Science Advocacy
Science Advocacy
On July 12th, a group called The Coalition for Safer Food Processing and Packaging published a report online in which they claim to have detected a class of chemicals called phthalates in several boxed macaroni and cheese products. Phthalates are “plastisizers,” meaning that they are commonly used to improve flexibility and durability in many of the plastics used today. In the weeks that followed, the story spread across the internet and was reported by numerous news outlets and blogs. That such a story would be so widely reported is not surprising – mac & cheese is a very common food for kids these days (as well as poor college students) and no one wants to hear they are poisoning their children. But in this case, how the story was reported was perhaps even more interesting (at least to UYBFS contributors!), because it tells us a lot about how scientific information is communicated in our modern media landscape.
Before we get to that, let’s start with a discussion of risk. Is there any risk to children (or those poor college students) from the phthalates found in these products? Despite what many sources reported, the risk is almost certainly very low. Phthalates are definitely toxic in rats, where they act as endocrine disruptors. (An endocrine disruptor is a chemical that interferes with normal sex hormone signaling, and in the case of phthalates, they can alter sexual development and also cause changes in neurological development in rats.) Do they have the same effects in humans? Well, that’s not so clear. Some studies say that they do, others show no evidence of it. The uncertainty comes from the fact that humans are less sensitive to the endocrine effects of phthalates and the fact that while most people are exposed to phthalates, they aren’t exposed to very much.
There are some reports of phthalate toxicities outside of early reproductive and neurologic development, but there is even less evidence of real risk in these cases. Then there is the dose of phthalates in the mac & cheese: the highest level detected was 218 parts per billion (ppb). That’s not very much – it means that for every billion molecules in the mac and cheese, only 218 are phthalates. So overall, the risk is very low. How low? Well, consider this: While it is uncertain if the phthalates in mac and cheese could cause any adverse health effects at all, it is much more likely that the high fat, processed sugars, and salt in these products will, since they are risk factors for childhood obesity, which in turn is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer.
So let’s summarize like this: Eating an occasional box of mac and cheese carries almost no health risk. If your child eats mac and cheese several times a week for months on end, there is a very small chance the phthalates in there may adversely impact their development. However, if they are eating this much mac and cheese, there is no question at all that your child’s risk for obesity is increased. If you are trying to decide whether to reach for that box of Kraft tonight, this should be your concern – not low levels of phthalates.
This is an important question, because it can change the way we think about the data. It’s not that it is common for scientists to lie, and I am certainly not suggesting that the authors of this study have done anything other than faithfully report the data they generated. However, the way this data entered the public domain should raise some red flags.
The group that generated this data is called the Coalition for Safer Food Packaging and Processing (CSFPP). That sounds like a noble cause for sure, but the url of their website is curious: www.cleanupkraft.org. It’s clear from their website that this group is specifically targeting the Kraft Heinz company, which makes one of the most popular mac and cheese products. It’s also clear from the website that this is a single-issue group, focused entirely on eliminating or reducing phthalates in our foods.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this. Even if the health concerns are overblown, phthalates aren’t good for you, so from a risk/benefit analysis, removing them from food seems like a swell idea. However, this groups’ tactics are only adding to the confusion around a complicated issue. They state that phthalates “threaten children’s health” and talk about birth defects and cancer without mentioning that the relationship of phthalates to these effects is still a subject of debate in the field.
So the good folks at CSFPP took it upon themselves to test for phthalates in 10 different brands of mac and cheese (plus 20 other cheese products). They found phthalates in 29/30 products. This really shouldn’t be surprising (phthalates are everywhere in food), but it is still useful data, assuming the data was generated properly (they don’t say how these tests were run, which is a significant omission in a scientific report).
The trouble starts with CSFPP’s decision to unilaterally publish this data online. They dumped it on their website with no analysis or assessment of risk. Sure, there are phthalates in mac and cheese, but are these levels high enough to be a problem? They didn’t even try to answer this question. Worse still, this “report” seemed designed to incite panic – they presented the levels in the fat fraction of each product prominently. We would expect phthaltes to be higher in the fat because phthalates are fat-soluble (not water soluble), but people eat the whole product, so the fat-only levels are misleading because the levels of phthalates people would actually be exposed to would be much lower due to dilution by the non-fat ingredients. They compared mac and cheese to processed cheese slices and “natural” cheese, which isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, since thse products are produced in very different ways, and they downplay the fact that phthalates were found in nearly everything – including the natural cheese. Worst of all, the report indicates that one of the products tested had no detectable phthaltes. If this group is so concerned about phthalates affecting human health, why wouldn’t they tell us which product was phthalate-free???
I don’t trust this data, and neither should you. There is a process for publishing work like this – the peer review process – which assures that experts in the field have reviewed the data and the conclusions and that the methods and results were transparent. I’m sure there are phthalates in mac and cheese, but how much is still an open question until this group (or another) publishes their work in an accepted scientific journal.
CSFPP’s plan here is clearly to skip the “let’s think seriously about the risk of these chemicals” step and go right to the consumer in an attempt to paint this data (and these products) as “bad”. In a great article on this topic in The Atlantic, James Hamblin calls this “fact-based advocacy”, and draws a very clear distinction from science. This group wants phthalates out of foods, so they generated data to help their cause. Then they used this data to further their goals without thought to what it actually meant to the people eating mac and cheese that they say they are trying to protect.
The CSFPPs report would be of little concern if not for the response from the press and health blogs. This story took off like a rocket, and was widely reported across most major news outlets within a few days. It is fascinating how different outlets reported this data. Below is a summary of selected reports (certainly not all), beginning with The NY Times, which reported on the publication the same day it came out. The Y axis is a rough estimate of the depth of the reporting (higher is more in-depth) while the X axis shows the chronological order of the reports. The titles of each story are also included, which provide a good sense of the tone of each article.
As you can see, we grouped these articles based on how they were reported. Some news outlets (The NY Times, US News, CNN, and NBC) simply reported the data as fact without trying to assess the risk these reported levels of phthalates might actually cause. This is likely because they didn’t have immediate access to someone who could understand the data and perform a reasonable risk assessment and they wanted to publish quickly, so… they just parroted the report and called it a day. That’s not great, but it’s better than the majority of outlets that took to adding alarmist titles or content over-stating the threat. The three worst examples were Dr. Axe, USA Today, and aol.com (can you believe aol.com is still around? Neither can we!!). Dr Axe is a chemophobic pseudoscience site, so this should come as little surprise, but USA Today and aol.com should be ashamed of their reporting which highlighted how dangerous these chemicals could be without bothering to even talk to an expert in the field.
If you were to read one of the four articles above and then read the reports by The NY Times, USA Today, or Fox News, you would be forgiven if you thought they were about two different studies. That’s the difference between blindly reporting on science without thinking and carefully considering the material and providing a useful perspective to the reader. CSFPP was counting on the former, and their plan worked. For several weeks the dangers of mac and cheese was all over the internet and social media. Most people who read these parroting or alarmist articles have already forgotten the word “phthalate”, but those that were sufficiently moved by the perceived risk to our children might join CSFPPs cause and call for removing phthalates from foods without ever understanding what risk they actually pose.
A reasonable person, especially someone with a negative opinion of “chemicals” and a positive opinion of “natural” foods could read The NY Times article and believe that feeding a single box of mac and cheese to their children could seriously harm them. This is simply not true. So how did we get here? It started with CSFPP, who dumped some data out on the internet to serve their own purpose without putting it in context and without concern for how it might be used. Then a series of major news outlets failed to put the data in context, instead blindly reporting the data with alarming tag lines like “Mac and cheese contains chemicals banned from baby products“. This is not science. This is sensationalism. We as consumers aren’t blameless either: by reading these poorly written articles without questioning them or digging deeper, we become agents of misinformation ourselves. This is how false information becomes “fact” on the internet. This is how otherwise reasonable people come to believe that the Earth is flat, vaccines cause autism, climate change isn’t real, or mac and cheese is toxic. This is what a failure of science communication looks like.
