Don’t Fall for Chemophobia: How to Spot Fake Food Fears and Make Better Choices
Chemophobia—an excessive fear of chemicals—is everywhere today, particularly for food. It manifests itself in fads like “clean” eating, avoiding ingredients you can’t pronounce, limiting foods with more than five ingredients, chasing “natural” or organic labels, or following the latest food fad.
This phobia makes no scientific sense and many of the people that are promoting these fads have agendas that can put both you and the environment at risk.
About 30% of people report being scared of chemicals, and 40% of Europeans say they would want to “live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist.”
Unfortunately for them, every sip, every bite, and every breath allows chemicals to enter your body—which, itself, is made up of nothing but chemicals.
The fear is that chemicals are “toxic,” meaning poisonous. A substance is considered highly toxic if only a small amount can make you ill, and less toxic if you can consume large amounts without becoming ill.
Arsenic is very toxic but, even so, small amounts are used to treat cancer and heart disease. Water is not toxic—but too much, too quickly will kill you.
Although natural and synthetic chemicals have different properties, when it comes to cancer risk, they are identical. In fact, 99 percent of the pesticides we eat are produced naturally by plants themselves—and they have the same ability to cause cancer as man-made pesticides.
Economic Theory of Promoting Chemophobia
In economics, spending money to lobby the government directly for money or to put your competitors at a disadvantage to help you profit indirectly is called, “rent seeking.” One special application of this theory was put forth by Clemson University Emeritus Professor Bruce Yandle, who coined the term“Bootleggers and Baptists.” It originally described prohibition, which was pushed by bootleggers (who profited from illegal sales) and Baptists (who opposed alcohol for moral reasons).
The theory can be applied to those who promote chemophobia. The “bootleggers” are the purveyors of “natural products,” advertising (falsely) that their goods contain no chemicals, even though all products do. It’s also worth remembering that humans have been manipulating both animals and plants for thousands of years.
Then there are the activists (Baptists) who find it morally objectionable that people create foods that put “profits ahead of people’s health.” They are long on warnings and accusations, but exceedingly short on science. Where they do cite studies, they are often cherry-picked and short on quality.
Some argue the answer to chemophobia is more regulation. But, regulation just replaces one chemical with another. And when the Bootleggers and Baptists team up, they become a powerful force for regulation—and regulating based on fear of chemicals is, essentially, anti-science.
The Consequences of Chemophobia
One thing the Bootleggers and Baptists never mention is the unintended consequences are of changing your behavior.
For example, an extreme focus on eating clean or organically can lead to a disorder called orthorexia—a hyper-focuson eating only what you believe is healthy while neglecting a complete, balanced diet with all of the essential nutrients. There is anecdotal evidence that this kind of dietary extremism can lead to the same medical complications that one sees with severe anorexia: osteopenia (loss of bone density), anemia (tiredness from insufficient red blood cells), hyponatremia (too little sodium leading to vomiting), testosterone deficiency, and bradycardia (slow heartbeat).
It’s not just your own health that can be impacted by trying to avoid chemicals. As Richard Sexton points out in Food Fight, “organic, non-GMO, small-scale farming, local foods, and animal-friendly production” often require more inputs and produce fewer outputs, which means more land is needed to grow the amount of food.
Hopefully, science will re-emerge as the guiding principle, and these fear-driven fads will slowly disappear.