208: Dirty Dozen Disinformation (w/Drs Andrea Love & Michelle Wong)
Every year, the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, DC-based lobbying group, publishes its “Dirty Dozen” report, which supposedly informs consumers about the 12 “dirtiest” fruits and vegetables. The report is repeated verbatim by major media outlets, which routinely demonize strawberries, blueberries, and other conventionally-grown produce. But does their science hold up?
Not according to the majority of scientists and researchers. Over the decades, the EWG has slammed some pesticides but not others, ignored data on dosages, and even wondered out loud if all that mercury in vaccines might just be causing autism. They also routinely ignore potentially hazardous organic chemicals, while selling “verified” labels for skin care products and sunscreens.
Today Derek is going to walk me, the non-science journalist, through the work of the EWG before he talks to biomedical scientist Dr Andrea Love and cosmetic chemist Dr Michelle Wong about the group’s questionable methodologies and fear-mongering tactics.
Show Notes
Environmental Working Group and the Dirty Dozen
The Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list is a danger to public health put out by an organic industry funded activist group
Influence Watch: Environmental Working Group
Dietary Exposure to Pesticide Residues from Commodities Alleged to Contain the Highest Contamination Levels
Ken Cook: The Story of The Environmental Working Group
What Biden’s oil record means for the industry’s future
Alleged ‘deal’ offer from Trump to big oil could save industry $110bn, study finds
10 years after Flint's lead water crisis began, a lack of urgency stalls 'proper justice'
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
First off, the dose makes the poison in beauty as well as in lots of different places.
How much of an ingredient you're getting is essential to what sort of effect it'll have on your body.
If there isn't enough, then there isn't enough molecules to hit the receptors that will cause some sort of biological effect, which means that it will either be ineffective or safe.
The threshold for both is going to be different, but it's important for both.
I think most people accept that the percentage is important for efficacy,
but they don't realize that it also holds for safety as well.
So, I think it's important to understand that.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon.
You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions, if that's easier for you.
And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspiratuality 208, Dirty Dozen Disinformation with Drs.
Andrea Love and Michelle Wong.
Every year, the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group, publishes its Dirty Dozen report, which supposedly informs consumers about the 12 dirtiest fruits and vegetables.
Now this report is repeated verbatim by major media outlets which routinely demonize strawberries, blueberries, and other conventionally grown produce.
But does their science hold up?
Not according to the majority of scientists and researchers.
Over the decades, the EWG has slammed some pesticides but not others, ignored data on dosages, and even wondered out loud if all that mercury and vaccines might just be causing autism.
They also routinely ignore potentially hazardous organic chemicals while selling verified labels for skincare products and sunscreens.
So today, Derek is going to walk me, I'm the non-science journalist, through the work
of the EWG before he talks to biomedical scientist Dr.
Andrea Love and then cosmetic chemist Dr. Michelle Wong about the group's questionable methodologies
and fear-mongering tactics.
Welcome to the show!
Shiver, shiver!
Alright Matthew, here's how this process goes.
In March, CNN published an article entitled Blueberries, Strawberries, Again on the Dirty Dozen List.
Can you read the first paragraph?
Sure.
Approximately 95% of non-organic strawberries, leafy greens such as spinach and kale, collard and mustard greens, grapes, peaches, and pears tested by the United States government, Yeah, that sounds pretty scary, especially with all the links to studies about problems with preterm births, neural tube defects, low sperm concentrations, heart disease, cancer, genetic damage, the list goes on and on.
And the first few graphs of this story certainly have me thinking it's time to go all organic.
But...
Trying to be a good journalist and a good reader and consumer, I keep reading and one more study jumps out.
Organic produce is not more nutritious, but studies have found that levels of pesticides in the urine of adults and children can drop up to 95% after a switch to an organic diet.
Okay, there's some data.
So I had to find out where that's from and I click through and I find a press release from UC Berkeley that's entitled, Organic Diet Intervention Significantly Reduces Urinary Pesticides Levels in U.S.
Children and Adults.
So, all sounding serious.
And I discover this study was conducted on four racially and geographically diverse families in the United States before and after an organic diet intervention.
Wait, so wait, families, this is families, not counties.
For families, yes.
Okay.
Four sets of families, which is data, but it's a pilot study at best.
Worth investigating for sure, but if you trace the chain of scare headlines, you realize
it took me a few minutes to sort through this one claim, and there are dozens in this CNN
article.
And not that all the claims are necessarily misleading, but how many casual readers get
past a headline these days, much less the first few paragraphs, and then click through
to the studies and then actually read them, which is both my hobby and part of my career,
because that's not how we consume information.
At least a percentage of people who see the headline are going to associate the term dirty with strawberries and blueberries, and then they'll stop buying them.
And it happened to me, but I'll get to that in a moment.
So let's look meta here.
The Dirty Dozen Branding is an annual campaign created and produced by the lobbying organization, the Environmental Working Group.
And that's not their only campaign.
They have an annual sunscreen roundup and an entire section on their site devoted to cosmetics.
You'll see terms like toxic and clean all over their site and in their reports.
Words that are often uncritically repeated by journalists brokering in attention capture.
Because they play well.
But are they scientific?
That's what we're going to focus on today.
Because I used to be part of EWG's target audience.
I lived in Brooklyn 15 years ago, and my ex-wife and I actually stopped buying conventional berries after one of their reports came out.
We chose mineral sunscreens over chemical sunscreens because of their work.
And I was on board with organic and natural everything, so I understand why people think that way.
We want to make the healthiest possible choices for ourselves and our families.
I still want to.
It's just that I started clicking through to read the studies and a very different picture started to emerge.
Okay, so Derek, when you say that you were part of the target audience, are you saying that you were in sort of like the cultural and media circles that were prepped to respond to this type of messaging?
Yes, I lived in Brooklyn.
I was a yoga instructor and freelance writer.
I was not a science writer.
I was mostly focused on music at that time.
I ate at Whole Foods, you know, all of the yoga teaching and the practice.
I was in those circles and communities.
So when you see something like this has pesticides on it and you don't have the chops to go through and actually understand dose amounts and what pesticides they're including and which ones they're excluding because they exclude a lot of pesticides in the reports.
Yeah, I was totally in that market and I just would read an article like the one we just cribbed from CNN and be like, oh, that's it.
I'll only buy organic.
And I guess it's like based on vibes, right?
Because you're not reading the articles.
Do you recall feeling like disgust or disappointment or like you look at the berries and you go, oh, those aren't good when you see them in the shop?
Did that help drive giving up the foods?
Absolutely.
Because I was a vegetarian at this time.
So the idea that I have to give up some fruit, it definitely, you know, and I was also going through orthorexia at this time.
So which already has its purity rituals associated with it.
So you tell me there's a pesticide on something.
And in my head, I'm like, okay, have to avoid it all costs.
And then Not only is that going to cost you more money, which is actually part of EWG's shtick, but it also just makes you feel like, oh my god, I've been eating this thing and now it's inside me, which I will say anecdotally does not help with an eating disorder.
Yeah, because your world just gets smaller and smaller, right?
That's what orthorexia is, exactly.
So, let's look at the history and present briefly of the Environmental Working Group, and I'm going to give a broad outline before talking, as you flagged, Matthew, to biomedical scientist Dr. Andrea Love.
We're going to talk about the methodology behind the Dirty Dozen List.
And then cosmetic chemist Dr. Michelle Wong will talk about EWG's reports on sunscreen and cosmetics.
I love these two women.
They are previous guests, and whenever I have questions about these topics, I DM them, and they are always Quick to answer, which I really appreciate.
Now, the consensus between Drs.
Wong and Love, but also broadly the scientific community, is that EWG can be summed up in this 2018 episode of the Skeptoid Podcast by Brian Dunning, who noted that while mainstream publications often parrot the group's talking points, you'll only find criticisms on science blogs and magazines.
And on these blogs and magazines, they will point out that EWG regularly ignores dose levels, meaning that they treat trace quantities as proof of toxicity when they're not, which I didn't realize when I was avoiding that produce, and that is a big red flag.
So you're avoiding something that is almost not there, and it's really weird because, you know, focusing on trace quantities of what's supposedly bad can then block you from access to the nutrients that are substantially good, right?
Exactly.
And as you'll hear Andrea Love say in a little while, when we're talking about the levels, They are one, one millionth, under one, one millionth of the accepted level as per the government.
Well, they might, it might be actually good for you in the homeopathic sense, right?
Like if you have just a tiny, tiny amount of pesticide, you'll be immune from pesticide sickness or something.
That might be what they're thinking of, but I think it's something else, actually.
I think there's something greener on the other side of this story.
So let's backtrack for a moment.
The Environmental Working Group is a DC-based lobbying group founded in 1993 by Ken Cook and Richard Wiles.
The group began as a project under the climate change-focused Island Press Center for Resource Economics, which is a wing of center-left grant-making organization the Tides Foundation.
So from 1993 to 1999, EWG worked under that larger organization, and then it was spun off and Ken Cook took over as president, which is where he remains today.
Now, Cook had previously worked as a journalist and as an aide for Michael Dukakis, and he's been involved in environmental issues for decades.
Now, along with Richard Wiles, who now works as the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, Cook co-authored a 1993 paper called Pesticides in Children's Food, and it was that paper which led to the creation of Environmental Working Group.
Now, EWG is an advocacy group first and foremost, but they're also a PR firm of sorts.
Now here's a clip of Ken Cook talking on a podcast in 2021 about the group's processes.
Really trying to break away from the the model of emphasizing a lot of technicalities that we felt like not just the public but even journalists weren't necessarily familiar with.
So we had that original content and then we made ourselves decide that before we would present that original research material we would force ourselves to develop a media plan.
I mean, even before we would complete the research, right, we would say, okay, we want to get this out.
We want it to be digestible.
We probably want to break it up into a whole bunch of different reports, different, as it's now called, pieces of content.
I'm not the biggest fan of that term, but we decided early on we wanted to think of ourselves as publishing at a level of quality that the grumpiest, most skeptical environmental editor
would say that's worth a look, and reporters likewise.
And we felt that that process would really help us ultimately communicate directly to the public.
Now, Cook is not wrong that environmental stories don't get enough coverage and that the public
generally doesn't pay enough attention to them.
I agree with all of that.
But I found his admission that they develop a media strategy before the research is even done to be rather telling.
Yeah, he's saying it out loud that, you know, he understands, they understand together that there's a scientific literacy problem and that they, you know, have figured out a way to game it.
Exactly.
That is exactly what I think is happening under this broader umbrella of what they're doing.
Now, later in the podcast, he talks about how the media has changed.
And one thing is certain, if you're only on the group's email list, like I signed up for a few weeks ago, they pump out clickbait headlines all the time.
He might not like the term pieces of content as he flagged, but that's exactly what his group brokers in.
And what gets sacrificed is the science, as you're going to hear specifically about during the interviews.
Now, Richard Wiles had the idea of creating the Dirty Dozen Lifts, which remains EWG's most well-known product.
Every year they rank produce according to how many synthetic pesticides are found on a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Now, notice I said synthetic because, as I flagged earlier, they don't actually measure organic pesticides.
Why?
Because that would go against their interests as an organic lobbying group, which is essentially what they are.
And just to be clear, like organic pesticides, they have their own problems, right?
At certain dose levels, absolutely.
Like any chemical in existence, too much of something can be bad.
So they're kind of not even looking at the dose levels of organic pesticides, which honestly most of them are probably fine, but the fact that they exclude them from their list I like all of their logos.
of synthetic pesticides that are also fine and demonize them is the problem.
So besides public donations, EWG is funded by organic food producers
like Stonyfield Farm, Organic Valley, Earthbound, and Applegate Farms.
I like all of their logos.
I like those brands.
I like those brands too, you know, and I'm, as I say, I'm like.
I agree with the spirit and the intention of EWG.
It's what they're doing to the science that's problematic.
And also, besides those companies, they get more funding from individuals and foundations, and they bring in roughly $13 million a year.
In 2022, they had $22 million in assets and $10 million in liabilities.
We're not talking about dark money billionaires here, but it also doesn't give them a free pass to do what they're doing.
Because it's not an excuse for their misrepresentation of science.
So on the surface, EWG appears to have good intentions.
As I said, they want to inform citizens about potentially dangerous chemicals in their environment.
That's really important.
The problem is that they skew data about synthetic chemicals, as I said, ignore organic chemicals, but they create this fear-mongering content that doesn't accurately reflect the dangers and benefits of the foods and products that they rank.
So here's a few examples.
The Dirty Dozen List is a marketing effort, as Andrea Lovell explained.
A 2017 study in the Journal of Toxicology found that substitution of organic forms of the 12 commodities for conventional forms does not result in any appreciable reduction of consumer risks.
So that was about the Dirty Dozen List specifically.
Now, EWG has also repeatedly spoken out against GMOs, yet the National Academy of Sciences found no difference between non-GMO and GMO foods.
Now, we'll get to sunscreen and cosmetics with Michelle Wong, but their annual analysis of sunscreens confuses consumers.
I was also in that group when I wasn't eating berries.
And then they sell an EWG verified label for cosmetics, which costs $250 per product to apply, and then it costs companies hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year to keep using that label because it's based on the company's revenue.
EWG maintains a tap water database that's also been criticized by public health officials for selectively assessing data, you'll notice a pattern here, because that basically sums up what many experts take issue with when it comes to the group's rankings.
And then moving into conspirituality land, EWG has repeatedly questioned the link between thimerosal and vaccines as recently as 2014.
Not good.
If EWG stuck to its stated principles of watchdog for environmental issues, I'd be all for their
work and some of their work is fine, honestly.
I'm not against all of it, so I want to be clear here.
We need many more regulations to keep corporations in check.
What we have is a current president who's been extremely friendly to oil companies after
promising to end drilling on public land.
And then we have a presidential candidate that's asked for $1 billion in campaign donations from oil and gas companies, with a promise that he'll save them $110 billion in tax breaks if he wins in November.
We have cities like Flint, Michigan, which took over seven years to provide safe drinking water for its residents, and even today, a decade later, residents haven't received a dime from a lawsuit they won against the city.
Arizona streets melt in the summer, yet the state is experiencing a population boom right now.
There are so many issues to address, and EWG is primed to actually address them, but that's not what they're working on.
Instead, they follow a similar conspiritualist playbook that we see often.
Criticize Western medicine as evil while selling supplements and courses.
Now, EWG does not criticize Western medicine, to be clear, not at least that I've found.
But what I'm saying is, there's this demonize one thing, and then on the other side, we're going to sell something else that's supposedly a solution, which is all of the labels that they sell.
And so in this case, it's to selectively choose data to demonize those chemicals, to drive consumers towards the products you want them to purchase, even better if you pay for the verified label.
And what really sucks is that their mission statement and their actual practices don't line up during a time when we really need people fighting for the environment.
Instead, it's just misinformation all the way down.
Yeah, what I'm taking away so far is that to the extent that these greenwashing enterprises wind up complicating or attacking public health initiatives or more equitable food access, they do have this right-wing tilt to them that rings with the echo of earlier purity movements.
We don't have to take care of the weak if the good soil takes care of us all.
But with what you're saying, Derek, about the science fudging going on here, like, even those claims are really just performative.
Like, at least Rudolf Steiner, like, limited his interest to the actual hard work of organic farming.
He wasn't into creating some labyrinth of, like, fancy labels for broccoli, right?
Yeah, you're totally right.
And I hate to say it, but a number of people have started their own labels.
And not that EWG was first with this.
There's always labels.
There's a lot of important labels.
They are important.
If you have celiac disease and you need to be gluten-free, that's very helpful.
There's labels around the purity of olive oil because there's actually a lot of olive oil scams out there.
There are certain labels we should look for, but for some it's just become a way
to monetize people's fears.
And what you said about equity is also really important because I'm gonna go to Fred Meyer later this afternoon
and I will pick up my fruits and vegetables and I know that conventional produce
is about 50% of what organic costs there.
And so I have a decision to make and many people have that decision too.
And the reality is the conventional is going to be just as good.
So let's just focus on what people can actually afford.
And not that I have anything against organic farming at all.
My little farm in my backyard that I started, my box this year is organic.
I believe you do organic farming.
That's totally fine.
I'm not against that.
I'm just saying that if you want to actually make food accessible to everyone at a cost that they can endure, don't make them scared to buy things that are conventionally grown.
Yes, nobody out there is going to rely on Derek and Matthew to feed them or the world.
No, I don't think my little mound of potatoes and tomatoes is going to feed even Portland here.
So that's just some brief background.
And again, this is a little bit different than an episode.
I know that a lot of our listeners are health conscious, and so I just wanted to kind of raise these flags.
And if you can afford organic or if you can afford things with labels, fine.
They're not necessarily worse, but they're not necessarily better.
I think that's the crux of the argument here.
Now I want to bring in two experts, as I said, that I love to further explain what EWG gets
wrong.
Dr. Andrea Love is a biomedical scientist who holds a PhD in immunology and microbiology.
She works in life sciences, biotechnology, and cancer research, vaccines, virology, cell and gene therapy, and immunotherapy.
She's also the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation.
And after you hear from her, we're going to move right into my conversation with Dr. Michelle Wong, who holds a PhD in chemistry and works as a cosmetic chemist and science educator in Sydney, Australia.
Michelle goes under the handle labmuffinbeautyscience on TikTok, Instagram, and most other major platforms.
Andrea, you have some issues with the Environmental Working Group.
Let's start there.
Can you kind of explain how you first, if you remember, came across this organization and give a broad overview of some of the problems you have with them?
Where do I begin?
So it probably actually started when I was in high school.
I grew up in eastern Connecticut and there when people from the New York metro area think about Connecticut they often think of like the western Connecticut kind of rich affluent Stanford periphery of Manhattan but Where I grew up it was predominantly state parks and farmlands and things like that and so I had friends who had farms and I also had affluent people in our, you know, community that would kind of buy into misinformation and I was very interested even in high school on a lot of genetic technologies and genetic engineering and
A lot of the tools and technologies that are used in agriculture are very similar.
And so, I actually was really fascinated with the implications or the benefits of these types of tools and technologies that could be used for food sustainability, agriculture, and so on.
And so, then kind of coming across these organizations that were, you know, essentially scaring people from foods that were safe and, you know, affordable.
Well, as a high schooler, I didn't really have the full array of scientific understanding.
But, you know, you kind of got a sense that maybe it wasn't sharing the full truth.
As I went through college and grad school and in my career, like their presence, their online presence, their funding and their visibility has really only gotten magnified.
And so, you know, now that I'm in a place where I have a little bit of public reach.
I've really felt this obligation to kind of help people alleviate this unsubstantiated health anxiety that has really been like this dirty dozen list has really been a feature of the Environmental Working Group for so long that many people don't even know the name EWG or the Environmental Working Group.
They know the dirty dozen list before anything else.
And I do want to talk to you mostly about that list, but something that I noticed is of interest.
A few weeks ago, I signed up for their mailing list when I started working on this episode.
I'm not kidding when I say I can't distinguish it from something like the Epoch Times in terms of the fear mongering.
And I also want to caveat that their stated mission of informing people about potentially hazardous chemicals, I think is a good one.
What have you noticed about their marketing efforts and the way that they present the information?
Yeah.
So, you know, the EWG's public persona is that they claim to be an advocacy group with a mission goal of helping human health through research and by advocating for industry changes.
You know, that would be great if that's what they did, but they don't.
What they do is the opposite of it.
They propagate misinformation.
They spread fear about chemicals.
When everything is a chemical, you're a sack of chemicals.
And they exploit chemophobia, which is the irrational fear of chemicals.
They also exploit the appeal to nature fallacy.
and they also exploit just general low science literacy.
And what they do is they routinely exaggerate risks of all consumer products.
And I know we're gonna talk mostly about food items, but they have all sorts of lists about consumer products,
whether it is cosmetic products or beauty products or skincare products or cooking implements.
They rate things.
They essentially pick one product against the other insinuating that one is inferior
or even harmful or dangerous.
They of course are funded by wealthy donors.
Many of them are organic farm organizations like Earthbound and Stonyfield and Organic Valley,
and they bring in millions of dollars every year.
And so a lot of these lists are promoting products that are backed by their donors or benefit their donors.
And their science or their scientific methodology is completely flawed.
So they create these methods to rank products, to make claims that are not actually supported
by the scientific body of evidence.
And they've been routinely criticized by experts in toxicology and chemistry and public health.
But their overall kind of MO is opposing any sort of kind of modern scientific technology
implementations, whether that be related to agriculture, whether that be related to life sciences, biotechnology.
They've even undermined the safety of vaccines.
They actually had statements on their website as recently as 2014 that propagated the misinformation
that vaccines were linked to autism.
Ultimately, my general take is, and again, I'm not a cosmetic chemist expert.
I'm not gonna speak on the actual formulations of those sorts of things,
but their entire operating status and structure is to foment fear and use flawed science
And I actually picked apart one of their recent studies on chloroquine and Cheerios and oatmeal Which was a terribly done study and was, of course, elevated by every media outlet around the world.
But they should never be utilized as an expert source of anything.
And they're often cited as an expert in a lot of media articles that are, again, exploiting fear of food ingredients, fear of pesticides, fear of chemicals more broadly.
And they're routinely quoted and used as these experts when they should never be used.
In the intro, I kind of gave an overview of what the Dirty Dozen is and how it functions, but you wrote about their scoring methodology, so I'd love if you kind of break that down for us.
Yeah, absolutely.
So basically, their Dirty Dozen list purportedly is the 12 most contaminated conventional produce items, and their solution is you buy the organic version.
Or just don't buy those produce items because, again, organic is double the price and offers no benefit.
Over 50% of their income, their revenue, comes in from large corporation corporate donors.
And it's ironic because they're insinuating that conventionally grown produce are unsafe and we shouldn't trust the government to regulate those pesticides.
But the list that they create is from the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture Pesticide Surveillance Reports.
So, don't trust the government, but we're going to use the government data to scare you about pesticide residue.
So, first of all, they're using these pesticide residue reports, and these residue reports are based on trace levels of regulated pesticides.
These are pesticides that are solely used in conventional farming.
Each of these have what we call these tolerance levels or maximum residue levels.
Every single pesticide has a maximum residue level that is approved and regulated by the EPA, by the USDA, and it's enforced.
If any farm or any producer is in violation of that, then they're reported to FDA and then there's additional scrutiny to ensure that they comply moving forward.
These Pesticide residues are orders of magnitude, hundreds, thousands fold lower than any level of these chemicals that would ever pose an actual risk to humans.
So what they're doing is they're taking these pesticide residue levels and they're essentially insinuating that the abundance, the vast majority of these 12 produce items are riddled with pesticides and you shouldn't be eating them.
First of all, 99.5% of conventional produce have cleared all of those benchmarks set by the EPA, USDA, and regulated.
So, 0.5% of produce, conventional produce items, are viewed as out of compliance on a daily basis.
Beyond that, when you're actually looking at those levels, we're talking tiny, tiny, minuscule quantities.
So when we're detecting things, we're utilizing the most sensitive analytical chemistry tools on the planet.
So we're looking at parts per trillion, parts per billion.
When we say parts per trillion, that's equivalent to one second out of 31.7 years of time.
So these are minuscule, minuscule, minuscule levels.
Just because you can detect something doesn't mean that it's relevant to your health or clinically relevant.
And so, the EWG takes these detected levels, 99.5% of them are well below any tolerance threshold, and then they tell people that these produce items aren't safe.
So, they take these levels, but then their methodology is not based on the actual level of the pesticide, but how many different pesticides were detected on that food.
Whether or not they're even above or below those tolerance levels.
So, for example, if they pick a fruit and they say, well, there's 10 pesticides that were detected on this fruit.
All of them were a thousand times lower than the maximum residue level, but there was 10 of them.
Therefore that fruit, that food item is dirty.
But if a different food item has one pesticide residue, say it's still well below the tolerance level but it was only a hundred times lower, but there's only one pesticide residue found, that one would maybe be clean.
None of them are of a concern whatsoever.
They're all part perfectly safe to eat and instead now they're they're pitting
you know these foods against each other and scaring people out of eating produce items
and then so they rank them based on the the number of different pesticide residues and
without any regard for how those levels even compare to the regulated and surveilled you know residue
tolerances and they claim that these things are then unsafe. The reality is none of these foods
conventionally grown that would be on the dirty dozen list exceed these pesticide thresholds
none of them would be considered unsafe.
They're all actually rigorously monitored, but the cherry on top is that the USDA surveillance regulation and monitoring doesn't include organic pesticides.
So the EWG is basically telling people that all these conventional, these 12 conventional produce items, and they change a little bit year over year, but there's some usual suspects that always appear, and the solution is to buy organic.
But they're not disclosing all of the residue levels of organic pesticides that are used.
And they use a lot of organic pesticides on organic products because organic pesticides are not as effective.
They're not as efficient at doing their job.
And in order to control pests and grow food, you have to use pesticides.
Doesn't matter whether it's organic or conventional.
And they're not on that USDA list because they're not regulated as stringently as conventional pesticides.
So, the EPA oversees all of the synthetic pesticides and toxicity and sets those benchmarks.
There's only guidance provided by the EPA.
The USDA surveillance report only reports conventional pesticides.
So, none that would be used in organic farming are included on this list.
And actually, many organic pesticides have, you know, more ecological impact.
They're less specific.
They target other insect or pest species that maybe are beneficial.
They can persist in the environment longer.
But even on top of that, a lot of the studies that are cited as evidence that conventional produce is causing people to pee out pesticide residues, if you look at the people who are eating the organic products, the urine levels are the same.
So, people that are eating organic Also consuming these synthetic pesticide residues that that the EWG is insinuating are unsafe.
And again, to be clear, these trace levels are not unsafe, but organic products also have these synthetic pesticide residues.
But the EWG omits that entire half of the story.
Well, you answered three of my questions in that one, so I really appreciate it because that was the synopsis.
I've linked to your article in the show notes and I had to laugh out loud, literally, when I read that organic pesticides were not regulated in the way that conventional pesticides were because it just so reminded me of supplements and pharmaceuticals.
So much.
It's really very striking.
And many farmers actually grow organic and they grow conventional.
And so if you talk to farmers, they know that organic farming is broadly not as sustainable.
It uses more land for the same yield.
The pesticides that are approved for use are very often not as effective.
So you have to apply more of them.
And we know everything.
the dose makes the poison. And just because something's organic or natural doesn't mean
it's better or safer. And there's a lot of things that plants produce to try and kill
things that are trying to eat them. And that's what most of these organic pesticides are derived from.
And it has become essentially a glorified marketing ploy to upcharge people.
And farmers are really kind of at the at the whim of consumer demand.
And so, you know, I think that everyone would benefit by, you know, better education and the fact that organic produce is not safer or healthier or more nutritious or better for the environment or better for the farm workers or anything like that.
And in reality, you know, these lists by the EWG, not only are they omitting really important information, but they're leading people to consume fewer fruits and vegetables, which does far more damage than these parts-per-trillion, parts-per-billion trace levels of chemicals that are not posing any risk to your health.
Last question, because this is one that gets me too, and it's something I'm honestly pretty ignorant of.
I see it often in EWG's marketing, is that when they're demonizing a chemical or a pesticide, they'll say it's banned in the European Union, but not in America.
Why do these discrepancies exist, to the best of your knowledge?
Some of those instances are false.
There's a lot of people that believe certain chemicals are banned in certain countries when they actually aren't.
So, for example, glyphosate is often used as a figurehead for this.
And glyphosate is not banned in the EU or in other countries.
The European Commission actually just renewed the regulation of glyphosate for another 10 years in December of 2023.
So so that's number one is that you know a lot of times we hear that like with the with the California ban on red dye number three everyone every media outlet said it was banned in Europe but it's not banned in Europe it's just called something different because in the U.S.
we have the FDA that regulates food additives in the EU they have the European Food Safety Authority and so red dye number three utilizes the European Food Safety Authority nomenclature and it's called E-127.
The scientific name is It's not banned.
However, of the ones that might be banned in certain countries, it's usually because these profiles or these assessments utilize different methodologies.
So in the US, we utilize a risk-based assessment for food safety and food health, whereas in some other countries they use a hazard-based assessment.
And the difference between a hazard-based assessment and a risk-based assessment is exposure.
So a hazard-based assessment uses a hypothetical scenario in which any potential exposure of any hypothetical dose could theoretically cause harm in some chance, whether or not that's realistic.
A risk-based approach actually looks at the likelihood of exposure and the dosage of that exposure to deem whether or not a realistic exposure poses a legitimate health concern.
So, I often use the sharp analogy for hazard versus risk.
So, the EU predominantly utilizes the hazard-based assessment and this is often very precautious It's also worth noting that EU is broadly very chemophobic and that's often reflected in policy and regulations and that doesn't necessarily reflect science because we know politicians are often, you know, convinced by lobbyists and people that maybe are not utilizing science.
But to give you a sense of the hazard versus the risk, the hazard, say a shark attack is a hazard.
However, if you're standing on the beach and you're not in the water, there's zero risk of that hazard ever being a concern for you because you're not in a situation where you would ever be exposed to that hazard.
The risk-based assessment says, okay, well now I'm in the water, so what is the likelihood of my exposure to the hazard causing harm?
So even within a risk-based assessment, there are other factors in play.
Well, how long are you in the water with the shark?
What species of shark is it?
Are they known to be aggressive?
How close are you swimming to that shark?
There are other things, right?
So those are your exposures.
Those are your dosages.
Those are your routes of administration.
So when we look at a risk-based approach, we're saying, okay, we have this substance.
People are going to be encountering it through topical, injection, injection, inhalation, what are the routes of exposure, and what are the dosages based on those routes of exposure that could theoretically or realistically pose a harm to people.
And what's the likelihood of that exposure?
And also they also include an acute and a chronic exposure for people that say pesticide applicators who might be utilizing those chemicals every day for their lives versus someone who might inadvertently spill a bottle and have one single but higher exposure.
And so the FDA regulates things using the risk assessment which includes The actual dosage of the potential harm and the likelihood of the dosage and utilizing actually the body of evidence based on those dosages.
Whereas many other countries in the EU and in other places use a hazard-based approach which is you know, often following the precautionary principle,
which can actually be worse in many ways because it's overly cautious.
And what it means is that you have to use less effective pesticides or chemicals
in order to have your desired effect, which may actually be compounding
the potential health risks.
Welcome back to the podcast, Michelle.
It's always great to see you.
Thanks so much for having me on.
I love conspirituality, so I am very flattered to be invited.
Well, anytime I need expertise in these areas, I will definitely reach out to you because your videos are awesome, your work is awesome, and you hold companies accountable like Environmental Working Group.
And I'm wondering, when did you first come aware of their work?
Honestly, I think pretty much as soon as I got into beauty and looking at the science behind beauty products, they are...
Very, very, very prevalent in the beauty space.
There are influencers everywhere, but not only the Environmental Working Group, but other groups have also started looking at products the same way they do.
Last week, CNN published an article about the safest sunscreens for 2024, and I've actually gone through their science writer uses EWG often to frame her articles.
And the article, you know, they are balanced.
I want to, you know, be clear on that in terms of her reporting.
But she always leads with an environmental working group sort of scare headline.
And this article says to wear sunscreen, but it uncritically offers EWG's 2024 Guide to sunscreens for consumer guidance, and that's where she says, go look at this if you want to know.
Now, EWG apparently reviewed 1,700 sunscreens for this, and only about a quarter they claim meet their standards of safety.
What do you know about those standards and how legitimate is their scoring system?
Generally, anything coming from the EWG is not very legitimate.
They have a very long history of being able to cite studies, but they don't interpret them correctly.
So, for example, they have their database, which is the SkinDeep database.
Their SkinDeep database pretty much just scores products based on what ingredients are in them.
So they'll take an ingredient list and then just look for particular chemicals in it.
And these chemicals, the way they score them is simply by doing a literature search and collecting all the data that exists and saying there's a lot of data that means it must be bad.
First off, the dose makes the poison in beauty as well as in lots of different places.
How much of an ingredient you're getting is essential to what sort of effect it'll have on your body.
If there isn't enough, then there isn't enough molecules to hit the receptors that will cause some sort of biological effect, which means that it will either be ineffective or safe.
The threshold for both is going to be different.
But it's important for both.
I think most people accept that the percentage is important for efficacy, but they don't realize that it also holds for safety as well.
And ingredient lists generally do not have percentages.
And even if they do have percentages, how that interacts with your body depends so much on the formula.
There are different formulas that can get ingredients into your body.
Some of them can't get it through the skin.
Some of them purposely keep it out of the skin.
So there's so much subtlety that this database is just missing because it's just going, it's in there, it's bad, it's not, it's good.
And this is how they rate their sunscreens as well.
They have particular ingredients that they don't like, and a lot of the time it is just the natural is safer fallacy.
They generally tend to say physical sunscreens, so zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, are safer, and chemical sunscreens, the ones with the scary names, the ones that are carbon-based, are less safe.
And that's pretty much the crux of their sunscreen guide.
There are lots of other little bits in their sunscreen guide.
Things like they try to rate the UVA rating of sunscreens using a method that is not designed to do that.
That's quite technical and I might go into it at some point, but it's going to be a longer explanation.
But short story is, none of their criteria makes a lot of scientific sense.
The best way to see if a sunscreen is safe is pretty much If it's being sold, it is generally going to be a very safe product if it's being sold in legitimate stores.
If it has an SPF rating, that's going to tell you what the protection is.
If it says broad spectrum, that tells you it also has UVA protection that's proportional to the SPF.
Unpack it a little bit because one thing I've noticed is whenever I post about sunscreen, Or I talk to friends who work in these spaces, it is very confusing to them.
The Coral Reef and Hawaii band came up again recently with a good friend who's worked in the wellness industry for decades and she was asking about it.
So with that UVA rating and how it works, you know, go for it.
The way that sunscreens are currently tested for protection, the SPF number is based off a human test.
So they will put a set amount of sunscreen, two milligrams per square centimeter, on skin, and it'll be a tiny patch of skin, and then they'll test it using a sun simulator.
So they get a UV light that's really focused into a dot, and they see how much UV your skin can handle with the sunscreen versus without, and that ratio gives you the SPF.
If you have an SPF 50, then it can handle 50 times more UV than bare skin.
To get the broad spectrum rating, because it's proportional to UVB, humans are expensive.
So they'll just test it on a microscope slide because they already know what the SPF is.
SPF is mostly UVB.
They look at the overall shape of the UV curve and they work out how much UVA protection is there.
So it's like they've got one data point and then they can extrapolate it using cheaper tests to get the other data point.
Now what the EWG has done is they've taken just that microscope test and they've used that to work out how much UVA protection is the sunscreen. That test was never designed to do that
because it hinged on that human data to get the other data. But they're just testing with the cheaper
test and using that to say this has high UVA protection, this does not. There's also some
complicated maths in there that they've also messed up. So yeah, there's a lot of misinterpretations of
how the test was intended versus what they've done. And they're presenting that as
science. And to most people, it does look like science because they don't understand how this test
was developed, what the point was, what all the logical steps were. And of course, they cite
lots of authoritative looking peer reviewed sources. And they do this as well in their Skin
Deep database.
You'll look up an ingredient like methylparaben and you'll see a huge list of sources.
They've actually changed their rating for methylparaben, I think.
I think they've actually said it's safer now.
I think they are slowly, slowly learning, but it's much slower than you would expect for a company that makes such a big fuss about things.
But yeah, if you look up any sort of Scary sounding ingredient.
You'll just see heaps of sources and the reason there's so many is because it's a popular ingredient.
People are studying it.
If you study it more, it looks like the data is worse because there is just more data.
If you have an ingredient that's very new and has very little data, no one is studying it, it's going to look safer by default just because it has a shorter reference list.
I mentioned this to Andrea as well.
I signed up for their mailing list a few weeks ago and every email was kind of like the Epoch Times, which is this like fear-mongering, you're going to die sort of email transmission.
And for any company that's putting forward good science, I don't think you would do that.
But they seem very marketing focused from what I've noticed.
Yeah, almost everything you read from them, at the bottom it says, please donate because this is an important cause.
And again, if you are quite naive on these things, like less informed on these things, you would agree, like it's very enticing.
A lot of these fear-based marketing campaigns really prey on us being good people.
A lot of it is, you know, you see something about pregnant people, Like this product is not safe for pregnant people.
If you have pregnant people in your life, you probably care about them.
Unless you're a terrible person, you care about them.
Probably going to want to forward it to them because you're like, well, I need to warn my friends.
I need to warn these people I care about.
And that's how it spreads.
So fear, I think, is a really effective and predatory marketing technique.
Fear also kind of hijacks our reptile brain.
It makes us not think critically.
It gives us a strong emotional response that stops our critical thinking.
Critical thinking is slower.
It's more deliberate.
It's, I mean, it's evolved later in our kind of human existence.
We have to put in effort to do critical thinking.
Fear is something that we have innate in us.
It doesn't take effort to build fear.
Yeah, it's just really infuriating both as a scientist and as someone who is ethical.
It's really irresponsible.
It introduces so much fear and uncertainty and loss of trust in science and all these public health measures that we've introduced.
Things like Regulations that have stopped so many people from getting hurt by consumer products like these all exist in the background.
It's complicated which is why so many people don't know about all these safeguards.
Yeah it's very easy I think to buy into that conspiratorial belief that big institutions do not have our best interests at heart and that is true a lot of the time but a lot of the time that is not true because I mean there are also people working in these institutions.
I think it's really undeniable that Our lives have improved.
We're living longer, which is also something that the EWG really tries to undo our perception of.
We are living longer.
We are not leading more toxic lives as much as that message is being pushed.
Andrea also pointed out the fact that when it comes to pesticides, they're using Government data to try to say the government is lying to you effectively.
But they're using their studies, and it seems similar here.
I mean, you mentioned a few moments ago the appearance of science, and I was on their personal care, their Skin Deep section of their website, and I downloaded the Unaccepted Chemicals for Skin Care.
It's 372 pages long.
Each page is roughly 30 chemicals.
They have a restricted list that's like 506 pages long, and it looks like rigorous science.
I'm not going to read all of that.
So what are they doing when they put out these long PDFs like that with no real context and just be like, here, here's all of our science?
Honestly, I think it's just obfuscation.
Like, no one is going to check every single one of those ingredients.
It's just not possible.
So you either trust their database and just look up the products and look at that red, green, yellow rating, like if they say it's good or bad.
It's really just marketing.
It's not useful for anyone to see these lists.
So there are lots of these lists floating around, not just from the EWG, although I think they influenced a lot of this, but even from really big retailers like Sephora and Ulta, they'll have lists of so-called dirty ingredients. And then the logic is in clean
beauty, clean products do not have these ingredients. And like I said before, the dose makes
the poison. How much there is, is crucial to safety. So just because one of these
ingredients is in there, doesn't mean it's unsafe.
And there's also a lot made of the fact that the EU has banned a whole bunch of ingredients. So
they have a ban list as well. That is thousands of ingredients long versus the US, which officially
only has 11 ingredients. But the thing is, these are really just examples because in both places,
there's an overarching regulation, which is you can't produce unsafe products. You can't release
harmful products onto the market. And if you look at the FDA actions, a lot of the time when they
warn companies, when they tell companies they need to do a recall,
the ingredients that they are talking about are not on that list of 11.
So clearly the FDA regulations are not restricted to these 11 ingredients.
The EU regulations, their extremely long list contains a whole bunch of things that no sensible person would ever put into cosmetics because it is both dangerous and expensive.
It's things like radioactive materials, jet fuel, it's like proper supervillain stuff.
From my understanding, The reason their list has such bizarre things is because when the EU was formed they mashed together a whole bunch of regulations from different countries and that's what they ended up with.
At least that's one of the reasons.
But yeah, the difference in the length of the list does not tell you much but the EWG also puts forward this whole like the EU is so much safer because of this longer list and I think The length of their list is trying to show that they're even more safe than the EU.
But again, the numbers do not reflect the safety of the products on the market.
If you look at what products are actually on the market in the EU versus the US, they are almost identical.
And there's a whole bunch of stories about, like, the US has all these unsafe products because of recalls versus the EU, which has a lot less recalls.
Obviously, like, the EU is safer, but If you look at the actual products, it's actually just harder to do a recall in the EU because a lot of the products that have been recalled in the US have never been recalled in the EU.
So one example is talc in the US because of all this regulatory pressure.
It's not even really regulatory pressure.
So the FDA actually has done investigations on talc and if there's asbestos in it.
And a lot of companies, because of all this negative publicity, they've changed their formulations to have cornstarch instead of talc.
But if you look in the EU, talc is still everywhere.
Their Johnson's talcum powder is still talc.
The US is cornstarch now, which is supposed to be safer.
I think it is safer.
Our second higher listenership outside the US is in Australia.
For some reason, we have a ton of listeners there.
what's happening versus what people are seeing because of places like the EWG.
Our second higher listenership outside the US is in Australia.
For some reason, we have a ton of listeners there.
So how does Australia match up in these regulations?
Australia is weird.
So it's kind of like split.
Culturally, the US has such a huge influence on anywhere English speaking.
So we have a lot of stuff from there.
At the same time, our actual regulations, probably, oh, it's hard to say.
Australia's small.
We have a small population.
It's around the same as Canada.
And so our regulators have less resources.
So a lot of the time our regulations say things like if it's been approved in a comparable region then it's approved here.
It's not a bad idea just piggyback off other people's data and just yeah double check it.
So for example for sunscreens we have a lot of filters that are approved in the EU but not in the US because the US sunscreen regulation is actually it's actually a lot stricter to be honest than the EU.
There's only a very short list of filters approved because they've said that the newer filters which Honestly, everyone agrees are much safer.
Like, I mean, all the filters are safe.
They're just like an extra degree of safer.
They're not approved in the US because of lack of safety data, which is...
Not what the EWG is really saying.
Yeah, so we've got a lot of those.
But at the same time, we have a lot of this same clean beauty sort of vibe going on.
We have a lot of fitness influencers, a lot of wellness influencers who will say things like, natural is better.
And I mean, I think Australia is really known for being, you know, nature is great.
Everyone loves nature in Australia because we've got fantastic weather.
We've got gorgeous beaches.
But at the same time, We also have a ton of sun and there's actually a lot of concern about the sort of sun safety messages because all this like chemical sunscreens are bad, you have to use physical sunscreens, that sort of message is really infiltrating Australia as well.
And there's been a few surveys done by our public health cancer body.
They've been showing that sunscreen fear has been increasing.
I believe the last two surveys were done 2014 and 2017, before TikTok became a thing, and they showed a massive drop.
In how many Australians felt that sunscreen was safe to use every day?
I'm sure it has plummeted since then because TikTok is full of this misinformation.
Yeah, this whole idea that chemical sunscreens are unsafe and you have to use physical sunscreens, you might think, that's all right.
Everyone can just use physical sunscreens.
The problem is zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, because they're inorganic in chemistry, that means they're not carbon based.
They are dense and they are particulate.
They don't dissolve.
They are in tiny particles.
And because of that, they will feel heavier.
The formulations required to keep these particles suspended are heavier.
Bigger particles also like to clump together more than smaller particles or dissolved filters, which means that even on your skin, when tiny particles spread out, they will slowly clump up over time much faster.
And they also give a white cast on pretty much anyone who is not ghostly white.
Especially if you apply the right amount.
So the amount of sunscreen you apply will be proportional to the protection you get.
Basically, if you apply half the required amount, then you get half the labelled SPF.
And with these physical sunscreens, these are physical limits on how nice you can make them.
Scientists are trying because they know that some people need to use physical sunscreens.
They might be allergic.
to a lot of chemical sunscreens. But there is like a fundamental chemical limit to how nice
you can make them feel and that means people will under apply. They might apply a few times and then
it's too much hassle to They just stop wearing sunscreen altogether.
And we know that sunscreen prevents skin cancer.
The biggest trial on cancer and sunscreen was done in Queensland, which is like a super sunny part of Australia.
They found that, I believe it was squamous cell carcinoma decreased by 40% when people use sunscreen every day rather than discretionary use, which is they just put it on when they felt like it.
Melanoma rates halved during the study.
And also the signs of skin aging decreased by, I think, somewhere around 40%.
And this was with a chemical sunscreen back in the 1990s.
So much worse technology.
Our technology is much better now.
Our sunscreens are also much safer now because we have all these new technologies.
It's just bizarre that we're seeing all this rise of sunscreen fear when pretty much everyone in Australia knows someone who's had bits of their face cut out because of skin cancer.
Most people know someone who's died of melanoma.
Environmental Working Group sells a verified market.
The valuation fee is $250.
There's an annual fee that's based on revenue, so it could run hundreds or thousands of dollars every year.
And the group claims that 2,457 products have been approved.
So it seems like a pretty big business for them.
Do you feel that there's any validity to this mark at all?
Or is it my instinct that this is part of their business model?
I think it's definitely part of their business model.
And interestingly, I mentioned before that some of their ratings of ingredients have changed.
They've like loosened their ratings.
I mean, it's a good thing because it reflects what the science says, but I think on their part, it's mostly a commercial strategy because if you loosen the criteria, you can approve more products.
Yeah, so I don't think this mark has ever been valid, but at the same time, the more money they get from it, it seems like the more Accurate, their label is, so yeah, it's a bit of a strange situation.
I mean, most of these sort of verifications on any beauty products are not valid.
Even things like cruelty-free marks, organic marks, there's like a whole bunch of natural ones that just do not reflect what you would think they reflect.
And yeah, the EWG verified mark, I would not bother looking out for that.
And most companies are only getting it because they feel like consumers are looking for it.
It's not like an actual endorsement of how the rating system works.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Please join us here on the main feed next week, over the weekend for a brief, or we'll see you over on Patreon.
