Precious Bodily Fluids

According to science, fluoride is a nutrient which helps to prevent tooth decay and is added to the water supply in the interest of public health.

According to some people who aren't really good at understanding science, fluoride is a hazardous waste product (more toxic than lead!) which is added to our water by Big Dentistry to lower our children's IQs and destroy all our white blood cells. Also the Nazis used it! So there's that, too. (After visiting each of those sites, I hope to eventually study the relationship between "People Who Like Conspiracy Theories" and "People Who Don't Understand Graphic Design.")

And of course, according to General Ripper in Dr Strangelove, fluoride is a Commie plot to poison his precious bodily fluids:

Today's post was actually going to be about people who fear the chemicals in sunscreen and/or believe that suntanning has excellent health benefits, and the rest of us are just a bunch of "heliophobic" haters. I spent exactly ten minutes reading their blogs, realised that they were essentially setting their children up to suffer skin cancer, and retreated in disgust.

Instead, you get a post about water fluoridation, where the only side effect of ignorance is having your teeth fall out of your head. Let's break General Ripper's conspiracy theory down:

• "Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!" Children's icecream, to the best of my knowledge, remains unfluoridated (except, of course, for any fluoridated water used in its manufacture). Deliberately added fluoride is found in municipal water supplies, and in toothpaste. It is worth noting that the protective effect of fluoride was discovered by observing the strong teeth of people who lived in areas where the water contained naturally high levels of fluoride - ten times higher than that found in fluoridated municipal water supplies. In other words, fluoridated water also occurs as an entirely natural substance.
• "...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it?" Fluoridation was actually introduced in 1945, although in the Australian state of Queensland it wasn't introduced until 2008. This clearly goes some way to explaining the heightened intelligence, and indeed life essence, of Queenslanders. 
• "A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works." The fluoridation of water is not a secret. Scientists, dentists and governments are justifiably proud of the public health benefits of fluoridation. However, if one does not wish to partake of government-fluoridated water, then I suppose you could just dig a well in your backyard? Unless your local groundwater has fluoride in it, in which case I guess you just die of dehydration with your precious bodily fluids uncompromised. 
• "I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love... Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I — I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence." Portland is the largest US city to remain unfluoridated (until 2014). It's also the US city with the highest rate of depression. Some might say it's caused by the 222 cloudy days per year, or the insufferable hipsters. Either way, it appears that even without fluoride, their life essence is faltering. 

Seriously, though: fluoride is added to water supplies for the same reason iodine is added to salt, or Vitamin D is added to milk, or folic acid is added to flour: it's a cheap, effective, equitable way to provide an important health benefit to an entire population. Fluoridation generally costs less than $1 per person per year, and each dollar spent saves $38 in further dental costs. Fluoridation is credited with a 40-70% decrease in tooth decay in children, and a 40-60% decrease in tooth loss for adults. Even with fluoridation, 51 million school days per year are lost in the US due to dental illnesses, a number which would be much higher without fluoridation. 

Fluoridation is considered one of the ten greatest public health achievements of the last century, along with vaccination and the recognition of cigarettes as a health hazard. 

I enjoy this graphic both for its pertinent information,
and for the fact that the baby looks like a unicorn.

I suspect there is very little overlap between people who have hysterics over their precious bodily fluids, and people and children who would not otherwise be able to afford dental care. Those who claim that they should be able to choose to take fluorine in tablets (as is done in communities reliant on rainwater tanks) are advocating for an alternative which is wasteful - in packaging, manufacture, and the time of doctors and pharmacists - as well as less accessible to people without the privilege of money or health education. 

If you have the money to pay for a dentist, then you have the money to buy one of the many filters available to remove fluoride from your water. So go do that, and...

No Guinea Pigs Were Harmed in the Making of this Post

I had an assignment this semester where we were asked to record a three-minute science presentation. Most people made nifty science shows for school children. I created my own sedatives and road-tested them on a pet guinea pig.

 

Homeopathy is like the Jersey Shore of pseudoscience: so outrageously, obviously awful that it seems hardly worth criticising. I have friends who feel the same way about the anti-vaccine movement, believing that it's only a fringe group of tin-hat-wearing sociopaths with a phobia of needles. But they're wrong. There are so many of these people, and they are very loud. 

Their brains were removed as part of a conspiracy
involving  Monsanto and the Illuminati.

They're loud enough to get homeopathy paid for by the NHS in the UK, and by private health insurers here in Australia. They're loud enough that they can influence large numbers of people to reconsider vaccinating their children, leading to outbreaks of deadly and preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough. They're loud enough that you can't go into a pharmacy any more without being faced with a wall of nonsense magic remedies.

Yes, homeopathic hospitals are actually a thing that exists in the UK.

In wandering the scientifically-illiterate cesspools of the internet whilst researching this video, I became so incredibly frustrated that I created this bingo card/drinking game to try to eke some humour out of the situation:

If you're going to play this as a drinking game,
I suggest using a homeopathic dilution of alcohol.

The point where someone's belief system can be summarised by "IT'S ALL A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY PAID FOR BIG PHARMA/BIG AGRICULTURE/BIG BUSINESS/BIG BIRD" is the point where you should stop trying to have a conversation, and hope that they get lost in the woods whilst communing with the Earth Life Force or whatever. 

I don't care about the loud people. You can't reason with them and they're not worth my time, or yours. But I do care about their kids and their pets and the random people on their Facebook friends list who see constant spam posts about chemtrails and have that tiny niggling seed of doubt planted in the back of their mind.  I hope that their kids get a good enough education to realise that Googling "ZOMG CHEMICALS IN MY EVERYTHING" doesn't count as research. I hope they don't treat their sick pets with Bach flower remedies.

I hope that one day I'll have enough posts here that whenever a reasonably intelligent acquaintance mumbles something about toxic MSG, you can just point them in this direction, and I'll provide a plain English explanation with some helpful links and a semi-relevant Chemistry Cat meme. That's really the motivation behind this whole project: trying to provide a counterpoint to all the fake science that's out there.

If you're seeing "PERMEATE FREE" or "ALUMINIUM FREE" or "GMO FREE" plastered on half the items in your supermarket, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that there might be something wrong with things that do contain permeate/aluminium/GMOs. But there's a big difference between being a person who wonders if they should find out more about these marketing ploys, versus being a person who screams "SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM ALUMINIUM, OH GOSH, WHAT AM I GOING TO MAKE MY FOIL HATS OUT OF NOW?!" I'm writing for the first group of people. (And also for people who like links to slightly ridiculous YouTube videos.)

One last thing: I graduate next year. I sure hope Scary Evil Scientists get paid as much as conspiracy theorists think we do, because I would really like a Maserati.

Formaldehyde Inside My Shampoo Forever

Warning: this post contains excessive use of memes, as well as outright mockery of contemporary "artist" Damien Hirst.

If you’ve sat in a high school biology class, you might remember that formaldehyde is the preservative in all those jars full of spiders and mouse foetuses. It’s also used in disinfectants and resins, as a preservative in pharmaceuticals, and in producing rather expensive works of contemporary art.

This is the structural formula of formaldehyde. 

Admire it now, before Damien Hirst covers it in rhinestones and decides it's been copyrighted.

Also, it's in some cosmetics! Formaldehyde, all over you! Quick, throw out all your shampoo and nail polish and go live in a cave before the chemicals come and murder your whole family.

Earlier this year, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was removing formaldehyde from its baby shampoo products - or, more specifically, it was removing a preservative which released trace amounts of formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde is an entirely natural substance - it’s found in most fruits, vegetables and dairy products. It’s also produced by your own liver as part of your everyday metabolic processes - your body has about 2.5 micrograms of formaldehyde per millilitre of blood. The body breaks ingested formaldehyde down into formic acid (the venom that’s found in ant and bee stings, incidentally). 

According to Johnson & Johnson's own toxicologist, if you sat down and drank fourteen bottles of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, you would have ingested as much formaldehyde as you can find in one apple. However, this level of nuance seems to have been lost on the media, who responded with headlines like “Johnson & Johnson owns up to deadly formaldehyde-containing products."

The mistake that's being made here (other than my mistake of visiting a website called Natural News, which is also on a mission to stamp out water fluoridation) is a misunderstanding of the scale of the quantities involved. An excess of literally anything - formaldehyde, cyanide, sunlight, food, water, pictures of LOLcats - might do you harm. But we're exposed to trace amounts of countless chemicals every day. It's the dose that makes the poison.

So, if your body can safely handle the amount of formaldehyde in an apple, it can likely manage the tiny amount absorbed by rubbing shampoo into your hair. But instead of trying to give people a primary-school-level maths lesson, manufacturers bow to hysteria and replace innocuous ingredients with something with less name recognition - even if the replacement ingredient isn't as effective, or as rigorously tested.

There's a similar occurence in the food industry: "all-natural" stevia is used to replace aspartame as a sweetener, even though aspartame has a longer history of safe use. Why do people get hysterical about aspartame? Because it's metabolised into very small amounts of methanol - much less methanol than you would expect to find in, say, fruit juice - and then into very small amounts of Evil Formaldehyde. (As an aside, stevia - sold by the Coca-Cola company as Truvia - is purified by extraction with methanol.)

In another effort to combat The Formaldehyde Menace, almost every nail polish is suddenly wearing a label proclaiming itself "3 free!" That's free of the ingredients formaldehyde, toluene and dibutyl phthalate.

I heard you like nails, so I got you some nail-coloured nail polish

so you can colour your nails the same colour as your nails.

This sounds all well and good, except:

• Formaldehyde isn't even used in nail polishes - it's found only in nail hardening products. You might as well advertise that your nail polish is free of anthrax.
• The products used to replace the "big three" aren't necessarily any safer, only less well-known. For example, butyl acetate, found in all these 3-free polishes, is a potential carcinogen. That's not to say that coating bits of proteins on your fingertips with a minuscule amount of butyl acetate will do you harm, but by that logic, neither should toluene. 
• Unless you're actually injecting yourself with nail polish, the likelihood of you consuming a toxic amount of any of these chemicals is vanishingly small. Whilst it is possible to be allergic or sensitive to them, it is also possible to be allergic to things like peanuts. This does not mean that nobody should eat peanuts ever.

Trace amounts of formaldehyde in cosmetics aren't poison, in much the same way that dead sharks aren't art - the proponents of formaldehyde-free products are just incredibly vocal. The marketing of formaldehyde-free products is, essentially, an alarmist and cynical scam designed to separate scientifically-illiterate people from their money by selling them "alternative" products which aren't necessarily any better or safer.