The truth remains: The right dose
makes the difference between a poison and a remedy.
May 21, 2014
By Dennis
Avery
The Food and Drug Administration has
just loudly re-endorsed perhaps the oldest truth in science—that the dose makes
the poison. Paracelsus, the father of toxicology, told us 500 years ago, “All
substances are poison. There is none which is not a poison. The right dose
makes the difference between a poison and a remedy.”
Even sunlight and water are poisons
at high doses.
The FDA has just commented on a new study
which found no health impact from low doses of bisphenol-A. BPA is a
plasticizer often found at low doses in things like foods, children’s milk
bottles, and toys. Activists responded by sending out waves of demands to
parents that this useful chemical be banned from the shelves.
The FDA said, “The study reported no
effects of BPA at any dose except at the very highest levels, and is consistent
with the FDA’s current position that BPA is safe at the very low amounts that
occur in some foods.” Moreover, the FDA says BPA’s “low dose” safety range is
huge: from 2.5 to 2,700 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day!
There’s NO case on record where low
doses of a toxic substance are more dangerous than high doses. That is
important in a human world where thousands of different chemicals play parts in
our food, water, medicines, and technologies. The activists, however, like
making us fearful of chemicals—apparently with the goal of undermining our
faith in the capitalist system that keeps finding new uses for chemicals.
Take obesity. Activists have
attacked aspartame and other non-caloric sweeteners in the midst of a First
World obesity epidemic. Sugar substitutes should therefore be a no-brainer. We
struggle with obesity because we no longer do hard physical work, we eat big
meals and high-calorie snacks, and we spend long hours watching TV and texting.
The nay-sayers, however, don’t want a cheap, acceptable substitute for the
16-ounce Coke. Ergo, they attack aspartame as “dangerous.” And, good people
believe them. Just last week, a conscientious young mother warned my Rotary
meeting about the potential evils of aspartame.
Farm chemicals have also been
accused in the “low dose” campaigns. Atrazine, our most widely used farm
chemical, turns up during the spring flush in the drinking water of some
Midwest cities. This makes it a target for activists and even the EPA itself,
which would like credit for another regulatory scalp. However, a person would
have to drink thousands of gallons of “contaminated” water per day to
exceed the EPA’s own safety level.
Recently, the New Yorker
lauded a Berkeley biologist, Lester Hayes, for claiming that low doses
of atrazine cause sexual changes in frogs even though high doses have shown no
impact. The real joker in the deck: Hayes has never revealed his testing
regime, and no other researcher has been able to duplicate the low-dose
impacts.
This is the opposite of science.
Europe has adopted the Precautionary
Principle that says nothing should be allowed unless it has been proven
never to cause harm to anyone or anything, ever. They will severely hamper
their lifestyles if they proceed down this road. I take rat poison every day to
prevent a recurrence of a small stroke I suffered five years ago. My warfarin,
originally developed to make rats bleed to death internally, is now used in low
doses to help millions of humans lead longer, healthier lives. The pills cost
less than a penny a day.
Another common example: Poisonous
iodine, first added to our salt in 1924 to prevent goiter, has all but
eliminated the condition that was prevalent across wide areas of the U.S.
Almost a hundred years later, the fear of goiter never crosses our mind
as we daily add a bit of salt and health to our food.
The truth remains: The right dose makes
the difference between a poison and a remedy.
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See more at:
http://www.cfact.org/2014/05/21/fda-no-low-dose-chemical-dangers/#sthash.Dj5CDKOw.dpuf
