What Doesn’t Kill You…

Inside your kitchen … there’s poison lurking.

Every day, millions of Americans are unknowingly eating food with toxic ingredients.

Ingredients like pyridoxine, which can cause a loss of muscle control and make it difficult to walk…ⁱ

…or phylloquinone, which can cause brain damage in infants…ⁱⁱ

…or cholecalciferol, which is actually used as rat poison.ⁱⁱⁱ

How were these kinds of toxins ever allowed into our food supply?

Well, it’s pretty simple actually.

All those terrifyingly named ingredients … are vitamins.

And, yes, they all can actually be toxic — and yet all this stuff is totally safe to eat.

Which … should leave you with some questions.

[OPENING SEQUENCE]

Let’s be honest: America hasn’t always been the healthiest place. There used to be lead in our gasoline. No one wore sunscreen. Everybody used to smoke.

No, seriously — even camels used to smoke!

(Don’t ask. It was a weird time.)

But these days? Americans are kind of obsessed with our health.

And we’re doing pretty well, especially by historical standards. Between 1960 and 2015, Americans’ life expectancy increased by almost 10 years. ^iv

Death rates from cancer? They’re falling.^v Death rates from strokes? They’re falling.^vi Death rates from cardiovascular disease? They’re falling.^vii

And yet there’s a weird irony here: At the same time that we’re enjoying longer and healthier lives, we’ve never been more concerned that we’re being poisoned — by … pretty much everything.

The food supply.

The pharmaceutical industry.

Cell phones.

Deodorant.

Chopsticks?

It seems like everywhere you turn, someone is claiming something you use every day is going to kill you. It’s all terrifying — and more than a little confusing.

After all, who can you actually trust? Well, allow us to nominate at least one candidate: this old dead Swiss guy.

This is Paracelsus, a 16th-century doctor who was one of the pioneers of the use of chemistry in medicine.^viii And perhaps his most famous contribution to science is a phrase that can help us navigate a lot of these fears: “The dose makes the poison.”

Now, what Paracelsus meant by that is that, while we tend to think of substances as either safe or harmful, almost everything is actually both — depending on how much of it we’re exposed to.

For instance, as health risks go, you’re probably not that worried about black licorice. And if you eat it in normal amounts, you don’t need to be. But in 2020, a Massachusetts man suffered a fatal heart attack after eating at least a bag of the candy every day for a few weeks^ix — because it contains an ingredient that, at those enormous quantities, causes potassium levels to nosedive.^x

There’s also nothing wrong with a little nutmeg. But a lot of nutmeg — two to three tablespoons — can send your heart racing and cause hallucinations ^xi — which could make Christmas a little weird.

And believe it or not, even water can be toxic at excessive levels. Drink more than your kidneys can excrete, and you’ll be facing a condition called hyponatremia — which, in the most extreme cases, has even led to comas or death.^xii

But while the principle of “the dose makes the poison” might make us more cautious about things we otherwise regard as harmless … it also ought to calm our nerves about some of the things that freak everyone out.

Take pesticides, for example. In 2018, 79 percent of Americans told pollsters they believed there was at least some health risk from pesticide exposure through fruits and vegetables.^xiii That’s one reason that so many people buy organic food, despite the fact that it can cost over 50 percent more.^xiv

Which would probably make them disappointed to learn that, contrary to popular belief, organics use pesticides too.^xv

But here’s the good news: It doesn’t matter. Because pesticides can be dangerous at high levels, but … those are not the levels in your grocery store. Not even close.

The EPA sets limits on how much pesticide residue can be on produce — and sets them well below the level at which they pose any danger.^xvi And in 2021, over 99 percent of the country’s produce came in under even those limits — and in fact, nearly a quarter of them had no pesticide residues at all.^xvii

Food isn’t the only issue where dosage really matters. Today, around half of Americans still think nuclear power is unsafe,^xviii usually because of concerns about radiation.

Again, you can understand the concern: Radiation is dangerous at high levels of exposure. But what’s a high level?

Radiation is measured in units called millirems. The maximum amount of exposure people who work in the nuclear industry are allowed to have is about 5,000 millirems a year — a level so safe that science can’t detect any difference in their likelihood to develop cancer.^xix

The amount that people near Three Mile Island, the site of the only nuclear accident in American history, were exposed to? About one millirem,^xx which is why there were no health effects.

The amount you get from living near a nuclear power plant? About 0.01 millirem a year.^xxi To put that in perspective, you get about 29 millirems a year from the radiation naturally occurring in your own body.^xxii

Americans are right to be vigilant about their health but panicking without getting the facts — can actually have the opposite effect.

Opposition to nuclear power has actually led to us getting power from dirtier sources, like coal.^xxiii And research has found that consumers who are worried about pesticides on their food … just tend to buy fewer fruits and vegetables — which is way worse for their health than exposure to miniscule amounts of pesticides.^xxiv

Luckily, we already have a good rule of thumb. If you remember only one thing, let it be this: The dose makes the poison.

And if you can remember a second thing: Go easy on the nutmeg.