by Andrew Williams

Created on: September 02, 2009

In many aspects of modern culture, science has been villainized. We treat every new technological development designed to make our lives better as if it were some insidious plot to give us all cancer. Cell phones, computer screens, cars, factories, microwaves, nuclear energy - all fall victim to the stigma of being "dangerous." The ironic thing is that the people most adamantly against these things are usually the people who know least about them and the public outcry for natural food and medicine is no different. Misinformation always travels faster than the truth and people are afraid of things they don't understand. Would you rather have a nice cool glass of clean glacier water or a beaker of dihydrogen monoxide cooked up in some heartless laboratory?

To delve into the root of the issue, one must examine the current fears of the day. At the moment, the primary scare happens to be carcinogens. People seem to be under the impression that everything with a long chemical name causes cancer. The fact of the matter is that anything you do in excess will have some likelihood of causing cancer. If you eat cashews every meal of every day for the rest of your life, chances are pretty decent that they'll eventually give you cancer. In the example stated in the first paragraph, the main difference between glacier water and dihydrogen monoxide is that glacier water inevitably has a few contaminants in it. This old routine of using the chemical name for water to trip people up has been a long standing gag among scientists tired of being accused of poisoning the world. Ask a natural food saavy friend sometime to look at the back of a box of Ben and Jerry's and tell you which ingredients are the dangerous ones that they refuse to eat. I'm willing to bet that it's all the ones they can't pronounce.

The FDA closely regulates all chemicals used to improve the taste or longievity of foods, as well as the pesticides sprayed on them and the farming techniques used to grow them. They're not any more dangerous to your health than eating any other kind of fatty foods. We use artificial flavoring because it tastes great - in many cases, it utilizes the exact molecular compounds that make your food taste the way it does in concentrated form. People who say natural foods taste better are simply deluding themselves. The artificial flavoring is engineered to taste better and humans don't have any innate ability to detect synthetic compounds. The same goes for the pesticides sprayed on

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