Catching up on some older episodes of John Stossel tonight while waiting for YouTube uploads to finish, and just about a month ago, he ran a whole episode on irrational fears of chemicals in food.
I'm a pretty big fan of the episode overall, at least so far (I haven't finished watching it yet), but I am a little disappointed that he directly ripped of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit! Experiment" where they went out and convinced people to sign petitions banning "dihydrogen monoxide". So just to be clear, Penn & Teller did it first. Way first... Like... Four years ago, first. Check that out:
Anyway... I guess it all just goes back into driving home my point from earlier today. People are afraid of chemicals purely because they don't understand the science and they don't remember chemistry class very well. If they did, there wouldn't be so much hysteria about foods.
All is not lost, however!
Just educate yourself in actual science. Then you can go to websites telling you to freak out about trace doses of utterly safe, but scary-sounding chemicals all you want. You may quickly realize that they are all filled with time-tested quackery.
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