
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 22, 1993                   TAG: 9404220005
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PASS THE ARSENIC

YUM-YUM. The Thanksgiving feast is almost ready, and from now through New Year's Day, the more fortunate among us can look forward to scrumptious good eats. Mouths are watering, taste buds are titillated.

Grab a handful of those aflatoxins, for starters. Betcha can't eat just one.

Smell the heterocyclic amines and malonaldehyde - stuffed with ethyl carbamate, furan derivatives, dihydrazines and psoralens - roasting in the oven. There'll be eugenol on the side.

Grandma's also fixin' cyanogenetic glycosides and nitrate, topped with marshmallows, and mashed arsenic, chaconine, oxalic acid and solanine. And for dessert: her famous made-from-scratch acetaldehyde, isoflavones, phlorizin, quercetin and glycoside. Can we have second helpings?

Wash it all down with California vintage alcohol, methylglyoxal, tannins and tyramine, and then a hot cup of benzo(a)pyrene, caffeine, chlorogenic acid, hydrogen peroxide and methyglyoxal.

Watch out, teeth; watch out, gums; watch out, stomach, here it comes.

Say you're no longer hungry? Blame it on spoilsports at the American Council on Science and Health for their reminder that a typical holiday meal is loaded with toxins and carcinogens.

That's right: Every nut. Every morsel of roast turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce. Those sweet potatoes; that pie. The wine, the coffee, the whole enchilada - a gastronomical Chernobyl-in-waiting. And you were just worried about counting calories.

But hold the mayo. The ACSH says there's no cause for your pancreas to panic. The foods and drinks on the holiday menu are "perfectly safe" and the poisons contained therein pose no risk to humans unless ingested in mega-doses. A body, for instance, would have to consume nearly four tons of turkey to get a lethal overdose of malonaldehyde.

ACSH, a nonprofit public-health organization, says its purpose in presenting the smorgasbord of horrors is not to scare us, but to help us get over our chemophobia. We tend, says the ACSH, to get hysterical about a few man-made chemicals in some foods, and don't realize that Mother Nature's foods are also laced with natural toxicants. One mushroom, for example, has an estimated relative cancer hazard 167 times greater than our average daily dietary intake of such chemicals as PCB and EDB. Such noxious foods won't hurt us unless we consume them gluttonously - so eat, drink and be merry.

Right, ACSH, and bon appetit to you, too.

by CNB