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Enjoy your summer vacation!

10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List
By JOHN TIERNEY

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known  
universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or  
angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us,  
perhaps you’re in the mood for a break, so I’ve rounded up a list of  
10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless,  
because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe,  
including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an  
enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint  
or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a  
trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my  
vacation worrying about any of these 10 things. (You can make your own  
nominations in the TierneyLab blog.)

1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the  
nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then,  
when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old  
reliable villain: saturated fat.

But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous  
experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb,  
unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another  
group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those  
fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol  
profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies  
contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated  
fat.

If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to  
the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.

2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel  
about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway  
to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage  
experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening  
the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air- 
conditioner.

3. Forbidden fruits from afar. Do you dare to eat a kiwi? Sure,  
because more “food miles” do not equal more greenhouse emissions. Food  
from other countries is often produced and shipped much more  
efficiently than domestic food, particularly if the local producers  
are hauling their wares around in small trucks. One study showed that  
apples shipped from New Zealand to Britain had a smaller carbon  
footprint than apples grown and sold in Britain.

4. Carcinogenic cellphones. Some prominent brain surgeons made news on  
Larry King’s show this year with their fears of cellphones, thereby  
establishing once and for all that epidemiology is not brain surgery —  
it’s more complicated.

As my colleague Tara Parker-Pope has noted, there is no known  
biological mechanism for the phones’ non-ionizing radiation to cause  
cancer, and epidemiological studies have failed to find consistent  
links between cancer and cellphones.

It’s always possible today’s worried doctors will be vindicated, but  
I’d bet they’ll be remembered more like the promoters of the old  
cancer-from-power-lines menace — or like James Thurber’s grandmother,  
who covered up her wall outlets to stop electricity from leaking.

Driving while talking on a phone is a definite risk, but you’re better  
off worrying about other cars rather than cancer.

5. Evil plastic bags. Take it from the Environmental Protection  
Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic  
bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors  
plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions  
— to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water  
pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.

6. Toxic plastic bottles. For years panels of experts repeatedly  
approved the use of bisphenol-a, or BPA, which is used in  
polycarbonate bottles and many other plastic products. Yes, it could  
be harmful if given in huge doses to rodents, but so can the natural  
chemicals in countless foods we eat every day. Dose makes the poison.

But this year, after a campaign by a few researchers and activists,  
one federal panel expressed some concern about BPA in baby bottles.  
Panic ensued. Even though there was zero evidence of harm to humans,  
Wal-Mart pulled BPA-containing products from its shelves, and  
politicians began talking about BPA bans. Some experts fear product  
recalls that could make this the most expensive health scare in history.

Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its  
wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company  
probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one  
with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting  
right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try  
recalling it, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.

7. Deadly sharks. Throughout the world last year, there was a grand  
total of one fatal shark attack (in the South Pacific), according to  
the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida.

8. The Arctic’s missing ice. The meltdown in the Arctic last summer  
was bad enough, but this spring there was worse news. A majority of  
experts expected even more melting this year, and some scientists  
created a media sensation by predicting that even the North Pole would  
be ice-free by the end of summer.

So far, though, there’s more ice than at this time last summer, and  
most experts are no longer expecting a new record. You can still fret  
about long-term trends in the Arctic, but you can set aside one worry:  
This summer it looks as if Santa can still have his drinks on the rocks.

9. The universe’s missing mass. Even if the fate of the universe —  
steady expansion or cataclysmic collapse — depends on the amount of  
dark matter that is out there somewhere, you can rest assured that no  
one blames you for losing it. And most experts doubt this collapse  
will occur during your vacation.

10. Unmarked wormholes. Could your vacation be interrupted by a sudden  
plunge into a wormhole? From my limited analysis of space-time theory  
and the movie “Jumper,” I would have to say that the possibility  
cannot be eliminated. I would also concede that if the wormhole led to  
an alternate universe, there’s a good chance your luggage would be  
lost in transit.

But I still wouldn’t worry about it, In an alternate universe, you  
might not have to spend the rest of the year fretting about either  
dark matter or sickly rodents. You might even be able to buy one of  
those Nalgene bottles.

Eric Siegel
esiegel at nyscience dot org





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