More Lunacy in the Land of Oz

By Rich Kozlovich

On Friday, October 5, 2012 the Dr. Oz Show once again went over on to the dark side by attempting to claim that organic was much safer for our children than conventional produce because of the use of pesticides.  The questioned asked was: “Are pesticides the greatest threat to your kids' health?”  The last time I wrote about Oz was when he scared mothers into thinking they were poisoning their children with arsenic when giving them apple juice.  The Alar scare days are over, and the public is more attuned to this nonsense, so I don’t believe his “findings” had much effect. 

First, let’s start with the fact that I think Ole Doc Oz is a loon.  I have thought that for some time.   In the beginning he had some interesting things to say, but after a while I began to realize he was practically talking out of the play book of the “all natural” crowd.  All of which is based on horsepucky, speculation, lies and scare mongering.  Organic isn’t healthier, it doesn’t taste better and doesn’t deliver more nutrition.  However; organic is more expensive, still uses pesticides and is the source of diseases such as E. coli and Salmonella far more often than produce grown conventionally.

He claimed that “….I don't want to panic everybody”, but then turned right around and said; “but we're at the very beginning of knowing the true health impact of these chemicals".  That is another way of touting that old red herring from the green movement; “we don’t’ know the long term effects”, which I will address later. 

Great!  While claiming he doesn’t want to scaremonger he immediately starts out scaremongering with a logical fallacy and a blatantly false statement.  We aren’t at the beginning of our understanding at all.  We have been using these products for decades and to declare that we don’t know “the true health impact of these chemicals” is an attempt to inject the irrationality of the Precautionary Principle into the argument.  In other words; if you can’t prove its safe you can’t use it.  That all sounds great, but it is merely a snake under the door!  There is no way that something can be proven safe.  That is a true scientists view, and rightly so because In point of fact, everything becomes unsafe at some level. 

Demanding proof of safety is a logical fallacy known as proving a negative.  It can’t be done.  It’s like demanding that your spouse prove she isn’t cheating on you.  It can’t be done.  You can prove someone is cheating if they are.   But you can’t prove they aren’t if they aren’t.  Make no mistake about this.  If the nation operated on the Precautionary Principle a hundred and fifty years ago we wouldn’t have electric in our homes today.  And we absolutely know that electricity isn’t safe. 

Ole Doc Oz had tests run on organic and conventional peaches.  He found pesticide residue on both.  The conventional peach had seven and the organic had two.  Scary?  Well, that is what he meant to do…scare you.  In the real world that is a meaningless piece of information.  What were the pesticides?  What was the concentration?    It is possible to have the organically grown peach with only two pesticides be more toxic that the conventional one with seven?  Yes!

These so-called natural pesticides are not as effective as manmade or synthetic pesticides.  So what, you ask?  That is a critical point to understand because pesticides have to kill stuff, and “all natural” pesticides aren’t as effective as manmade, or synthetic pesticides and as a result they have to apply these “all natural” pesticides more often or at higher rates of toxicity.

As for being healthier: Horsepucky!  A Stanford study on organic foods found that;

" conventional foods have slightly more nitogen and organic foods have more phosphorous.  We all have plenty of both phosphorous and nitrigen in our diets."

Then he trots out a pediatrician named Alan Greene, who serves on the board of directors for Healthy Child Healthy World who says he couldn’t "look a person in the eye" and say the levels of pesticides they found on the peaches and other produce was safe.”  Why does he say that?  He goes on to say;

"At real world exposure levels, we have real health concerns and questions still out there.” 

And just who are those who have these questions and what are they?   Who does that remind you of?  When I hear that kind of stuff I think of Dan Rather.  He would make some claim via questions that had no answers and then intone as he went off the air; “questions remain”, leaving everyone with the impression that surely something must be wrong without providing one iota of evidence.

Green goes on to say;

“I think that some of the levels should be changed. And there's some pesticides like the organophosphates that I don't believe we need to be using anymore."  Then he really goes over the edge by saying “pesticides could turn out to be "the next lead."  "We used to all think when I was growing up that lead was fine, it wasn't affecting us. Then we learned it was affecting the brains, we got rid of it in gasoline, and everyone's IQ went up a little bit. I think we have potential for that."

So he wants to change the levels.  Ok….to what?  The levels used in synthetic pesticides are based on efficacy and safety studies, and if you drop the levels they won’t work.  Then what? 

I would like to know where his information came from.  That statement about pesticides being the next lead is also is a logical fallacy.  Just because lead was shown to have detrimental effects on society, including IQ, doesn’t mean pesticides will also.  What is the biological mechanism for such an action in each?  Clearly they must be different, so why would you get the same outcome?

During the 80’s there was man in Ohio who illegally performed pest control services to the public using methyl parathion, one of the most toxic pesticides used in agriculture.  It was never meant to be used indoors and sunlight destroys it within a few days, although it can last longer. It is quickly broken down by soil bacteria and water.  He sprayed it in homes and businesses.  When they tested the children living in those homes they found that the amount of breakdown product of methyl parathion in the urine of those children was extremely high, according to the Ohio Department of Agriculture, the lead agency on pesticides in Ohio.   It became a 25 million dollar superfund project and the CDC has followed those people for years. This didn’t only happen in Ohio though.  This went on in other states and the CDC tracked those people also.   

Now, let me ask you this.  Did you know any of that?  No you didn’t!  Why?  Because there was no horror story.  We can be assured that if there was something seriously wrong caused by these incidents the CDC, the EPA, the entire green movement and the media would have been screaming to the high heavens about it.  So what did they find?  Nothing!  At one point they stated that there “might” be a problem with IQ.  See….there we go again.  I love this one because this can’t be proven either way because no one knows what a person’s IQ should be.  

You can only show trends.  As it turns out this claim was also speculative and a logical fallacy because this seeming trend did not occur amongst all the people exposed, although they were almost exclusively the same socio-economic group, albeit in different parts of the country. 

But Old Doc Oz loved it.  He went on to proclaim "Can you imagine that? That we're making the kids dumb, maybe. Maybe because of pesticide exposure".  If he couldn’t say “maybe” he couldn’t have said anything.  It is unbelievable that any scientist could say such nonsense, yet scientists spout this kind of scare mongering  junk science all over the world, including the Land of Oz.

Oz said we don’t know the long term effect of these chemicals by saying “we're at the very beginning of knowing the true health impact of these chemicals.”  Well, that is untrue.  We have been using these products for decades and the world is a better place to live in so many ways, including our children’s health.  We live longer, healthier, better fed lives than ever in human history.  That is what we really know for sure.   

In answer to Ole Doc Oz's question; “Are pesticides the greatest threat to your kids' health?”  The answer is NO!  The greatest threat to our children's health are scaremongering MD celebrities and PhD’s.