There are two narratives we’re being fed at the moment,
scare stories that are essentially about how modern life is killing us.
Everything we breathe, everything we eat, can either kill us or make us fat or
damage our children. There’s an underlying message of nostalgia for ye olden
days when food was safe and chemicals were safely confined to the periodic chart
on the classroom wall. The days before Brexit and Trump and Facebook and everything
going to hell in a hand cart.
A study has found that the chemicals in cleaning products
can cause serious lung function decline in women.
It says that ‘According to new research, women who work as
cleaners or regularly use cleaning products at home experience a greater
decline in lung function over time than women who do not clean.’
And of course the effect is being compared with smoking,
because everything is these days, including sugar.
The phrasing is odd: ‘The effect of occupational cleaning
was thus comparable to smoking somewhat less than 20 pack-years’. ‘Somewhat
less’ is meaningless. Does it mean a bit less or a lot less? The effect of
smelling a lovely flower is somewhat less than smoking.
The hydra of chemical versus natural is rearing its ugly
heads again. In this vision of the world, natural (ie unprocessed) is always
better even though cancer, ricin, deadly nightshade, botulism and many more things
are natural. And a chemical is a chemical whether it comes from a lab or from a
plant. The cleanest mountain air or spring water are made of chemicals.
The point is not whether these chemicals are harming us, it’s
that the reporting is gleefully playing on our fears. At a time of national and
global insecurity, people are more vulnerable to scare stories, we’re
hyper-alert to yet more things that are threatening Life As We Know It.
The Evil Chemicals narrative ties in with the Ultra-processed
Food narrative, the other monster that is crawling out of the night to stalk us.
The report the media has picked up on says that ‘a 10%
increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diet was associated
with significant increases of 12% in the risk of overall cancer and 11% in the
risk of breast cancer’.
However, Professor Linda Bauld, Cancer Research UK's
prevention expert, said: 'It's already known that eating a lot of these
foods can lead to weight gain, and being overweight or obese can also increase
your risk of cancer, so it's hard to disentangle the effects of diet and
weight.'
Dr Ian Johnson, from the Quadram Institute in Norwich, said
the study had ‘identified some rather weak associations. The problem is that
the definition of ultra-processed foods they have used is so broad and poorly
defined that it is impossible to decide exactly what, if any, causal
connections have been observed.’
And Professor Tom Sanders at King's College London said that
mass-produced bread would be classed as ultra-processed, but a home-made loaf
or bread from a posh local bakery would not. 'This classification seems arbitrary and based on the
premise that food produced industrially has a different nutritional and
chemical composition from that produced in the home or by artisans. This is not
the case.'
This study is highly critical of the classifications used
for ultra-processed food too.
There's a significant point in Professor Sanders’ comment
about bread; there's a lot of food snobbery and smuggery going on, with the
foods that are identified as being mostly eaten by lower income people being
demonised whereas middle class food is more 'wholesome' and 'virtuous'.
The moral high ground food police probably don't count craft
ale or artisan gin as highly processed and don’t seem to have noticed that even
porridge made with soya milk and honey counts as 'ultra-processed'.
The smugness is about doing things more simply or more
traditionally, buying food that doesn’t come in packaging. Yes, plastics are
destroying the environment but food packaging extends the shelf life of products,
causing less wastage and less environmental harm from producing (even) more
than we need. It’s also a great boon to people too busy to shop for fresh
produce and ingredients every day. It’s a complex problem not solved by
ill-informed moralising or nostalgia.
Toxins (aka chemicals) have taken the place of diphtheria, polio
and smallpox as the Invisible Evil (and plague if you go back further). But
never fear, you can buy a detox from a wellness guru because your fear is their
marketing opportunity.
It's not like things were any better in ye olden days when
people breathed in coal or wood smoke or smog, and lots more people smoked. Sitting
around in the cave or wooden houses before chimneys were invented during the
long winters didn’t just make people smell like kippers, it caused serious lung
damage.
Employment was much more lung-unfriendly too - mining,
dyeing and tanning, the cloth industry or industrial scale laundries just to
name a few.
Has there ever been a time in human history when our lungs
were pink and flawless since we first learnt to make fire? It’s not modern life
that’s killing us, being alive has always been dangerous. We just have more
media to scare us about it now.
In ye olden days food was full of germs and poo and
parasites as well as adulterants – for example alum, plaster of Paris and ash
in bread.
In 1872, adulterants in food were found to include ‘strychnine,
cocculus inculus (both hallucinogens) and copperas in rum and beer; sulphate of
copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in mustard
and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime
sulphate, and turmeric in chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate,
bisulphate of mercury, and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate;
lead in wine and cider; all were extensively used and were accumulative in
effect, resulting, over a long period, in chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often
fatal food poisoning. Red lead gave Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue.’ Ice
cream was found to contain ‘cocci, bacilli, torulae, cotton fiber, lice, bed
bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hair, and cat and dog hair’.
Yum. So much for hipster nostalgia.
Of course we need to
avoid harm where we can but we need to separate real harm from hysteria,
conspiracy theories and marketing opportunities. Headlines about city air being
as bad as smoking don’t help. We’re never going to live some bucolic idyll in the Shires like hobbits.
Fear and guilt make for good headlines and clickbait but things
are not getting worse. They’ve always been bad. The history of humanity is
about processing, ingesting and inhaling stuff that's bad for us. Sometimes for
fun.
