Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

that it won’t print studies funded by tobacco, which Seavey sees as a dangerous precedent, one that will grind science to a halt, not to mention that Big Pharma has been unfairly maligned even though they have been the main engine boosting life spans during the last fifty years. “I used to think Ayn Rand was describing a worst-case scenario. But it’s coming true. They’re regulating businesses out of existence.” He lifts up his water glass. “Here’s to the slow death of civilization.”

I raise my glass tentatively, not sure what else to do.

Seavey—thin, dirty-blond hair, looks a bit like the actor Eric Stoltz—has worked for the ACSH for seven years. It’s clearly a pro-industry group. But I don’t want to caricature them as apologists for corporate America. For instance, they also take a strong antitobacco stance.

They claim that they just want to bring perspective to public health—to focus on real dangers, not imagined ones. Smoking kills 440,000 people a year in the United States alone, far more than any alleged toxin. They also make the controversial argument that millions worldwide have died of malaria because of the ban on the mosquito pesticide DDT. So DDT—which they claim poses a minimal threat to humans—should never have been outlawed.

“The chances of being sickened by any toxin is extremely slight,” Seavey says. “There’s no real risk, if any. It’s a counterintuitive notion—the idea that something very bad for you could be harmless in small doses.”

So why the obsession with toxins?

“It probably comes from our primitive caveman minds. We divide everything into either food or poison.”

I agree with Seavey on that point. Putting aside which toxins are actually toxic, there’s almost a religious element to the quest for purity from unnatural compounds. Toxin obsession reminds me of the intricate rules on kosher eating that I learned when living by the Bible. Organic eaters look at chemicals the same way Orthodox Jews look at pork—as impure, almost repulsive.

There’s this mistaken idea that natural is good, says Seavey. But arsenic and hemlock are natural. Likewise, there’s the fallacious idea that natural products don’t have chemicals. But they do. The ACSH claims on its website that “of the chemicals people eat, 99.99 percent are natural.” Or as a wiseacre blogger wrote, “Even Rachel Carson was made of chemicals.”

The Toxin-Free Life

Marti has e-mailed me a list of do’s and don’ts for living a toxin-free life, and I vow to spend the week following her path. Here are my notes for the first day:

     9 a.m.: Trip to Whole Foods to buy organic strawberries and organic raspberries (price: $4.75). I can’t listen to my iPhone, per Marti, since she says it’s linked to brain cancer and low sperm production. I’m bored out of my mind.

     10 a.m.: Morning ablutions. For my shower soap, I’m using olive oil mixed with mineral salts (got the recipe off an organic website). Felt very ancient Roman. For shampoo, baking soda and apple-cider vinegar. Took forever to wash it out, but my hair feels supersoft and now has Einstein-like antigravity properties. Underarm deodorant is cornstarch and baking soda. Unpleasantly sticky.

     11 a.m.: I cover Deca-laden upholstery on the couch with organic cotton sheet.

     Noon: Go on a BPA hunt in the kitchen, searching for the recycling code on the bottom of all plastic containers. Recite the classic BPA poem: “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”

     1 p.m.: Explain to Julie why the couch is covered with organic cotton sheet. Wait as she rolls her eyes.

     2 p.m.: Meet friend Roger for a late lunch. He e-mails to ask for my cell. “I’m not carrying one these days. You can call the restaurant.” He responds, “I’ll send a Telex.” Ha.

     3 p.m.: Clean up spilled red wine in living room with vinegar and baking soda. Julie says this smells worse than spilled wine.

     4 p.m.: I worry if the water bowl for our pet lizard, Brownie, contains BPA and is altering her hormones. I have the same thought about the plastic watering can for my plants. Realize this might not be best use of my cerebral cortex.

In short, I can’t be as toxin-free as Marti. It’s just not physically or logistically possible with three kids and all the other health-related things I have to do. But I don’t want to glibly dismiss the dangers of toxins. There are lots of disturbing data out there. The American Cancer Society estimates that environmental toxins cause 34,000 deaths a year. In 2010, a presidential panel said that number could be “grossly underestimated.” There are 80,000 chemicals used in industrial processes, and only two hundred of them have been tested by the EPA. What’s the reasonable middle path?

I call up David Ewing Duncan, a journalist and public health advocate, who traced all the toxins in his body and wrote about it in his 2009 book Experimental Man.

How has his life changed after all the research?

“Many of the toxins I’m fatalistic about,” he says. “Nobody knows how many parts per billion are dangerous. And even if we did, there’s often nothing we can do about it. There’s no way to escape. Virtually all the major chemicals are found everywhere on earth, from polar bears in the North Pole to penguins in the South Pole.”

Are there things he does differently now that he’s studied the issue for years?

“There are two behaviors I’ve changed.”

First, he’s much more careful about mercury in fish. He only eats sea creatures low on the food chain—crab and shrimp, for instance—which absorb less than the big predators, such as tuna and marlin.

Second, he says he’ll never microwave anything in plastic again.

“But you could say I’m part of the problem, not the solution. There need to be people who are vigilant, like your aunt. We need to pay more attention before we add new chemicals.”

It’s all about weighing costs and benefits. To be totally safe, I could avoid cell phones. But the stress of living a cell-phone-free life? That might put me in an early grave. You have