Panic in the pantry: Food facts, fads, and fallacies

Evidently the first edition of 'Panic in the Pantry,' which was published in 1975, didn't have sufficient impact, since the new edition starts with a history of the 1989 Alar panic. A lot of people thought the Alar-in-apples scare demonstrated the dangers of pesticides in our food supply. What it really showed is that most people don't know beans about nutrition. Fortunately, according to Elizabeth Whelan and Frederick Stare, they don't have to, since America's food is not only the most abundant but the safest in the world. 'Panic' is really aimed not only at people who don't understand anything about nutrition, but whose education is so defective they are incapable of understanding anything about it. Therefore, unless they are willing to study hard, they will continue to have to take somebody else's word for it. Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, and Stare, retired founder of Harvard University's Department of Nutrition, say you should take the word of scientists, like them. Of course, lots of habitues of the health food stores seem suspicious of scientists. They are right to be skeptical but are facing the wrong way. ACSH, for example, occasionally runs blind surveys of Healthfoodland (as Whelan and Stare call it) to find out what quality of advice is being given out. The results are appalling. In 1989, another group, the Consumer Health Education Council, called 41 Houston health food stores with a concocted story about a man with AIDS who was continuing to have sexual relations with his wife. The callers purported to seek nutritional advice for the couple. Thirty of the 41 nutritional counselors claimed their stores sold cures for AIDS, all 41 recommended vitamins and various 'counselors' recommended other nostrums from hydrogen peroxide to herbal baths. Not one counselor recommended either abstention from sex or condoms for the wife at risk. The quality of the advice from Healthfoodland is literally a matter of life and death, and not just from AIDS. I know health food quacks who are telling insulin-dependent diabetics to throw away their needles (which the diabetics are only too happy to hear) and replace them with Chinese herbs. That is a death sentence. But isn't it true that lax regulations and slovenly testing practices allow dangerous chemicals and adulterants into our food? No, say Whelan and Stare. The Food and Drug Administration 'testing process is so rigorous that many "natural" substances -- including vitamin A -- could not survive it.' That's because more people (one or two a year) die from vitamin A overdoses than have died in all history from dioxin (zero). These victims are readily identifiable because typically they get their vitamin A from drinking carrot juice -- up to a gallon a day -- and their corpses consequently are bright orange.