2019-03-01 02:38:45
Chemophobia is defined as a prejudice, mania or irrational fear of chemistry. This definition, which represents a widespread feeling towards everything that smells of chemistry, does not make sense, because chemistry is in everything that surrounds us. Matter is made of atoms that assemble into molecules to form everything from the water we drink to our ADN. So, having a phobia of chemistry is, in a way, having a mania for ourselves.
Our guest on Talking to Scientists, Maria Jose Ruiz Garcia says that everything is chemistry, except the vacuum. So, if someone tries to sell us a product “without chemistry”, either lies, or tries to sell us something immaterial, empty. In our world, ordinary matter is made up of 92 different types of atoms, in the Periodic Table there are more, but these were created artificially and do not participate in ordinary matter because they have a very short life. These atoms associate with each other to create an infinite number of substances, thanks to their chemical interactions.
In many places, chemistry is associated with the artificial, with the toxic or with the dangerous, nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing more natural than the venom of a cobra or botulism toxin, nor more artificial than a medicine or a vaccine. Separating the concepts “natural” and “chemical” is a tricky game. Paracelsus said “the poison is in the dose” and he was right because any substance is dangerous if consumed beyond its level of toxicity, we can die if we drink exorbitant amounts of water.
Going to the supermarket and buying any product is something we do every day. What we don’t usually do, and when we do we can’t avoid a shadow of concern, is read the label of the composition of the article. That is where we are faced with a series of names describing the chemical substances that make up the product, some of which are identified with the letter E followed by a number.
But what we don’t realize is that if we did a chemical analysis on a natural product, such as a banana, the list would also be chemically suspect. In the image on the right we offer those ingredients. A banana has sugars, starch, fatty acids and ingredients that European Food Safety Agency specified with a three-digit number preceded by the letter “E”. So, in the banana is the E460 which, by the way, is just fiber. It also contains colorants such as riboflavin (E101) or flavors such as 3-methylbut-1-ol ethanoate.
The lack of information about these compounds and, what is worse, the disinformation, interested or not, and of dubious origin, that comes to us from some media and, above all, through social networks, are generating all kinds of reactions, and not exactly good ones, against a branch of knowledge that encompasses everything that surrounds us: chemistry.
This is how in broad sectors of society a whole series of irrational fears of chemical products are being installed. And I mention the word “irrational” because as we can see during the conversation with María José Ruiz García, our guest on Talking to Scientists, we should take things more calmly, so as not to be influenced by prejudices of obscure origin and absurdities.
Today we talk about Chemiphobia with Maria Jose Ruiz Garciaprofessor at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Biochemistry of the University of Castilla – La Mancha, in Toledo, and coordinator of Science on demand.
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