Terms “chemical” and “chemistry” have, in colloquial speech, become synonyms for something bad, dangerous, fatal and unnatural. ”Don’t eat that, it’s full of chemicals”, represents a warning that some foods are bad to your health. “Chemophobia” (chemophobia or chemonoia) is a term used to describe this fear of chemistry, chemical compounds and composites, even though the term doesn’t represent a fear in a medical context but is more of a non-clinical aversion and preconception.
In 1997, while working on his school project – warning of the damages of of Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO), Nathan Zohner – a 14 year old student at the Eagle Park Junior High School in Idaho Falls, wrote that Dihydrogen Monoxide is a substance without taste or smell which, upon inhalation hurts thousands of people annually and that the symptoms of ingestion of DHMO include sweating, increased urination, bloated feeling, even vomiting and nausea as well as the imbalance of electrolytes in bodily fluids.
However, there were warnings of DHMO even before Zohner’s project: on April 1st 1983, a local paper in Durand, Michigan reported that there is a presence of a substance called Dihydrogen Monoxide in the city’s water supply system, which can be fatal if inhaled. People signed petitions, called upon the local government to react, and then is when the panic started to spread. Why?
Indeed, why, if Dyhidrogen Monoxide is a compound made of a single Oxygen atom and two Hydrogen atoms, more known as – water? The whole story surrounding DHMO was an April Fool which was a hoax repeated a few more times, and people have due to ignorance and scientific illiteracy always fallen for it. Other used names for water include Hydrogen Oxide and Oxidane but none of these names sound familiar nor inspire confidence in ordinary citizens which are chemistry laymen. Not even the dangers due to suffocation or other side effects of water consumption sound as scary as Dihydrogen Monoxide. This term sounds like a name for a corrosive acid used to dissolve limescale or some toxic organic compound.
 |
However, this is not the only case of having a name for a harmless chemical compound sound scarily dangerous to people. Imagine eating something that contains eicosapentaeonic acid (EPA), docosahaexaonic acid (DHA), octadecatrienoic acid, phenylacetaldehyde, hept-2-enal, glutamic acid, valine, arginine, leucine, pentan-2-one, and E170, E160a, E306 additives. Would you eat that? If you are not a vegan, you might already have – since that is the chemical composition of an egg. Ascorbic acid is in fact vitamin C, and acetylsalicylic acid is plain aspirin.
The chemophobia movement has its plumes in the USA. Vani Hari, the self-proclaimed “Food Babe” who advises her followers not to eat anything containing ingredients they can’t pronounce or foods that sound “too scientific”, and Michael Pollan. According to Vani Hari, none of us should eat some of the aforementioned compounds, as well as sodium chloride, drink tea that contains (1R, 2S, 5R)-2-isopropyl-5-methylcyclohexanol (scientific term for menthol) or something containing ethyl ethanoate or 3-methylbutyraldehyde (compounds which give the aroma to wine and beer). Michael Pollan advises us “not to eat anything that our great-grandmothers couldn’t recognize as food”, and “not to eat anything that has more than five ingredients or ingredients we can’t pronounce”. That being said, we probably shouldn’t eat avocados or pineapples, and especially not something containing unpronounceable ingredients. The inability to pronounce the name of a compound is used as an argument against chemistry.
All of this conditioned the creation of very unclear marketing phrases as “natural”, “100% natural”, “chemical free” and organic, which imply that all things “natural” or “organic” are at the same time healthy, and “chemical free”. These marketing phrases count on the fact that not all consumers graduated in Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biology, Physics or some other applied science and that they are in fact averse to scientific terminology.
It is forgotten, for example, that the death cap (Amanita phalloides) is 100% natural but a fatally dangerous mushroom, and that the adjective “organic” is mentioned in the context of organic compounds of carbon. Most compounds found in our foods, except for water and mineral salts, are organic compounds of carbon, regardless of the way the food was produced. However, in the era of fear of science, these attributes are highly marketable and attractive.
 |
| Death cap |
Unfortunately, the fight against chemophobia usually ends as being counterproductive – ridiculing the people who don’t understand science and shy away from unknown terminology. It is clear that there indeed are chemicals that are dangerous in small doses, like ricin from the castor oil plant or amatoxin from the death cap mushroom. However, there are measures of toxicity of compounds, 50% lethal dose (LD50), which is a dose of a toxic compound killing 50% of the test population (E.g. rats). To a rat, LD50 for water is more than 90 grams of water per kilogram of body mass, and for orally ingested amatoxin LD50 is 0.3-0.7 milligrams per kilogram of body mass. That means that in regard to water, approximately 300 times smaller dose of amatoxin kills 50% of tested rats.
The fear of chemistry and chemicals is a preconception and a consequence of ignorance, a result of irrationality and ignorance of society in which we live in, but the fight against this fear can’t be ridiculing and insulting those who don’t understand science, because that is what causes resistance towards science and education and brings us to the creation of even bigger prejudices towards science and scientists.
Illustration: Source: © The Hit Man via A dirty word
Jelena Kalinić, MA in comparative literature and graduate biologist, science journalist and science communicator, has a WHO infodemic manager certificate and Health metrics Study design & Evidence based medicine training. Winner of the 2020 EurekaAlert (AAAS) Fellowship for Science Journalists. Short-runner, second place in the selection for European Science journalist of the year for 2022.
