The brain hungers to place things in simple categories: good for you, bad for you...safe, risky. But the stomach hungers for French fries, salmon, meat substitutes, and other things that have been hastily labeled "bad" by activists, so the brain has some work to do: putting the activists' warnings (about food and other things) in context, weighing those tiny or imagined risks against other risks from everyday life. Ten lessons for the discriminating risk-assessor:
1. All regulations are not equal. To people who put politics before science, all regulations are essentially morally equal either you're for all of them, since they ostensibly protect us, or against all of them, since they limit our freedom and cost money. But all regulations are not morally equal, from a utilitarian perspective. There's a real difference between a science-based regulation that, say, forbids high levels of cyanide in milk (which people wouldn't likely want to drink anyway) and a fear-based regulation that, say, forbids mixing peas and carrots on your plate, due to warnings from mystics that the combination causes bad karma or warnings from environmentalists that gene migration may result in a deadly pea-carrot mutant. The first regulation is likely harmless and the second a genuine nuisance, so (until the day when all laws are repealed or all life controlled by benign totalitarianism, depending on your political persuasion) there is much to be gained by encouraging the use of sound science for choosing between regulations.
2. Foods aren't all-good or all-evil. A group called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) is suing McDonald's and Burger King for not labeling their food carcinogenic under California's Proposition 65 law. Apparently, the chemical acrylamide, recently found to occur in fried foods in higher amounts than previously realized, has been considered a carcinogen by the California government for decades but what Californians and the activists ignore is that acrylamide was considered dangerous only when workers in industrial settings were accidentally exposed to massive amounts, or when lab rodents were deliberately exposed to huge amounts. There is no evidence of danger to fry-eaters, though people are naturally more suspicious of fries, since many people already regard them as a naughty, fattening indulgence but that is a separate issue (and quantity matters there, too).
3. A few "toxic" dust motes won't necessarily harm you. In similar fashion, a new study warns of toxic effects from dust on your computer that contains traces of fire-retardant chemicals but said toxic effects are only small reproductive and neurological effects on rodents subjected to massive doses of the compounds in question. And needless to say, humans are much safer having computers with minuscule traces of chemical dust on them than they would be having computers that were on fire. (If computer-related dust frightens people, you know it's only a matter of years before we get people suing for allergic reactions to designer nanoparticles.)
4. What doesn't feel bad right now could still kill you, though. Obviously, most people tend to panic over stuff they aren't familiar with or don't like but tend to feel safe around stuff they like such as cigarettes which is no rational way to assess risks. The main reason, I submit, for the schism between scientists' thinking on smoking and smokers' thinking is that smoking doesn't kill you fast enough for it to register as an immediate threat on most people's present-focused fight-or-flight systems. If they felt even a tiny shock each time they touched a cigarette, they'd probably be easily convinced that cigarettes are dangerous (even if in fact they weren't!), but if people feel no pain now, they generally don't think about tomorrow and furthermore don't want to. Their concern over hypothetical and minuscule long-term effects from other chemicals is likely rooted more in the degree of fear they feel right now over the issue than any attempt to weigh subtle long-term consequences. That's humanity in a nutshell. It's not some complex, sophisticated calculation that leads them to "rationally" conclude that such-and-such a loss of future probable years of life is worth so-and-so many years of rich tobacco taste. They just don't like to think about the distant future, whether the topic is lung cancer, paying off the federal debt, or paying off their credit card bills. Now always seems more real to people than later, even if now is dominated by a groundless feeling of dread and later will be spent in a very real lung cancer ward.
5. Subjectivity, obviously, is not objective. On a similar but broader note, and I can't stress this enough: how you feel about things doesn't matter. To anyone whether a socially-concerned leftist or a faith-fueled rightist urging us to "look within" for the answers, I plead: look without. Unless you want to mount a serious argument that the physical universe (and the scientific laws describing it) are the product of some illusion out of The Matrix or Eastern mysticism for which there is not an iota of evidence (and don't give me any lip about quantum physics, which gets wildly misinterpreted) you must admit that what's inside your head tells us nothing certain about what's outside your head. If you want to report what's inside the skull, then by all means tell us your hopes, fears, dreams, and prayers. But if you want to know what exists outside your skull, you need to empirically examine the real world, and that's where science not political consensus, not memorable anecdotes, not rhyming protest slogans, not the tugging of heartstrings, not fear comes in.
Or to use a concrete example: Remember, just because you've become comfortable with your looks doesn't mean the rest of us have become comfortable with your looks, let alone that you've actually gotten better looking.
6. You ought to fear fear itself (I didn't invent this one). People often take their own emotional intensity as evidence they're onto something in the real world: supernatural energy, bad vibes, a social trend, something dizziness-inducing in the water, what have you. The last thing we need are philosophies encouraging people to just "trust their instincts" instead of carefully, skeptically examining the facts: mysticism, faith, relativism (the claim that there is no reality beyond perspective and subjectivity), fate, fortune-telling, the highly subjective testimony of alternative medicine users, occult dream-analyzers, etc. It may be all in your heads, people, while reality is out there, thataway.
But since few people grasp this point, I've actually had people say to me, "You don't need research about everything, you just need to kind of think about it and it makes sense: yeah, all those chemicals must be doing something bad." Were falser words ever spoken?
7. Not all "discrimination" need be irrational. Sorting true from false, and more safe from less safe, entails discrimination, not in any sinister sense, but in the sense that one says "We must discriminate between nails and screws to get this job done." Unfortunately, there have been efforts in the past decade or so to blur this distinction and treat even the cold, objective risk rankings of insurance companies' actuarial tables as forms of "discrimination" in the sinister, irrational sense. Boston Globe columnist Charles Stein asks "do we really want a health insurance system that treats sick people like bad drivers?" Like the Clinton administration before him, Stein thinks there is some way to have all insured people pay the same rate, regardless of how much risk they represent, and still have something called "insurance." Call it welfare, call it charity, eliminate all risk calculation and the insurance policy prices that follow from them but don't pretend it's still insurance, which is based on differential risks and appropriate premiums as surely as casinos are based on playing the odds. It would be absurd to charge an obese, smoking, elderly man the same rate as a fit, non-smoking, young one for a life insurance policy, for instance. As philosopher Hans-Herman Hoppe once said, praising insurance actuarial tables: it is not the end of discrimination that rational people should seek but its perfection, that is, its grounding in facts and probability, not public or personal mood.
(Speaking of discrimination, Newsweek columnist and past FactsAndFears contributor Gersh Kuntzman takes issue with a recent court decision declaring "ladies' night" at bars discriminatory, and he humorously reminds readers that ladies' night doesn't just benefit ladies.)
8. The fearful and fanatically safety-conscious are not necessarily the good guys. For example, the AP's Don Thompson reports that California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer is suing three health advocacy organizations for misspending the money they squeezed out of companies under the aforementioned Prop. 65: "The state is seeking to dissolve one of the organizations, the nonprofit California Community Health Advocates in Rocklin, alleging that settlement money went to pay personal mortgage and property taxes, personal credit card debts, musical equipment and other improper purposes." That group may get dissolved, while another, the California Advocacy Group, has already settled with the state. The third group is called Consumer Cause, something of a misnomer, apparently.
9. The risk-exaggerating groups may cloak themselves in the appearance of scientific objectivity and concern for the environment. The PEW trust funded a study that appeared in Science earlier this year warning of PCBs in farmed salmon and, out of context, it's true there are traces of PCBs in farmed salmon. But this study, like a smaller one produced by the PEW-funded David Suzuki Foundation, glosses over the fact that even if farmed salmon have higher levels of PCBs than wild salmon, neither have PCBs in anything like amounts large enough to even approach the highest "safe" levels recognized by the FDA and EPA, levels that are in turn far lower and more cautious than are scientifically justified. That, of course, didn't stop the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) from leaping on the salmon studies and demanding that salmon (can you guess?) be labeled hazardous under California's Prop. 65.
10. Finally, remember that a few negative-sounding factoids can be marshaled against almost anything, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a serious risk. A March 14 article by the Los Angeles Times' Rosie Mestel does a pretty decent job of putting the latest scare from the chronically concerned Center for Science in the Public Interest in perspective which is all I ask. CSPI's latest reason for stomach upset is Quorn, a meat substitute made from fungal mycoprotein. Note how commonplace Quorn is and how infrequent problems with it are:
"It seems in the FDA's eyes severe vomiting, diarrhea, and anaphylactic reactions do not constitute harm," [CSPI head Michael] Jacobson said. "I think that's pathetic."
Quorn's manufacturers, based in the bucolic Yorkshire town of Stokesley, say they are perplexed and not a little irked over the complaints about what they prefer to describe as their "mushroom"-related product.
More than 1 billion servings of Quorn's 100-plus dishes have been eaten in Europe since the first savory pie was rolled out with pomp in 1985. Consumers have chowed down on Chinese-style chargrilled mini fillets, beef-style casserole with herb dumplings, and Southern-style Quorn burgers all with no known deaths.
Several leading allergy experts say there is no evidence suggesting special problems with Quorn, although a few people can be expected to react badly to the fungus, just as some might to any other foodstuff, such as raspberries, milk or corn.
Jacobson is quoted in the article claiming never to have heard of mycoprotein before, which, as ACSH Nutrition Director Ruth Kava points out, is hard to believe coming from a microbiologist. But that's all right. If CSPI isn't competent enough to put risks in perspective, at least there are a few scientists, exceptional reporters, and websites like ours willing to do it for him.