Throwing the Kitchen Sink at Chemophobia
How a Washington Post plastics story served as a campaign amplification tool
Washington Post staff journalist, Shannon Osaka, has written at least one article a month based on NGO anti-plastics campaign literature
She uses the same activist scientists as her sources, promoting their campaigns
Her writing indicates a very poor understanding of chemicals and plastics
There does not seem to be any content corrections by WaPo editors
This assessment of a recent mainstream media chemophobic article against plastics in common household products shows how campaign journalists have joined hands with activists in amplifying their political agenda. It serves as one more example of how traditional news organizations are no longer serving their readers in a professional or competent manner.
In the latest Washington Post scare story on the dangers of plastics with the innocent title: These kitchen items may be contaminating your food with chemicals, Shannon Osaka has demonstrated yet again how her scaremongering has no limits. Facts and evidence can be overlooked if you just throw a large number of scary sounding chemicals at common everyday activities, creating a terrifying world of chemicals lurking in your home, trying to kill you.
And Shannon Osaka threw the kitchen sink of activist chemophobia at your kitchen, working on behalf of an army of special interests to amplify their campaigns via her position in the Washington Post. But somewhere between the activist-drafted talking points and the final article, an ignorance and illiteracy crept in making this sorry article a sad testimony of a media in serious decline.
Osaka was writing on behalf of several activist scientists trying to shift the chemophobia campaign towards something they have called “plastic chemicals”. Not just chemicals that you should be afraid of, but chemicals added to plastics (causing all sorts of terrible things). Couple that with the fear of microplastics, plastic waste, industrial profits and we have the perfect storm for fearmongers. And they tell us we can find many of these chemical invaders in our kitchen!
Here are some of the plastic chemicals in our kitchens Shannon Osaka was told to focus on:
PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances)
Phthalates (DEHP)
BPA (Bisphenol A)
BPS (Bisphenol S)
BPF (Bisphenol F)
flame retardants (???)
PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic acid)
PVC (polyvinyl chloride)
Shannon Osaka didn’t realize, or failed to provide details on which flame retardant chemicals are in our kitchens (assumedly doing horrible things like stopping things from burning). The activist campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s had been against brominated flame retardants like Deca-BDE or TBBPA, but those had mostly been phased out two decades ago so you could only flog that dead horse so much. Shannon must have thought: “Most of my readers are too ignorant to notice that flame retardants are not a single class of products, so we don’t really have to worry about the quality of my evidence.”
Believe in what you feel!
The first paragraph of Osaka’s article sets the tone:
When Americans eat a burger, they aren’t just biting through bun, lettuce, tomato and cheese. Instead, the burger — or its packaging, or the utensil used to cook it — also likely contains a blend of chemicals scientists believe harm human health. PFAS. Phthalates. BPA. Flame retardants.
This is classic activist campaign scaremongering: turn an everyday activity, like eating a burger, into something that can harm you (and not from the calories or fat in the burger). It is not just a synthetic chemical, but a “blend of chemicals”. Notice how Ms Osaka began her fearmongering tirade by listing each chemical invading your home followed by a full stop. Deceptive. Dishonest. Disingenuous. Such emotional manipulation puts the Washington Post’s integrity and credibility as a news source to shame.
Worse, this burger has harms that we don’t know about. How harmful? Well an undisclosed group of “scientists” (probably the ones paid by NGOs to create fear) “believe” they cause harm. Do scientists “believe” in the same way we believe in a religion? Shouldn’t legitimate scientists test, verify and prove that something is harmful? Not the scientists, it seems, who regularly go to Shannon Osaka at the Washington Post to get their activist campaigns amplified.
Why go to evidence and facts when you can believe what you feel?
No End to Endocrine Scare Stories
Many of these scientists involved in this story used to get their funding from the endocrine disruption campaigns that terrified people since the 1990s ... until they didn’t. It seems the simple correlations between EDCs (endocrine disrupting chemicals) and a whole host of diseases did not tie to any clear causation. The data did not support their hormone doomsday scenarios and as many natural substances (like coffee, humus and soy) also disrupted the endocrine system, people lost interest and, importantly, their research and campaign funding dried up.
But these activists can still use their EDC rhetoric by just swapping in the word “plastic”. Osaka continues:
These chemicals act on the body in multiple ways — confusing hormones, disrupting immune systems and boosting cancer cells. But they all have one thing in common: They are intimately linked to plastic.
I didn’t know chemicals could “boost cancer cells” like that! And was Osaka reading from her notes incorrectly when she broke endocrine disrupting systems into “confusing hormones, disrupting immune systems”? She should have sent the final draft back to the activists that planted the story with her.
What do phthalates, BPA and “flame retardants” have in common? They were all chemicals targeted in the 1990s by these same activist scientists (PFAS only started to scare people over the last decade when someone came up with the clever term: “forever chemicals”). So now these “experts” have dusted off their three-decade old endocrine battle strategies, linking them all to plastics instead (which foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies are now willing to throw a ton of money at).
It seems these plastics are lurking everywhere (in our food packaging, clothes, toys, furniture, flooring and kitchen utensils), and linking them to frightening chemicals is a good strategy to raise fear and outrage among an anxious public. Since the new Mom’s Lobby has moved into K Street, the time was right to resurrect the endocrine rhetoric. Osaka created a concern of chemicals invading our home via plastics making their way into dust, water, food and, cue the doubt signaling: We really don’t know the risks … and would you trust what industry and governments tell you?
First you scare them with harms like “cancer” and “confused hormones”, then you make them angry enough to act. It doesn’t matter that all of these claims have been repeatedly debunked. Remember the false data behind Spatula-Gate? Osaka brought that back as well, with a quote from the Toxic-Free Future NGO that massively massaged that spatula data to fit their campaign alarmism.
The endocrine disruption campaigners used a series of arguments in the 1990s to hide their lack of data or evidence, including claims of imperceptible health risks from long-term, low-dose exposures, cocktail effects, mixtures and epigenetic vulnerabilities. All of these arguments were resurrected in this Washington Post chemophobic time capsule (with the words “plastic chemicals” replacing “endocrine disrupting chemicals”). Old wine in new (plastic) bottles.
The Activists Pulling the WaPo Strings
The usual activist suspects, like Leonardo Trasande or Tracey Woodruff, have reclaimed media attention by simply swapping the words “endocrine disrupting chemicals” with “plastic chemicals”. The Washington Post should have done some background research on these radical attention-seekers.
Shannon Osaka puts out at least one plastics or microplastics scare story per month.
Or rather, whenever Leonardo Trasande wants to pump a campaign in the media, he has Shannon on speed dial (and she willingly submits – see here, here and here).
Tracey Woodruff is another activist who uses an academic post to launch her endocrine disruption, sorry, “plastic chemicals” campaigns (and also has Shannon Osaka on speed dial – see here, here and here).
Since Shannon does not appear to understand very much about basic chemistry, we can assume that most of these articles arrive on her desk pre-packaged.
From the quality of this current article, it is safe to say that Shannon Osaka is serving as a shill for activist scientists (while she writes against what she considers as industry shills). Where are the Washington Post editors here? Cutbacks, I suppose, have prioritized content quantity over quality and young, useful idiots like Shannon will always serve a purpose to these seasoned activists. This article serves as one more post-mortem on a failed mainstream media.
On two occasions in this article, Osaka gave industry trade associations a chance to reply, but in both cases, she then followed it up with responses from her activist friends with an instant rebuttal. Often her deflection was deceptive, as, for example:
But scientists say that this blend of chemicals adds up to a stew of potentially toxic materials that fill our homes and the food we eat. The world produces an estimated 450 million metric tons of plastic every year; almost all of that plastic comes with some sort of chemical additive.
In one breath, Shannon moves from “this blend of chemicals adds up to a stew of potentially toxic materials that fill our homes and the food we eat” (Yikes!) to “450 million metric tons of plastic every year” assumedly filling our homes and the food we eat.
Scary stuff if you consider that almost all of these plastics have “some sort of” chemicals added to them. Should someone tell the author of this article that, like everything that exists, all plastics, all physical substances are made of chemicals? Doesn’t she understand that chemicals are not man-made, but rather that man is made of chemicals? Her naïveté is kind of cute … if she weren’t so open to manipulation.
I recommend industry trade representatives ignore future requests for comment from Shannon Osaka. She cannot be trusted.
Chemophobia for the Numerically Illiterate
Most people don’t understand numbers and if they are linked to something scary (like a large number of “chemicals”), they tend to react in an irrational manner. It is no surprise that activists know this and exploit it on the daily. This seemed to be Osaka’s objective when she wrote:
The Washington Post used a comprehensive database, built by scientists in Switzerland and Norway, of 16,000 chemicals linked to plastic materials to see how people interact with chemicals in their everyday lives. Of those, scientists say, more than 5,400 chemicals are considered hazardous to human health. Researchers believe that many of these chemicals are harming Americans even at typical levels of exposure.
“16,000 chemicals” seems like a frightening number but an average meal exposes consumers to around 10,000 chemicals (with chemical cocktails often leading to food coma). If you are outraged that we don’t know everything about everything, think about the 1000 chemicals in that cup of coffee you are drinking while reading this article. Bruce Ames once said that of the 22 chemicals in that cup of Joe that we have actually tested, 17 are carcinogenic to rats. Ames then pleaded for reason, reminding people of the Paracelsus Principle, that the dose makes the poison, and in most cases, our exposure levels are so low as to make most chemophobic arguments ridiculous.
Osaka then made an even more remarkable claim, that “more than 5,400 chemicals are considered hazardous to human health”. Everything can be a hazard. Water is a hazard, and if people are exposed to a high enough dose, it is a risk. So every single one of those 16,000 chemicals, like water, should also be considered as “hazardous to human health”. It seems strange that the activist scientists who fed the Washington Post with these scary numbers don’t “believe” that all chemicals (at high enough doses) can be hazardous. Or maybe they didn’t have time to review Osaka’s final draft.
Shannon Osaka is either not very scientifically informed or she is being incredibly deceptive. Take the following paragraph:
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control (sic), more than 90 percent of Americans are exposed to key chemicals in these groups. About half of those chemicals are listed as hazardous by governments or industry; only a small number are considered to pose no risk. The rest don’t have enough official hazard data to determine health effects.
Osaka is mixing up the terms “hazard” and “risk” within the same breath. This Oxford-educated journalist should know that “risk” equals “hazard” times “exposure”. Everything is a hazard (everything is toxic) at some level but if the exposure is low, then there is no risk. Scientists taking the risk-based approach will recognize that the chemical exposure levels in these plastics are far too low to pose any risk. Endocrine disruption campaigners since the 1990s have taken the hazard-based approach, arguing that there are no safe exposure levels (so hazard equals risk). This flawed approach was wrong in the 1990s with the failed endocrine disruption campaigns and it is still wrong today (even if they have shifted to a more emotionally triggering phobia).
The only thing that has changed since the 1990s is that the detection technologies have improved, being able to measure exposures at the nano-scale. So activists can now claim they are finding more chemicals in our bodies (any chemical they want to look for can now be found at shadow levels), but the risks from such ultra-low exposures are even more meaningless.
Osaka has never let facts spoil a good scare story. In this most recent chemophobic episode, she takes Washington Post readers on a journey showing “how some of the most dangerous chemicals go from everyday items in our kitchens into our bodies.” Facts, evidence or reason don’t matter in such a journey when she can write such emotional prose. It is all about spreading the fear that activists build their campaign funding on, and Shannon Osaka, via the Washington Post, delivers that fear to these special interests with impressive ambition.
In reading this article, I kept asking myself whether Shannon was naïve, ignorant and manipulated by opportunists like Trasande and Woodruff, or did she have malicious intent. Then I read the following unedited line from this Washington Post article:
“For consumers, experts warn, it’s impossible to tell from packaging whether a product is actually chemical-free.”
Hmm, the “experts warn” us that something may not be “chemical-free”? Before we chuckle too much at Ms Osaka’s lack of understanding of chemistry, her personal page notes she is presently writing a book on plastics. I look forward to her erudite advice on how we can all live a “chemical-free” life.
Shannon and her activist friends can ignore those with some scientific education (who can’t stop laughing at her ridiculous claims). Their objective is to scare the ignorant. It seems the Washington Post has identified this as its target market.