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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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