Tons Of Food Needed To Reach Toxicity

Should the federal Food and Drug Administration ban Thanksgiving dinner? That’s the question asked by the New York-based American Council on Science and Health this year as it released its annual holiday menu stuffed with turkey, dressing, the traditional trimmings and a wide assortment of government-declared carcinogens and other poisons.

The fold-out “menu,” printed on embossed heavy stock and tied with a gold cord, is an eyecatching gimmick. Yet the ACSH’s question is not as facetious as it sounds. The FDA and other assorted agents of our nation’s food police would have you believe that trace levels of certain chemical compounds found in food and other substances are hazardous to your health.

But as the ACSH menu makes clear, many chemical compounds that the FDA and others have determined are hazardous to rodents - and, therefore, to humans, too - are naturally occurring in many foods, at levels in many cases that are higher than those identified by the government as harmful to health.

Consider the typical calorie-laden Thanksgiving feast that’s also filled with toxic, carcinogenic or mutagenic (causing birth defects) substances:

A cream of mushroom soup appetizer contains hydrazines, which are carcinogenic and mutagenic.

A fresh relish tray of carrots (caffeic acid, a carcinogen), cherry tomatoes (benzaldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, quercetin glycosides, all carcinogens and the latter two also mutagens) and celery (caffeic acid and psoralens, another carcinogen, and furan derivatives, a mutagen).

An entree of prime rib of beef with parsley sauce (heterocyclic amines and psoralens, both carcinogens and mutagens).

Roast turkey (heterocyclic amines).

Broccoli spears (allyl isothiocyanate, a carcinogen and mutagen).

Pumpkin pie (benzo(a)pyrene, a carcinogen and mutagen, and safrole, a carcinogen).

Coffee (benzo(a)pyrene, benzaldehyde, benzene, benzofuran, caffeic acid, 1,2,5,6-dibenz(a)-anthracene, catechol, ethyl benzene, furan, furfural, hydroquinone, hydrogen peroxide and methylglyoxal, all bad stuff).

You get the picture: Many foods contain enough naturally occurring compounds to cause health problems if ingested in large doses. But that’s the key - the dose.

One slice of plain old white bread broken up in your turkey stuffing contains 167 micrograms of furfural, a compound known to cause cancer in rodents. But the cancer-causing dose is 197 milligrams per kilogram of rodent body weight, ACSH notes, which would translate into a human eating 82,600 slices of white bread a day.

ACSH figures that it would take nearly four tons of turkey and 96 cups of coffee in one sitting to reach toxic dosage. The point is that the minute levels of these compounds found naturally occurring in foods, or in man-made form in pesticides and food additives, are not harmful to health, as the chemophobic lobby in this nation insists with its scare stories about this or that chemical causing cancer and other illnesses.

Thanks in part to the kind of eye-opening reasoning displayed by the ACSH menu, Congress this year approved legislation repealing the government’s nearly 40-year-old “zero risk” standard for chemicals used in pesticides. The new standard is “reasonable certainty of no harm.” Food additives, however, still must meet the old “mouse is a man” test that is scientifically unsupportable.

Food police or not, bon appetit!