This thanksgiving, don’t let the food fearmongers scare the enjoyment out of your holiday feast.
While it’s nothing new that a cabal of organic food fearmongers is once again trying to scare the money out of your pocketbooks, unfortunately they’re aided this year by research funded by your tax dollars and with the help of government-paid researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. You should ignore them and dig in and here’s why.
Using a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (who else, right?), a group of two scientists with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and three university “environmental health scientists” just blew $1.25 million taxpayer dollars on a massive organic food propaganda paper (ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/8418/8418.pdf), published in a government-sponsored health science journal, and subsequently trumpeted across the land by the Associated Press. The researcher’s “intuitive assumptions” are likely to soon be parroted in the pages of the New York Times and other major newspapers.
The researchers collected and examined the urine of 23 children looking for traces of the harmless breakdown products (metabolites) of non-persistent organophosphate (OP) pesticides. Using ultra-sensitive instruments, they found OP pesticide metabolites at an average of 2-5 parts per billion in the children’s urine. When they switched the kids to organic fruits and vegetables, the OP metabolite traces disappeared within 24 hours.
The research is good news on two fronts. First, only tiny traces of pesticide metabolites were found. A part per billion is equal to one second in 32 years. Second, it confirms that pesticides are rapidly detoxified and cleared from children’s bodies, just as we thought they were.
But instead of using these findings to reassure parents about the safety of the food supply, the researchers instead are promoting organic foods. Consider this line from their paper, “Although we did not collect health outcome data in this study, it is intuitive to assume that children whose diets consist of organic food items would have a lower probability of neurological health risks, a common toxicological mechanism of the OP pesticide class.” [emphasis added]
This sentence is an organic food marketers’ dream. Most parents not holding a PhD in toxicology would incorrectly interpret this as a warning that neurological health damage from pesticides is “common” (it’s non-existent) and that organic foods are substantially safer (they’re not). What is entirely missing from this sentence is the context of dose. While a nickel might be 500% more than a penny, neither amounts to wealth. So it is with pesticide residue risks.
The CDC researchers who coauthored this paper also published another paper this year showing that even the theoretically most exposed 5% of children — you know, those kids who eat nothing but fruit and veggies . . . ok, I said they were theoretical — would still be exposed to less than half the EPA-acceptable daily lifetime intake, called the chronic Population Adjusted Dose (cPAD). The average kid would be exposed to one-fifth this amount.
How low is that? Well, the cPAD for chlorpyrifos, the OP pesticide that is most “toxic,” is 1/1,000th of the No Observable Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL) dose (i.e. harmless) in dogs and rats, which were the most sensitive animal species tested. Thus, the theoretical “95th percentile” kids consume less than 1/2,000th of a harmless dose and your typical kid consumes 1/5,000th of a harmless dose. For comparison, one 500mg aspirin tablet will ease a headache, 70 tablets can kill you. So an aspirin is 1/70th of a toxic dose. For these pesticide residues we’re talking about 1/5,000th of a NON-toxic dose.
I called the lead author, Dr. Chensheng Lu at Emory University, to ask if he had any evidence that the children were exposed to anything but a fraction of the ultra-cautious, non-toxic EPA reference doses. He responded by saying that “the EPA reference doses aren’t the gold standard for safety.” In that he is correct.
The EPA reference doses are already so low and so completely in the realm of the theoretical that they are more or less arbitrary. Reasoned arguments can be made to set them either higher (because no ill effects have been observed in any animal species at higher doses) or lower (because one-tenth is assumed to be ten times safer). Dr. Lu and his fellow co-authors promote organic foods based on the latter “relative risk” argument, but there is zero evidence that any real world risks are reduced by consuming organic food.
Dr. Lu says his team is now developing a “complex model” to convert the urine metabolite levels they measured to estimates of actual food residue exposure. But why create a Rube Goldberg scheme to estimate something we’ve been directly measuring for years?
The EPA and FDA annually test thousands of raw, unwashed food samples for pesticide residues. In 2002, for example, the FDA examined 6,766 raw commodity samples and found that over 65 percent had no detectable pesticide residues. Fully half of the fruit samples were residue-free, as were nearly three quarters of vegetables. More predictive of actual consumer exposure is the FDA’s Total Diet Study, which tests for pesticides in prepared foods (washed, peeled, or cooked as appropriate) using the most sensitive residue detection methods. The 2002 Total Diet Study concluded that “the pesticide residue levels found were well below regulatory standards. An adjunct survey of baby foods in 1991-2002 also provided evidence of only small amounts of pesticide residues in those foods.”
Decades of data showing our food supply is safe are apparently not healthy for the careers of environmental scientists. So, good news is twisted to bad using methods and jargon so complex that you need several PhDs just to untangle it all. They hide their sophistry behind the flawed concept that less is always meaningfully safer. They examine urine instead of food, metabolites instead of actual pesticides, fantasy risks rather than real ones.
As a final note, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the government agency that sponsors Environmental Health Perspectives, the alarmist journal in which all of this drivel was published, is considering phasing out agency funding. Unfortunately, the public comment window for this proposal closed on October 28 (http://www.niehs.nih.gov/external/ehp/home.htm). Let us all hope that the Bush administration and real scientists at the NIEHS get a spine and drop sponsorship of the fear-mongering journal.