Myth Number One: All the Chemicals are All Scientifically Tested, Rigorously Tested so it’s Safe

All right, so let’s talk about what is happening on the planet at the moment and the World Health Organization is talking about the epidemic of non-communicable diseases. And I’ve quoted that you know, that that’s their quite there, the non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, respiratory diseases, diabetes, you actually go on and on and on and the thing about these diseases is that you know, you don’t catch them by sitting next to somebody in the train. You know, if someone’s got cancer and you’re sitting next to them, you’re not going to get cancer or kidney disease or liver disease. These diseases come from environmental and lifestyle causes. And what that means and this is this is the really important thing what it means is that we can prevent these diseases by removing these environmental and lifestyle causes. It’s very doable. Now it’s quite a few things: junk food lack of exercise we can go on and on and on. I want to talk about the role of pesticides. Pesticides aren’t the only chemicals we know that are involved. Many of the chemicals that that we have in plastics, in dish-washing fluid are also involved. I’ve written this distinct focus on pesticides but chemically chemicals generally tend to be very bad news and we have more and more science on it. I want to go into the myths. And myth Number One is here all the time. All the chemicals are all scientifically tested, rigorously tested so it’s safe, you don’t need to worry about them. You know, the regulatory bodies say we’ve reviewed the science and made the decisions on that and so, you know, don’t worry. No need to eat organic food, you know, because the normal everyday nice unblemished food you get from the supermarket is perfectly safe. I think actually it is another issue when we talk about problems like this. At the moment everybody’s talking about plastic and plastic is a problem because it’s in particular terms of its toxicity and there not so much talking about that, there more concerned about the visual pollution and maybe the turtles and things, the jelly fish and eat them. The big trouble about this is you can’t see this pollution. It’s invisible because it’s so small, but it’s so powerful. So what I really wanted to start with is, you know, where this is the biggest myth. In fact, you know, it’s more than myth. It’s an outright lie is when. What farmers use are formulations of chemicals. A pesticide that you buy is not just one chemical, might have an active ingredient called malathion, but you’ve actually got solvents you’ve got surfactants and a whole lot of other chemicals mixed into it and they’re in there to actually make these chemicals work more effectively.

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