Pseudoscience Friday – The DA swallows Food Babe’s babble

downloadIt’s taken less than a week for dedicated time-wasting to begin, for some members of the Democratic Alliance in the Eastern Cape. Soon, they’ll bring this time-wasting to Parliament, if we are to trust this DA statement telling us that MP Annette Steyn will take questions on the issue of Sasko (and others) adding ADA to their bread to the relevant Minister.

Briefly, for context: ADA (Azodicarbonamide) is a chemical used in bread production (as well as in the production of yoga mats, among other things), and ADA is legal for use in quantities smaller than 45 parts per million. It helps with both bleaching of bread, and giving it a lighter and fluffier texture.

And, says the Eastern Cape DA,

according to the World Health Organisation ADA is known to cause respiratory problems such as asthma, allergies and skin problems. Scientists are of the opinion that ADA has the potential of causing cancer.

Furthermore, the

people most affected by this potential health risk are the poor people of the Eastern Cape who do not have access to information about ADA. They are the very people who need the most protection from questionable foodstuffs that could compromise their already precarious health status.

The fact that something is a legal additive doesn’t mean it’s safe, of course. However, the fact that a chemical can be dangerous under certain circumstances does not mean that it’s unsafe under other conditions – for example, in the production of bread. As this superb Guardian article reminds us, it’s the dose that makes the poison.

And, the fact that Australia, the UK and some countries in Europe have banned ADA in bread does also not demonstrate that it’s harmful either – it might just be that they have succumbed to the fearmongering propagated by the likes of Vani Hari (the self-styled Food Babe), who is so dedicated to over-reacting to the mention of any chemical in food that I’d not be surprised to see her falling for the Dihydrogen Monoxide panic next.

Vani Hari started a petition that was instrumental in getting Subway to remove ADA from their bread, where she cited the same World Health Organisation (WHO) information quoted above. However, she either didn’t read what the WHO said, or she’s happy to lie in service of fearmongering. The DA also don’t seem to have read the WHO report, which says (my emphasis):

Case reports and epidemiological studies in humans have produced abundant evidence that azodicarbonamide can induce asthma, other respiratory symptoms, and skin sensitization in exposed workers.

In other words, factory workers – working with large quantities of ADA – could be at risk. This has zero relevance to 45 parts per million (or less) in bread. Steve Novella addresses this misrepresentation of scientific evidence, alongside other examples, in a superb blog post on Vani Hari’s Subway petition. (Here’s another by him, on Hari’s concerns regarding DoubleTree Hotels adding “antifreeze” to their cookies.)

Then, as David Gorski points out, there might not be any ADA left in finished bread in any case:

Moreover, azodicarbonamide arguably not even in the final product. According to this article, once flour is wetted with water, reaction with azodicarbonamide with the constituents of flour is rapid. In the experiments described, it only took 30 minutes for all the azodicarbonamide to disappear, with trace amounts left. By 45 minutes, there weren’t even trace amounts left.

In other words, what we have here might be worse than simple “chemicals are bad” panic – we’ve might have a homeopathic version of that panic!

Also on the topic of the naturalistic fallacy and pseudoscience, you might want to take a look at this open letter to Woolworths, which manages to combine a moral panic around GMOs with the more sensible point that food should be adequately labelled.

As a friend pointed out on Twitter, it didn’t take long for the food version of Godwin’s Law – namely the invocation of demon Monsanto – to crop up in the comments. But emotion doesn’t resolve scientific queries, and if you want to read a more sober account of what we know and don’t know about GMOs, I’d recommend Grist’s “20 questions” roundup to you.

(Pun fully intended.)