodies in the world, the food industries likely figured that the proposed EPA brochures would reflect this positive conclusion.
But the EPA has never bound itself to scientific reality. From acid rain and asbestos to second-hand tobacco smoke, the agency has clearly demonstrated a preference for hysteria over objective science. (In fact, a federal judge recently reprimanded the EPA for jumping to conclusions about the health effects of second-hand tobacco smoke, which EPA’s own science did not support.)
So it is with the new consumer brochures. One cannot read past the second sentence before the scare campaign begins: “While pesticides have important uses, studies show that some pesticides cause health problems at certain levels of exposure.” Never mind that the “certain levels of exposure” required to cause health problems are tens of thousands of times higher than the levels found on our food. Unfortunately, this sentence sets the tone for the rest of the brochure. Following a common political strategy these days, the brochure highlights the risks to children from pesticide residues. The cover for the brochure is of four children having a picnic next to a wheat field. The heading on the first page says, “Infants and children may be more vulnerable to pesticide exposure” followed by three points sure to raise alarms in any thoughtful parent’s mind. “Since their internal organs are still developing and maturing, infants and children may be more vulnerable to health risks posed by pesticides.” These ominous statements are followed by decontamination recommendations such as “peel fruits and vegetables to reduce dirt, bacteria, and pesticides.” The brochure even implies that meat is unsafe by telling consumers to “trim fat from meat and skin from poultry and fish because some pesticide residues collect in fat.” Finally, the brochure ends with a tacit endorsement of organic foods. “Your grocer may be able to provide you with information about the availability of food grown using fewer or no pesticides. These foods are often grown using Integrated Pest Management (IPM) or organic practices.”
Overall, the brochures will leave most consumers with the distinct (and false) impression that fruits and vegetables grown with synthetic pesticides aren’t safe. That will result in reduced consumption of fruits and vegetables and, consequently, increased cancer risk.
To begin with, organic foods cost considerably more than conventionally grown fruits and vegetables, reducing purchasing power, especially among poorer consumers. Organic foods cost more partly because organic crop yields are, on average, lower than conventional farms as they tend to lose more of the crop to pests and disease. Organic farming is usually more labor intensive, which also increases the costs. And there is no evidence anywhere that organic foods are safer or more nutritious than conventionally grown foods. Not a single study has found a nutritional advantage to consumption of organic foods. The health benefits of increased fruit and vegetable consumption accrue equally, regardless of how the produce was grown.
The problem, though, goes beyond the higher cost of organic foods. With the recent development of dangerous new strains of food-borne pathogens, such as E. coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella typhimurium, there is strong evidence that organic and “natural” foods themselves pose a particular health threat to consumers which conventionally grown foods do not. While these foods represent only about one percent of the nation’s food supply, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have traced about eight percent of confirmed E. coli 0157:H7 cases to such foods. In other words, people who eat organic and natural foods are eight-times more likely to suffer an attack of food poisoning by this deadly new strain of bacteria than consumers of conventionally grown foods. This new strain of E. coli causes permanent kidney and liver damage and, according to the CDC, was responsible for an estimated 250 US deaths in 1997 alone.
Consumer Reports also found higher levels of salmonella on the free-range and organic chickens they tested. The CDC estimates there are up to 4,000,000 cases of salmonella poisoning in the US each year, with one-fourth of the culture-confirmed cases proven to be of the new, more virulent typhimurium strain.
The risk of food poisoning from these pathogens comes at least as much from fruits and vegetables as from meat. The bacteria are transmitted by the animal manure which organic farmers use as fertilizer. While meat normally is cooked, a process that kills pathogenic bacteria, many fruits and vegetables are not. Although organic farmers compost their manure before applying it to crops, studies have shown that E. coli 0157:H7 can survive for long periods of time and at temperatures far above what is seen in most compost piles. Compounding the bacterial problem is the reluctance of organic and natural food producers to use anti-microbial preservatives, chemical washes, or pasteurization.
The Food and Drug Administration, too, has found an increased health risk from organic and natural foods, although it has been reluctant to report this. The agency, responsible for testing food products for dangerous contaminants such as pesticides, routinely finds higher levels of fungal toxins in organic foods. Laboratory tests show some of these toxins to be among the most carcinogenic compounds in existence.
All of which brings us back to the wisdom of the planned consumer brochures on pesticides. In 1997, I asked Carol Browner, Administrator of the EPA, whether the pesticide brochures ultimately wouldn’t harm public health: first, by needlessly scaring consumers away from fruit and vegetable consumption, especially in light of the National Research Council’s report which found no increased health risk from pesticide residues; secondly, by encouraging organic and natural foods consumption, which may pose a greater public health threat than conventional produce. She responded by saying that, although it was important to consider that possibility, the pesticide brochure was mainly a “consumer right to know issue, so that mothers could decide for themselves what was right for themselves and their children.”
Fair enough. If, as Administrator Browner stated, the pesticide brochure is truly a “consumer right-to-know” issue, then the EPA should make it clear that when they say that pesticides cause health problems at “certain levels of exposure,” they mean unimaginably-high levels of exposure-far above what is found in our food and water.
The brochures should tell consumers that the National Research Council and a half dozen other major reports have found no indication that the levels of pesticides found in the food supply cause any human health problems whatsoever, even in infants and children. If it is simply a right-to-know issue, then the EPA brochures should also discuss the theoretical health risks posed by the natural chemicals in our food. Consumers have a right to know that the limonene in oranges, the caffeic acid in fruits and vegetables and many other naturally occurring food chemicals cause health problems at “certain levels of exposure.” (again, these problems are only seen when laboratory animals are fed huge, concentrated doses of these natural chemicals) Finally, consumers have a right to know that even organic food is grown using pesticides which have their own theoretical health risks. Consumers also have a right to know about the higher risk of deadly bacterial contamination associated with organic foods.
In reality, the EPA’s entire approach is fundamentally flawed. Consumers must have all of the information on these issues to make informed choices. Even if the brochure treated pesticides fairly, this information is useless without a broader context in which to place it. It is simply impossible to provide that context in an in-store brochure.
If consumers are interested in knowing their exposure to low levels of pesticide residues, they certainly have every right to demand that information. But that information has always been available from the EPA and FDA, and no one is proposing that it not be. (One good thing about the new brochure is the internet address to the EPA’s web page on pesticides and food, www.epa.gov/pesticides/food. Compared to a short brochure, a web page is the perfect format for relaying complex food safety information.) One suggestion, from Robin Woo of the Georgetown Center for Food and Nutrition Policy, is that the EPA defer the entire issue of “communicating the risks and benefits of pesticide use” to the President’s new Council on Food Safety. This would allow recognized experts, not politically-motivated regulators, to decide the best way to communicate with the public on this issue. Since the brochure is mandated by law, however, there is little chance that will occur.
The enthusiasm Ms. Browner and the EPA have shown for the pesticide brochure, despite the fact that it will confuse consumers and damage public health, is really an indication of the brochure’s true purpose-bolstering the campaign to eliminate pesticides. There is no question that a brochure which focuses on the health threat to children will scare the public and result in louder public calls for the EPA to ban pesticides - especially if consumers remain uninformed as to the health benefits of pesticide use. In 1993, Ms. Browner stated that “the most important thing is to reduce the overall use of pesticides. By doing that, we will automatically reduce risks and we won’t have to spend all this time worrying about lots of complicated things.” In their zeal to rid the world of pesticides, it seems as if one of the “complicated things” Browner and the EPA don’t have time to worry about is public health.
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