The claim that tiny amounts of chemicals are wreaking havoc on our health has become widely popular. This is mostly due to the media’s uncritical fascination with the idea that our environment has been corrupted by a villainous conspiracy between greedy business and regulators.
The only certainty here is that the more alarm the media spreads, the more grant money the alarmist scientists get to do research; and the more alarming research they produce, the more material the media has to fan hysteria.
Eventually, politicians take note, and respond, as California’s Senate has done by passing a new bill to protect children from the hypothetical dangers of bisphenol A (a component of plastics and resins) despite three huge new independent studies showing that BPA is, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the Oakland of chemical risks (there is no “there” there).
Once the alarm has been sounded, it matters not that the FDA, EPA and CDC — and their equivalents overseas — have produced Himalayan amounts of data to show why the claims made about the dangers of BPA are not remotely supportable. Chemicals are the new germs — and like germs, they need to be eliminated for us to be truly safe.
The folly can be shown by math. Given, according to the University of California Berkeley’s Carcinogenic Potency Project, that 99 percent of our exposure to chemicals is through those that occur naturally, and only 1 percent through manmade compounds, and given that the likelihood of risk from either is roughly the same, we are either doomed — life is so toxic there’s little we can do about it — or millions of years of evolution have done a reasonably good job of adapting our bodies to cope with this toxic environment. As all the latest research on BPA shows, our bodies neutralize and remove it with remarkable efficiency and with no trace of any negative effect.
But there is another reason to scale back the alarm. We can’t handle cleanliness, it’s against our nature. This is the gripping focus of new book by Rob Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University, called “The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today.”
Over the past century, we have, driven by science and medicine, pursued an eliminationist view of health. If we purify our bodies and purge the environment of threats, we will be healthier. Obviously, this quest has been hugely successful in terms of eradicating killer diseases. Less obviously, we may have taken these interventions too far. We have neglected to find out whether our bodies, shaped by millennia to cope with nature, are able to cope when much of that nature is removed.
Human survival and adaptation, explains Dunn, is not just about avoiding predators; sometimes, it is vastly more efficient, even beneficial, for a body to live and let live when it came to parasites and microbes.
This particular hypothesis emerges from people who have recently sought cures for such ghastly conditions as Crohn’s disease (chronic bowel inflammation) by ingesting parasitic worms suspended in orange juice, happily served up by a clinic in Mexico, or, more hard core, walking barefoot in the fetid latrines of the developing world. Far from making themselves sicker, the scale of improvement to their health has led to a brace of clinical trials to tease out cause and effect.
Dunn calls the underlying phenomenon that may be at work here “mutualism” — and it is widely evident elsewhere in nature. In fact, at one level, it’s how everything manages to live: Consider what happens when you kill the bacteria and other organisms in a termite’s gut — the termite can no longer digest wood, and quickly dies.
The question is, what collateral damage have we done to our bodies through our “kill all germs” approach to health? What co-dependent bacteria or parasites have we removed through antibiotics, medicine’s equivalent of nuclear warfare? And what are the unintended consequences of the broader trend of turning humans into biological islands, remote from the nitty gritty of nature?
The answer, says Dunn, might well be seen in rising rates of certain kinds of modern disorders — not only Crohn’s disease but also allergies, immune-system problems and even anxiety disorders. Defensive systems honed by millennia to fight threats that no longer exist could now, for want of exercise, be turning on us.
As a scientist, Dunn is acutely aware of the sanctity of method in determining cause and effect from just-so stories; nevertheless, he assembles enough research to make the underlying logic of his argument compelling: Evolution embedded us in nature and embedded nature in us.
Unfortunately, we haven’t yet adapted to the computational risks we now face. We do not have an instinct for math or genetics or cost-benefit analysis. For millennia, we were the fast food of the living world, an easy source of nutrition for any predator. The machinery for escaping that part of nature — fear — is still there, though the predators have long gone. Without them, all that’s left is for the mind to prey upon is itself.
The only certainty here is that the more alarm the media spreads, the more grant money the alarmist scientists get to do research; and the more alarming research they produce, the more material the media has to fan hysteria.
Eventually, politicians take note, and respond, as California’s Senate has done by passing a new bill to protect children from the hypothetical dangers of bisphenol A (a component of plastics and resins) despite three huge new independent studies showing that BPA is, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the Oakland of chemical risks (there is no “there” there).
Once the alarm has been sounded, it matters not that the FDA, EPA and CDC — and their equivalents overseas — have produced Himalayan amounts of data to show why the claims made about the dangers of BPA are not remotely supportable. Chemicals are the new germs — and like germs, they need to be eliminated for us to be truly safe.
The folly can be shown by math. Given, according to the University of California Berkeley’s Carcinogenic Potency Project, that 99 percent of our exposure to chemicals is through those that occur naturally, and only 1 percent through manmade compounds, and given that the likelihood of risk from either is roughly the same, we are either doomed — life is so toxic there’s little we can do about it — or millions of years of evolution have done a reasonably good job of adapting our bodies to cope with this toxic environment. As all the latest research on BPA shows, our bodies neutralize and remove it with remarkable efficiency and with no trace of any negative effect.
But there is another reason to scale back the alarm. We can’t handle cleanliness, it’s against our nature. This is the gripping focus of new book by Rob Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University, called “The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today.”
Over the past century, we have, driven by science and medicine, pursued an eliminationist view of health. If we purify our bodies and purge the environment of threats, we will be healthier. Obviously, this quest has been hugely successful in terms of eradicating killer diseases. Less obviously, we may have taken these interventions too far. We have neglected to find out whether our bodies, shaped by millennia to cope with nature, are able to cope when much of that nature is removed.
Human survival and adaptation, explains Dunn, is not just about avoiding predators; sometimes, it is vastly more efficient, even beneficial, for a body to live and let live when it came to parasites and microbes.
This particular hypothesis emerges from people who have recently sought cures for such ghastly conditions as Crohn’s disease (chronic bowel inflammation) by ingesting parasitic worms suspended in orange juice, happily served up by a clinic in Mexico, or, more hard core, walking barefoot in the fetid latrines of the developing world. Far from making themselves sicker, the scale of improvement to their health has led to a brace of clinical trials to tease out cause and effect.
Dunn calls the underlying phenomenon that may be at work here “mutualism” — and it is widely evident elsewhere in nature. In fact, at one level, it’s how everything manages to live: Consider what happens when you kill the bacteria and other organisms in a termite’s gut — the termite can no longer digest wood, and quickly dies.
The question is, what collateral damage have we done to our bodies through our “kill all germs” approach to health? What co-dependent bacteria or parasites have we removed through antibiotics, medicine’s equivalent of nuclear warfare? And what are the unintended consequences of the broader trend of turning humans into biological islands, remote from the nitty gritty of nature?
The answer, says Dunn, might well be seen in rising rates of certain kinds of modern disorders — not only Crohn’s disease but also allergies, immune-system problems and even anxiety disorders. Defensive systems honed by millennia to fight threats that no longer exist could now, for want of exercise, be turning on us.
As a scientist, Dunn is acutely aware of the sanctity of method in determining cause and effect from just-so stories; nevertheless, he assembles enough research to make the underlying logic of his argument compelling: Evolution embedded us in nature and embedded nature in us.
Unfortunately, we haven’t yet adapted to the computational risks we now face. We do not have an instinct for math or genetics or cost-benefit analysis. For millennia, we were the fast food of the living world, an easy source of nutrition for any predator. The machinery for escaping that part of nature — fear — is still there, though the predators have long gone. Without them, all that’s left is for the mind to prey upon is itself.