Are you somebody who looks for products that claim to be ‘chemical free’? Do you confidently proclaim that some foods are ‘chock full of chemicals’, even ‘poisonous’, because you believe they are ‘unnatural’ and therefore somehow dangerous?
In popular parlance, people frequently use the word ‘chemical’ interchangeably with the word, “poison”, as if they’re the same thing. Yet, as anyone who remembers anything from high school chemistry classes can tell you (and for many of us, that’s the problem – we don’t remember), that’s simply not true.
All this misinformation is giving chemistry a bad press and has prompted chemical scientists to set about reclaiming the value of ‘chemicals’ for what they really are.
“Food is a bunch of chemicals, nothing more, nothing less.”
Of course, chemicals are everywhere and in everything – from the air we breathe to the medicines we take every day. Chemicals are molecules. The whole world consists of them – we are immersed in them. It’s all chemicals!
But, as Associate Professor Matthew Todd from Sydney University’s School of Chemistry says, “our relationship with molecules does seem to become particularly fraught when we eat them.”
“Food is a bunch of chemicals, nothing more, nothing less,” he says.
“When we eat, we eat chemicals. Some are simple, such as water or salt. 
Some are complex, such as the proteins in steak. But they’re all chemicals.
“There is no part of food that is not chemical. If you eat an apple that weighs a hundred grams, you have eaten a hundred grams of chemicals.”
Professor Todd says part of the reason why people are alarmed by this idea is this negative ‘public relations run’ that the word chemical has had in the last couple of decades.
“…everything is made of chemicals, […] synthetic chemicals are often much safer for human health than so-called ‘natural’ ones, and […] unfounded anxiety about chemicals is encouraging people to buy into ideas and ‘remedies’ that make little scientific or medical sense.”
Reclaiming chemicals!
Luckily for the poor old chemical scientists, there are movements to right these wrongs. In the UK, there is a charitable organisation called ‘Sense about Science’ that is trying to help.
Sense about Science says it role is to equip “people to make sense of scientific and medical claims in public discussion”. It looks at all forms of scientific and medical claims from ‘superfoods’ to ‘detox’ products and ‘cancer cures’, drawing on unbiased scientific evidence and using plain English descriptions.
Last year they stepped in to help the chemists of the world tackle common misconceptions about chemistry (and reclaim the good name of chemicals!) by publishing a guide called Making Sense of Chemical Stories.
The guide aims to bridge the gap between what they call the ‘lifestyle view’ (and popular definition) of chemicals and the realities of how chemistry is used to sustain the modern world.
The guide does this by tackling common misconceptions about chemistry and it’s worth a read.
“In lifestyle commentary,” says Director of Sense About Science, Tracey Brown, in the introduction, “chemicals are presented as something that can be avoided, or eliminated using special socks, soaps or diets, and that cause only harm to health and damage to the environment.
“The chemical realities of the world, by contrast, are that everything is made of chemicals, that synthetic chemicals are often much safer for human health than so-called ‘natural’ ones, and that unfounded anxiety about chemicals is encouraging people to buy into ideas and ‘remedies’ that make little scientific or medical sense.”
Myth buster – six misconceptions:
According to the guide, there are six common misconceptions about chemistry that the world needs to understand:
- “You can lead a chemical-free life.”
“Everything, including the air we breathe, the food we eat and the drinks we consume, is made of chemicals. It doesn’t matter if you live off the land, following entirely organic farming practises or are a city-dweller consuming just processed food, either way your surroundings and diet consists of nothing but chemicals. There are no alternatives to chemicals, just choices about which chemicals to use and how they are made.”
- “Man-made chemicals are inherently dangerous.”
“Whether a substance is manufactured by people, copied from nature, or extracted directly from nature, tells us nothing much at all about its properties. In terms of chemical safety, “industrial”, “synthetic”, “artificial” and “man-made” do not necessarily mean damaging and “natural” does not necessarily mean better.”
- “Synthetic chemicals are causing many cancers and other diseases.”
“The chemical reality is that many of the claims about chemicals being ‘linked’ to diseases simply tell us that a chemical was present when an effect occurred, rather than showing that the chemical causes the effect. Caution is needed in reporting apparent correlations: it is in the nature of scientific experiments that many disappear when a further test is done or they turn out to be explained in other ways.”
- “Our exposure to a cocktail of chemicals is a ticking time bomb.”
“We have always been exposed to many different substances, because nature is a “cocktail of chemicals”. Modern technology enables us to detect minuscule amounts of substances, but the presence of such a small amount of a specific substance does not mean that it is having any discernible effect on us or on future generations.”
- “We should avoid man-made chemicals.”
“…synthesised and man-made chemicals have given societies choices beyond measure about what they are exposed to and the problems they can solve.
- “We are subjects in an unregulated, uncontrolled experiment.”
“The chemical reality is that there is an extensive regulatory system that strictly controls what chemicals can be introduced: what experiments can take place, what can be used, for which purpose and how they should be transported, used and disposed of.”
And look out for next week’s post – ‘Detox’ is a marketing myth.
