Attack of the killer veggies

Editorial Copyright 1999 Washington Times February 23, 1999

Ten years to the month after the great Alar scare, environmentalists are out to set off another panic. The culprits, as always, are those fruits and vegetables that doctors and other health experts say you should serve your children more, not less, often.

Last week, activists at Consumers Union released a study showing that even a single daily serving of some produce can deliver "unsafe levels of toxic pesticide residues" for young children. Warned Consumer Union's Edward Groth in an interview with CBS News, "It might affect puberty. It might affect fertility. It might affect any number of factors that are regulated by the body's hormonal system."

Not that the group wants children eating fewer fruits and vegetables. No, sir. It just wants parents to consider laundering their produce before serving it to vulnerable children. Remember, it's their puberty at stake.

Just three years ago, the National Research Council issued a report entitled "Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet" which downplayed the risks of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. Produced by scientists at universities and research institutions across the country, it argued there was little reason for anxiety, much less panic, over the problem.

First, it said, the dose makes the poison, not the substance itself. In the trace amounts in which they appear in food, pesticides simply do not pose a serious risk of cancer.

Second, the risks are purely hypothetical. The restrictions that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency put on pesticide residues are based not on studies of humans but of lab rats. Regulators fatten the rats on huge quantities of chemicals, then try to extrapolate the number of tumors that rats get at high doses to what humans might get at low doses. Whenever "human risks are inferred from animal test data, considerable uncertainty may remain about the magnitude of the risk," the report said.

Third, there may be far more naturally occurring, "wild" pesticides and chemicals - that plants use to protect themselves - in the food supply than the man-made variety. They happen to be unregulated. What are they doing to puberty?

Not that wild pesticides make the food supply unsafe. The NRC report pointedly said that regardless of their origin, pesticides are present in food in such minute quantities that they are "unlikely to pose an appreciable cancer risk." Richard Adamson, the former director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Etiology, has told editors here that eating an apple with trace amounts of Alar (a growth regulator) is about the same as eating a peanut butter sandwich with trace amounts of aflatoxin (a carcinogen formed by mold that grows on peanuts and grains).

The report made one other finding notable for its political incorrectness. By "controlling insect vectors, pesticides have profoundly decreased the spread of human diseases, and pesticide usage has increased agricultural yields." That's something to keep in mind the next time a group tries to protect you from produce that pesticides helped make possible.

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