Subway's 'Yoga Mat Chemical' and the Capitalist Theater of Paranoia

Somehow my shit science radar didn't register Subway and the "yoga mat chemical" until yesterday, when an NPR piece actually did the bare minimum legwork (or consulted with an industry-independent source that did) on the would-be imminent harm of an additive in a wide range of bread and bread-like products that has the chemical paranoia chorus super-riled up. It started with a food blogger, Vani Hari, aka the "Food Babe," who "discovered" that Subway uses a common dough conditioner in its bread called azodicarbonamide, which is also used in making yoga mats and other rubber stuff. Launching off of the classic "banned in Europe" fallacy, the blogger cited a few studies on the chemical suggesting real danger.

In its story yesterday, NPR pointed out that some of those studies have fuck-all to do with consuming azodicarbonamide as a food additive and pertain instead to inhaling it in high concentrations, e.g. as an occupational hazard. As a food additive, it's limited to 45 parts per million, which, relative to Food Babe's cited research, is nothing at all and within the FDA's guidelines (not that that might mean anything to Subway's protesters).

Meanwhile, the food consumption-specific flags relating to azodicarbonamide byproducts likewise relate to only high doses of consumption. For those actually concerned about the harm that may be caused by azodicarbonamide, the research is out there and it's not invisible to Google. Stick with peer-reviewed primary sources and you'll be fine; getting hung up in the sphere of bogus precautionary principle treatises (where precaution is wielded arbitrarily according to current anti-science fashion) is a risk of the journey.

The problem and where the arbitrariness really hits is in the old adage that the dose makes the poison. That is, if something becomes harmful at high doses it doesn't neccessarily invoke the precautionary principle at very low doses. Flouride, another chemical on the faux-green list of everyday doom, is an instructive case. The study so often cited by anti-flouride advocates is, much like those concerning azodicarbonamide, interested in high doses of the chemical only, finding some potential if frustratingly vague harm (like lower IQs) at those high doses. This potential harm is taken to be a statement of doom all the way down the dose spectrum, but the inconvenient fact is that the study's controls for "no harm" weren't "no chemicals," but rather the very low doses found in United States water supplies.

A "see also" deserving of its own paragraph: Jenny McCarthy and the "green vaccine" movement.

Almost anything you can think of has a safe dose, even if it's down to single parts per million, and anything will have a harmful dose. The vitamin aisles are loaded with things that will fuck you up at high doses, but you aren't likely to hear the Environmental Working Group making doomsaying invocations of precaution about kava, St. John's wort, vitamins A, D, E, and K, or beta carotene. And you're still pretty unlikely to hear about all of the very good science implicating our would-be antioxidant saviors as quite possibly having the opposite effect just because, well, how embarassing.

So, it's not really about harm. It's a little bit about ideology and people's weird and highly contradictory ideas of "naturalness," but it's more so about people trying to sell different things, like fake green lifestyles and the associated product lines or, say, bread that's fluffy. We'll be just fine without azodicarbonamide—so why not ban it, they say—but some significantly large group of people will wind up with some wrong ideas about chemicals and health. That's not precaution at all.