Coke and Pepsi Warnings

One day I overheard a news item on the radio about using radiation to kill bacteria on vegetables.  A colleague asked the rhetorical question, “Who would buy that?”  I told her that I had done some reading on the subject recently and the irradiated vegetables were perfectly safe to eat.  In fact those vegetables had been exposed to radiation for at least half of the time they were growing and couldn’t have grown without it.  It’s called sunlight.  But people don’t think of sunlight as radiation.  They don’t consider radio and cellphone signals as radiation.  Radiation is thought to be always bad and dangerous – no distinction is made between harmless and dangerous.  That would take some critical thinking.

People also fear carcinogens.  If it might cause cancer, regardless of the conditions or dosage level, it’s bad.  But so many things have been shown to cause cancer (including good-old sunlight, by the way) that comedians joke about it.  There are even substances that were once considered dangerous but have earned a reprieve.  It seems you can hardly move without bumping into something that at one time or another wasn’t considered deadly.

Now we get a recent news article about a substance in Coke and Pepsi coloring being banned in California because it caused cancer in lab animals.  Later in the article it states that humans would have to drink over one thousand cans per day to reach the dosage level given to the rodents.  Of course, if you tried to drink that much in a day the amount of water would kill you long before you reached the danger point for developing cancer.  (Yes, you can overdose on water!) 

Perspective is about moderation, understanding that you can keep trying to make your food, your drink, your environment purer but you reach a point where an extra dollar of effort yields pennies in benefit, and finally a point where an extra dollar of effort yields no benefit at all.  Yet there are still those with so little perspective and no understanding of science who insist that the water and the air are never clean enough.  Then it’s left to politicians and judges, not scientists, to sort it out.  And where do all these additional dollars come from? – you guessed it!