CHURCHVILLE, VA, October 2003 — Suppose your gracious new neighbor took you aside one day and quietly warned that serving non-organic fruits and vegetables to your family was endangering your kids’ health. Suppose she offered a professional-looking ‘index of danger’ showing your supermarket’s peaches, apples, spinach, celery, and potatoes were all too dangerous to eat. You’d probably be devastated.
Then suppose you learned from another friend that the neighbor had made it all up. With no training in chemistry or medicine, she’d made a bid for local prestige by concocting her own ‘chemical danger index’ and frightening her neighbors half to death. Would you feel betrayed?
Meet the Environmental Working Group, your friendly, concerned “neighbor” from Washington, DC. The EWG is a multi-million-dollar “public interest watchdog” dedicated to making you afraid of nearly everything in your modern world: fruits, vegetables, baby food, drinking water, toys, swimming pool chlorine, utility poles, cotton clothes, etc. The EWG says that eating one non-organic apple or peach can cause “dizziness, nausea or blurred vision” in a child, but offers no evidence. The EWG makes up its own “danger indexes” despite the fact that it has no scientists on its staff.
EWG does have a brilliant scheme guaranteed to keep you in fear for as long as you’re willing to stay there. The EWG says it recently tested 9 people and found traces in their bodies of 76 different chemicals “linked to cancer,” 79 chemicals “associated with birth defects,” 86 that disrupt the hormone system, and 94 that impact the brain and nervous systems. And all those chemicals can, indeed, be found in our environment. What the EWG doesn’t tell you is that 1) the chemicals are found only in tiny amounts; and 2) there’s no link between the trace chemicals and our health.
The brilliance of the EWG strategy is that modern chemical testing can find a part per trillion. That’s one second in 31,000 years. Thus we’ll always have “chemical contamination” to support EWG scare-mongering.
Some examples: They warn you about dioxin, despite the fact that U.S. industrial dioxin output is about four pounds per year, nationwide. Most of it is natural, from forest fires.
They warn you that DDT, banned for 30 years, is still lurking in the soil, and industrially-produced PCBs are buried in the rivers. Last year, however, the Federal government released a major study of New York’s Long Island, where women have a relatively high breast-cancer incidence. They examined blood and urine samples from 3,000 women (half with breast cancer, half without) along with samples of their yard dirt, carpet dust and tap water. The study focused on the cancer risks of everybody’s favorite chemical villains: DDT, another long-banned pesticide called dieldrin, and PCBs.
They found no link between any of the chemicals and breast cancer. What they found is that too many Long Island women smoke, and lots of them delay having children. Both raise breast cancer risks.
Where does the public-interest EWG get its money? Not from the public. They get it from the politically correct foundations of long-dead industrialists, whose affluent grand-kids now feel guilty that Mr. Ford or Mr. Pew got rich producing things people wanted, like cars and gasoline.
If you still prefer the chemical conspiracy theory, remember that our kids’ urgent health risks include smoking, lack of exercise, overeating – and not eating the five fruits and vegetables per day that will cut their total cancer risk in half. The major impact of the Environmental Working Group is to make us fear the ultra-healthful fruits and vegetables, and more inclined to drink sodas than tap water. How does that help?