Chemicals & Chemistry

By Michael Dourson, Bernard K. Gadagbui, and Patrician M. McGinnis

We have all heard the saying “Too much of a good thing.” This applies to foods, drinks and many kinds of activities. This saying also applies to chemicals we “hear” about in our daily news.

Note: This article is republished with permission from the

Toxicology, the study of poisons, is often thought of as a new discipline. It’s not. It has been around as long as people have been trying out different types of food, and using the occasional poisonous plant, or animal, to dispatch a rival.

Chemical phobia is a prevalent theme in today’s social media, and chemicals often written up in mainstream news outlets in negative terms.  But have you ever stopped to think about the sources of this information?  How many of the source

Taste is subjective. So is smell. But when the headline in the  January 22, 2013 issue of The Mirror reads:

There are about 20 million known organic chemicals, so it should not be at all s

Contrary to populist dogma, with rare exceptions, chemicals do not accumulate in our bodies.

Organic chemicals can be divided into broad categories – let's call them "flavors" – based on what functional groups they possess.

One would think that the FDA's issuance of the CLARITY-BPA Core Study, a two-year exhaustive examination of the effects of the plastic component bispheno