“Toxic” Feast: Turkey with Stuffing?

Worried about chemicals in your food? Well then, you had better not eat this Thanksgiving or …ever again! Greens constantly tell us not to eat meat, not to eat certain fruits and veggies because of trace pesticides, not to drink from soda cans or eat canned food because of trace chemicals from the packaging, and so on. And don’t drink bottled water or tap!

Well, if these things concern you, the thought of Thanksgiving should horrify you. A typical Thanksgiving meal contains such horrors as: acrylamide, ethyl alcohol, benzo(a)pyrene, ethyl carbamate, furan derivatives, furfural, dihydrazines, d-limonene, psoralens, quercetin glycosides, safrole. And that’s just what you will find in your typical stuffing! To see what other “horrors” await you, check out the American Council on Science and Health‘s Holiday Dinner Menu and you will see that chemicals are in everything we eat.

Fortunately, you have as much to fear about these chemicals as you do about the ones green lament–which is very little. ACSH points out: low dose exposures are of little concern; it’s the dose that makes the poison. Humans consume myriad chemicals every day at levels too low too matter. This is true for man-made as well as naturally occurring chemicals. So the next time you see greens hyping the risks of a nutritious food item–worry not. The only truly scary thing is the fact that people actually believe these groups.

Image credit: davitydave’s photostream on Flickr.