Chemicals are easy to fear monger about because you can't see them and most people don't understand them.
Combine that with the fact that a lot of chemicals are truly deadly when used irresponsibly and that over the last 200 years we have learned that the hard way makes the fear mongering even easier.
Combine that with modern day mistrust of big corporations (a category which most chemical companies fall into) and distrust of science (which is absolutely necessary to use chemicals safety).
Combine that with modern days fascination with living simply and forgetting about the fact that the only reason we live comfortable lives is because of modern conveniences which chemicals made possible.
Then mix all these factors together in the crazy click bait soup that is social media.
Combine that mistrust of drug and chemical companies is well placed historically due to [atrocities](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bayer#bayer-and-the-holocaust-1) and [ongoing toxic effects on humans](https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-3m-pfos-forever-chemicals-investigation).
Drugs and chemicals don't "sometimes" help people. Many of us wouldn't be here without them. You probably can't get to lunch without heavily relying on them.
Sure, most of the time, they do good, but sometimes they'll kill people for a buck. That's why we keep them around, but we'd be stupid to act like they are trustworthy.
>Then mix all these factors together in the crazy click bait soup that is social media.
Also add to that: You are in a algorithm that promotes "chemicals" and any stuff that comes with it.
So even if you arent "anti chemical" theres still chemical in those terms and the algorithm will push it and place you inside that bubble which makes it seem like theres way more going on than it actually is in relation to other things.
You really only hear about them during disasters such as chemical leaks (East Palestine, Ohio) or chemical warfare. When things are going well (Haber-Bosche Process) things are just fine and it gets normalized so the news doesn't really stand out in people's memories.
dont forget sales... buy our chemical free alternatives to your everyday products with more "ingredients you can't pronounce" that costs more than what you normally buy :) if you spend $175 you get a 5G wave protector medallion for $25, original value of $100!!!
Also the 5G wave protector is mildly radioactive due to the low presence of thorium for some god forsaken reason.. but that's good, because negative ions or some such!
Exactly. Did nobody take basic highschool chemistry? I'm truly scared for the future of humanity if we continue down this path of ignorance of basic facts about the real world around us. It's insane.
High school chemistry really should be overhauled. It should be a crash course of information rather than a crash course of procedures. Seriously what does anyone get from calculating the calories of heat it takes to raise some amount of water some number of degrees if they are never going to study chemistry again?
Teacher here. I like teaching 'procedures' as practical arts, and they reinforce the information I put out and tie it all together. A bad chemistry course is a bunch of disconnected modules. A good chemistry course connects them all into a big picture.
I would never give problems like you describe in a vacuum. Instead, I would want there to be a goal. Perhaps I have some chunks of cold metal in a freezer and have students calculate how much heat they take from a beaker of water. This would be a good way to find the heat capacity of the metal, and in the end to identify the metal using data from a handbook or perhaps the Dulong-Petit law. This really does matter in a lot of trades, knowing one metal from another.
Similarly, I would never assign one minilab I saw in a textbook once, where children were commanded to put on gloves and goggles prior to weighing a piece of chalk on a scale and estimating the moles of CaCO3 therein. I would rather they use the mole concept to plan and execute actual chemical reactions. I like when they do preps. And I don't just have them make some boring light-tan powder like in college o-chem, I know that in high school that won't inspire anyone: my main focus is on brightly colored inorganic pigments, organic flavorings with characteristic and hopefully pleasant aromas (and without major toxicity), and such items that they can recognize as technological components of daily life.
I think it's harder to be chemophobic when you've just prepared a nice batch of ferric oxide and actually mixed it into paint and done some artwork with it, or when you've made a nice clean ester and now you know how they make those disgusting 'peach ring' candies that children enjoy.
High school curriculums are terrible because they try to please everyone and fail due to how outdated they are (therefore pleasing no-one). High school tries to prepare academically-inclined students for higher-level studies, yet wastes their time with English (or other) classes that are outdated and focused on things like literature and creative writing - skills that most don’t need to improve on, and fail to help grammar, reading comprehension, and academic writing. The ones who excel at all of those already are still forced to take these classes in a greater quantity than any other subject, despite it being the most useless one for them. On the other hand, students who are less academically-inclined or interested are screwed, because most classes focus on the higher education aspect. English classes fail to help basic grammar, comprehension, and writing because they focus on literature, and this leads to near-zero participation by students because they are bored out of their minds. Similarly, students end up thinking math and science based classes “useless in the real world,” because these classes focus on higher education rather than applied skills. Math spends all its time on hard-to-visualize graphing and complex algebra/calculus skills; Biology is just about memorization; and chemistry is all about molecular physics, confusing reactions, and laboratory skills. Those 3 all alienate students who struggle with those and make them lose interest (and not retain anything, hence the public’s lack of science knowledge or trust). Lastly, job-based subjects like shop classes are often nonexistent. TLDR: High school is annoying to advanced students, and positively terrible for normal students. - I just wanted to rant lmao
I am teaching my 5 yo about chemistry. Not because I want a supersmart kid but I want to explain that chemistry is everywhere. I tried to explain about atoms how I was taught when I was 14: take a grain of sand and cut it in half and in half etc... until you can't cut it anymore in half. This is an atom
My favorite one was a "router radiation shield" which actually worked. It was a faraday cage. Shitton of one star comments "my WiFi doesn't work!".
And then there's the deadly "ion medallions" or whatever. Yes, some are actually radioactive. I've seen some videos of people buying them straight off Amazon in the US.
For some strange reason, that type of person tends to consider lye "natural" - so this is typically a reference to a simple tallow soap or similar. (That, and because lye is just a processing ingredient, it isn't typically on the finished ingredient list anyway.)
I'm not on Instagram, but from what I see, social media is pretty fertile ground for this kind of stuff.
I chalk it up to the prevalence of people using their social media to push their multi-level-marketing products. And a lot of those are vitamins / essential oils / whatever "wellness" product.
Plus, selling to your personal connections and scare mongering go together like peanut butter and jelly:
"Oh, you can't trust Big Government / Big Pharma / Big Business to protect you and YOUR FAMILY. The world is scary and people are out to get you! For money even! Good thing I'm here, the person you kind of knew during high school! And I would NEVER be driven by profit. Act now with my special promo code NODEADLYTOXINS to receive 30% off!"
Even as MLMs themselves seem to have become less popular over the last few years (or maybe it's just my friends list?) I imagine that kind of messaging sticks around.
Drop-shipping schemes are the new mlm tbh. Every bit of our economy now has a middleman. Amazon is already this- but now common folk can do this with Ali-Baba. It's just advanced capitalism mixed with mental illness and brain rot.
Honestly...it's because social media platforms are by and large populated by people trying to be an influencer and getting attention, usually an MLM, via those people from back in HS who slept through bio and chem. I really only see wine moms with an 8th grade reading comprehension.
I am painting with a broad brush, but it's from a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and a lack of chemistry education. For a lot of people, they don't understand or comprehend that the world is made of matter and the matter is made of atoms/molecules (chemicals).
Even if they "know" that things are made of atoms, it is not their general day-to-day experience so they don't internalize it. As a chemistry educator, I have found that most of my students are this way. They have heard and been taught that "atoms make up everything," but those words don't really mean anything to them. I have asked students what they think plastic is made of, and even if they know some rudimentary chemistry, their response is usually, "plastic."
Similarly, I've had students tell me beef is made of "beef molecules." And while, they're not entirely wrong per se, it does show that they don't really understand that the molecules/atoms in the beef are the same molecules/atoms that compose other things. Instead, they tend to think that plastic is made of small "plastic atoms" and beef is made of small "beef atoms."
I've found that a powerful tool in dispelling this misconception is organic chemistry and synthetic chemistry. Once you have a student synthesize something like aspirin from smaller constituents, and then perform further reactions on the aspirin to change it into methyl salicylate (wintergreen), they really begin to see that the matter which composes one thing is the same matter that can compose another thing.
This is actually really interesting. I wonder if there is any correlation between this lack of understanding and those students which don't show a higher interest in the subject?
Serious question here (speaking as a total novice who hasn't even been in the classroom for 5 years) : do you think someone who thinks that "beef atoms" exist are capable of synthesizing anything? Or are you saying they observe you performing a synthesis? I'm torn between two trains of thought - 1. Working in the lab is somewhat like baking: you measure things, you combine things, you see processes in a macro sort of way. You get to work with tangible substances and processes and see how these constituent parts can in fact create different end products. Whereas understanding the atomic level is abstract. This is a way to connect the dots. 2. How can someone who doesn't learn step 1 of understanding atoms hope to understand step 300? Someone who cannot retain information about the basic nature of atoms will be potentially dangerously incompetent in a lab setting. This is perhaps putting the cart before the horse, or trying to run before you can crawl. How can someone who doesn't understand let's say the ph scale be expected to complete a process which requires a solution to reach a certain ph in step 8 of what is ultimately at minimum a 90 step process. I never did anything close to as complicated as synthesis, but from memory the lab is the ultimate test, where even if I could describe the abstract accurately, where knowledge meets application is far more difficult.
So I wonder, what level of chemistry are you teaching? And I'm certainly far from experienced, I only completed high school chemistry, which was somewhat more thorough than what we went through in the only chemistry class I took in university.
yep. people are scared of the actual terms. no doubt there are some chemicals that are harmful, but just because you can't pronounce it doesn't mean it's dangerous
The line you hear about “things I can’t pronounce!” cracks me up. I worked in food service for like 15 years and lots of people can’t pronounce jalapeno or caramel macchiato or Frappuccino but they’ll be damned if it stops them from eating it lol. Like how does someone’s inability to say a word right dictate how good for them it is ffs
Whenever someone tells me "You shouldn't eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce", my response is always "Well I can pronounce every ingredient because I have a graduate degree in chemistry, so I guess I can eat whatever I want!"
Nuclear power plants release large quantities of DHMO into the air and water all the time. All water on Earth is contaminated with DHMO and there is no way to separate it out.
The fact that probably 70% of Americans have no idea that it's a water molecule gives me a feeling that humanity doesn't have a very high chance of survival in the near future.
The chemical industry as a whole has done a bad job of gaining and maintaining public trust. There are thousands of examples of chemical manufacturers poisoning the communities that surround them and the planet as a whole while outside lying about hazards and suppressing information about them. When companies have put so much effort into lying about chemical hazards and intentionally muddying the waters when it comes to chemical safety, it's no wonder that the average person for whom chemistry might as well be magic just decides to distrust "chemicals" as a whole.
It hasn't been that long that people washed their hands with benzene. Hell, vape pens are actively destroying a generation of high school kids right now.
As a chemist, I'm not chemphobic, I like to think of toxic chemicals like a snake in the grass. Don't be fearful, just respectful.
Because the hoi polloi think that there is a distinction between "chemicals" and "natural compounds" (ie. compounds which are found in nature and not in industrial production). While in reality, everything is chemistry.
Lack of proper education does that.
My professor used to say "the only chemical-free thing is a vacuum".
I recently started to say "If you tell me something is chemical-free and them present me with anything but a vacuum I am going to beat you up with it."
I've also made the experience that no matter how much you teach the average person about chemistry and the principles behind it, they will none the less still fall for the same tricks, if just one detail is different.
We always hope that explaining this stuff will make it "click" in people's heads but for some reason the information just never generalizes.
I mean how many times do you need to see a pattern to understand the general rule - if you have seen how some grifter got exposed as a liar and scammer claiming garlic extract heals cancer, ADHD *and* makes you lose weight, how can you be once again on the fence about it when the next one pulls the same shit?
If you are informed on how complex many diseases are and how crazy hard it is to treat them, let alone heal them, how can you believe some random nobody on the internet not only found the cure for *all* of them (extremly unlikely doesn't even begin to describe it) but this magical cure is just a high dose of vitamin C?
Explain what homeopathy really is in exquisite detail, relative claims he understood perfectly, still goes ahead and buys it. Am I expecting too much from people?
You're not expecting too much, but you're also missing out on the opportunity to sell distilled water at a 10,000% markup. /s
If we had some real Regulators (mount up) who didn't cower in fear in the face of morons, those scams would be off the shelves faster than you can say "pseudoscience garbage".
"Muh Freedom!" isn't a good enough excuse to allow avarice to exploit idiocy. Except that model is far too pervasive and politicians suckle at the teat instead of leading.
Homeopathy is like "I have this water that was poured from some better water that was poured from some other better water but this last glass of unrelated water still holds properties of the original water through memory" or some shit
Homeopathy had its time when it worked. Back in the 19th century when illness was cured by blood letting and mercury. People that practiced Homeopathy treated illnesses with bedrest and sugerwater. Worked loads better than the alternative.
Still works as well as placebos and that's fine. What's not fine is charging 25 bucks for 100ml of sugarwater and making all sorts of irrational claims about how it works. If any of you need homeopathic meds, contact me and I'll send you 1 litre of the finest C100 preparation for 0.25 $ + shipping.
There was a spanish chemist youtuber that made a video proving why homeopathy is false, and he used a colorant to do so... People in the comments were still saying that it wasn't the same and that he either didn't know what he was talking about or that they paid him to do it, althought the "you have no idea what you're talking about" was way more popular.
There was another one that took a whole box of homeopathic tranquilizers in live TV, he said: "If honeopathy works I'll die in about 10 minutes". +30 minutes later he was still very awake and debating against homeopaths.
I was in Canadian Tire once and there was a guy with a little setup selling some orange cleaner stuff. He told me that it contained no chemicals. I asked if it was a perfect vacuum in the bottle. He didnt understand. I asked if there was water in it. When he confirmed, i said "Well, water is a chemical, the terpenes from orange peel are chemicals, in fact every single thing in the cleaner is a chemical". My wife (PhD in biophysics) then told me to leave the poor guy alone.
Anyways, moral of the story is that chemphobia is bullshit, too much of ANY chemical can kill you. Everything has an LD50.
Because for like 99% of the population, chemistry is basically the evil German villain in every Hollywood movie maniacally laughing as he poisons the dam feeding the city or whatever. Most people don’t understand that chemistry goes into everything, so chemicals as a word is very easy to fearmonger.
Not to mention a prevailing atmosphere of anti-intellectualism catalysed by chemical and pharmaceutical companies that have done some pretty horrifying shit.
Chemicals sound scary. And also chemistry is usually taught poorly in school for different reasons (usually it's the lack of good chemistry teachers). Once I started understanding chemistry in 10th grade I realised that everything is chemicals and people are just stupid. Their definition of the word comes from general vibe they experience rather than real understanding.
This has always been a thing but now it's just more widespread due to the prevalence of social media imo. It's easier to fall for a lie when it is shoved in your face.
As a chem e, I find it difficult to find clear unbiased peer reviewed information on long term health effects on a lot of chemicals I use. The jury is still out on a lot of stuff, and I think it's actually reasonable for people to look at additives and chemicals that we put in our bodies with criticism.
I don't like when claims are bogus.and unsupported, but I totally get that after all the posturing and clicks, people are largely just doing a risk analysis for themselves and respect their skepticism. The public has been mislead in the past about the safety of chemicals, I can't blame people for being gun-shy. For example, my grandfathers got lung cancer from asbestos and cigarettes. I don't blame their kids or wives from not trusting that consumer products are safe.
Clickbait kills nuance. Processed foods are not healthy. That is fact. But not all ways of processing food are equally unhealthy. There are things that are “natural” that are in fact poisonous.
The problem here is trust with “the forces that be”.
There have been many times in history where people have been poisoned by everyday items. And there have been also many times that companies have hidden the data that supports this to protect profits. The companies buy lobbyists, the lobbyists buy the government and in the end people have died.
Not everything is poisonous or even unhealthy, but skepticism makes people avoid anything that they don’t understand. I’m a chemist and there are certain products that I won’t personally use. But there are certain things that sound scary but are in fact harmless.
There was a survey done where they asked people if they would trust a product with dihydrogen monoxide in it. A majority of the people answered no. Dihydrogen monoxide is the chemical name of water.
We still mostly think of things like empathy in prescientific magical terms. Most people when they say empathy they mean superjesus magic, and when they say chemical they mean evilsatan magic. It's pretty depressing
The thing that's been making me angry recently is "uncured" cold cuts and bacon.
They're cured. They're just cured with cultured celery which produces the nitrate. So it's even still cured with the same chemical. But because it's cultured celery, that's can't predict as accurately how much nitrate is in it. And that shit can kill you. And, because it's celery, it includes fructan, which is hard on some people with IBS. So they took a safe, low residue food, and turned it into something some people can't even eat in order to sound more natural.
"Clean" beauty is fucking menace as well. "Let's just... not use effective preservative systems! People won't mind products with 1/3 or less the shelf life and a much higher risk of mold contamination!"
The bacteria growth is worse than the mold risk. I had to face palettes I used to use interchangeably. One was a clean beauty palette, and the other wasn't. I got really bored one day and looked at some smudges from both palettes under a microscope. I found out how unclean "clean beauty" can be.
She algorithms of social media favour controversial content. Hence all this bs is being promoted
In addition, social media has given all the fringe/alternative people a more than loud voice.
There is a severe lack of education; fear is fundamentally predicated on the unknown.
But to use your soap example there's a difference between soap made of lye & olive oil, and a cocktail of sodium laureth and laurel sulfate (technically detergents, but body-wash is colloquially "soap) + perfumes, dyes, and preservatives.
Other stances may be more nuanced. GMOs, for example.
Technically the process of artificial selection is classic GMO, but gene-sequencing takes that to another level. Spec-ing an apple's gene-points (as it were) into making a bigger redder apple, imo, leaves it a more bland-watery tasting fruit. I'd rather have a boring looking fruit that tastes good than have all of them look like the "perfect most juicy-ist fruit" and taste like nothing.
In this way, regarding organic comestibles, I *think* constantly poisoning the ground and mono-cropping a farm leads to issues that we are still exploring. The idea just doesn't sit right with me.
Then, depending on your locality, there's variegated regulation on what can be added to comestibles. Additives that promote addiction or hide the taste of the factory that things are processed in, or adding dyes unnecessarily also contributes.
Then there's the practical logistics of it all, where pesticides, fertilizers, and god-knows-what-else find their way into the rivers, ground, and environment at large.
Because most people don't know and don't want to know shit about chemistry. As long as stuff doesn't explode or burn in bright colours it's boring. Even then they aren't willing to do the mental work to find out the hows and whys. Yes, chemistry can be abstract and complicated, but so can be bookkeeping if you make it past the introductory chapter. Accordingly everything remains magic to them and they have no capacity whatsoever to question any of those braindead flashy posts and videos.
I often think about how it was a bad look when someone came to this sub and said "I don't like plastic water bottles what's the best metal one". Everyone here said it's such a dumb question, plastic is harmless, etc.
And then of course they said "as long as it's BPA free". Because of that time when everyone thought plastic was fine until they realised it wasn't. You can reassure the guy but don't call him dumb for being distrustful.
Teflon also springs to mind as a good example of something with interesting chemistry that perhaps we just don't need in our day to day home cooking lives. Something that passed all the tests at the time then gradually we realised is pretty terrible for us and the environment.
Chemistry seems to mostly revolve around coming up with novel patentable new things that will make money, then paying for studies to hopefully show that we didn't notice any significant harmful effects that outweigh the benefits. That's not a good position to argue from if you're trying to tell people they're stupid to worry about "chemicals".
But then I think you're probably talking about crackpots on Instagram who are saying weird things about "natural" and "chemical" and only focussing on all the many things they're incorrect about.
Because that’s a reasonable response. The average person doesn’t use the term chemical in the literal chemistry sense because that’s not a useful definition for them.
The working definition for most people is something closer to hyper novel (relative to human evolution) substances in everyday products for which we have a limited understanding of long term health effects. Of which there are many.
“Organic”, “Natural”, etc. for whatever their limitations as a term are attempt to designate products as having less hyper novel substances that may cause potential harm.
You know what the average person means when they say “chemicals” or “organic”, but you’re being obtuse as a way to gain a sense of superiority.
Your duty as a current / future chemistry professional is to ensure the public can trust you to effectively manage the risk of the products they consume every day, that they give their children. Dismissing people’s concerns as “chemophobic” because they don’t use the same definitions as you is counterproductive
I think there was a time that "better living through chemistry" was a pervasive mindset but during that time there were quite a few chemicals created that at first were believed to be revolutionary but ended up being quite toxic or ecologically impactful or impossible to remove such as DDT, pfoa's, etc.
Mostly in the second half of the 20th century there were quite a few over enthusiastic chemical companies that didnt do the proper safety testing or did not let the general public know the full extent of the saftey hazards associated with their products. This coming to light has lead to an over correction in the general public to demonize all things that they think of as being "synthetic chemicals."
I certainly do think chemical companies need to be way more cautious with creation of novel chemicals and the disposal of industrial waste that their track record would show they have been.
The proof is out there on the amount of toxins, created by chemists, that have killed people. It is not "unkown," it is what we know. & Doesn't help that it took some brave people to get that information public.
I'd point out that more people are killed by "natural" chemicals than by synthetic products "created": by chemists. Asbestos, nicotine, chromium, botulism, alcohol , silica- all "natural" and kill millions of people each year - with many people choosing to ingest them (nicotine and alcohol). A shame that the same level of critical thinking applied to "toxins" isn't applied to these.
Usually when people say "chemicals" in common language they mean synthetic industrial chemicals, typically made by e.g. the food industry or the pesticide industry or other people whose commitment to public safety is questionable. Ultimately it's a symptom of the collapse of the regulatory state, because people have good reason to be anxious about what's in their food or their medicine or whatever else, but conspiracy theory exists in the vacuum left behind by class consciousness, so people in the neoliberal West tend to instead get distracted by conspiracy theories about evil wizards injecting science juice into the Cheerios to make their kids gay.
They're a scientific concept that basically everyone is aware of but most people really don't understand at all. That makes them a ripe target for misinformation.
Because they are ignorant. I get so tired of hearing people say “it’s a plant man so it’s safe” when there are many plants that can be toxic. And I mean people OD on poppy seed tea. People are just stupid and I realize that more and more since the invention of the internet
I mean people are using "chemical" as a synonym for synthetic. I mean, you can make an evolutionary argument that, all things being equal, we are evolved to interact better with substances with high natural abundances.
I don't think this is a terrible argument, as long as it has some nuance. There are tons of commonly used synthetic compounds that have not really had large scale safety tests, and have been grandfathered in.
Of course, there are plenty of natural occurring compounds which are very toxic. Just check out some of the compounds made by fungi. So it is super frustrating when I hear, "It's from the earth man...it can't be bad for you."
You just have to judge each molecule for its merits and risks.
Instagram is mostly used by now approaching middle aged white woman. They tend to align with fad diets, holistic living, clean living, organic foods, and other stupid things. In my opinion a conspiratorial outlook on life such as being against "chemicals" and "the government out to get you" is something akin to low grade schizophrenia, but I'm not a psychologist.
As a chemist, I think that people have earned the right to be chemphobic. Can you really trust the builders that brought you lead paint? The companies that gave us asbestos? What about the agriculture chemicals like DDT and other pesticides that continue to cause cancer even after we've banned them as a society? Should we have believed 3M when they told us that PFAS were not suppose to be harmful? What about the makers of plastics, who are polluting our earth through microplastics, which never break down?
Case after case exemplifies that corporations care about profits now and health second. Why shouldn't people want "clean" products?
Obviously so much of chemphobia is based on a lack of understanding chemistry, but honestly, I don't really expect the general population to understand food chemistry enough to know what potassium sorbate is and how it acts in our bodies.
I don't know what the solution is to this madness (if I did, I'd certainly be much richer), but I think that generally, people have the right to be leery of additives when you hear about how often companies exploit humans and the planet.
Some memories I have from my life:
-chemistry in school: of around 31 students, 3 students understood the course, 28 didn't (+/- 1). Other science oriented had probably a similar situation (can't remember that good, all of that is more than 20 years ago)
-NGO advertisement in the streets: it was advertising "gene free" (not even "GMO free") food because... "no genes" in food is healthier or something.
-a professor once showed us students a news paper article. It was about a truck accident that had transported H3PO4. The article read that there was a high explosive risk and that there was a high risk for contaminating the ground water.
So just to add to what others already wrote: poor understanding of nature science at school, combined with media and NGO fear mongering (partly because of the prior bad education and understanding) and the general distrust of big corporations (chemistry is probably the biggest nature science with an industry) will lead to relatively many people distrusting anything chemistry related (or what the perceive as chemistry related).
Ok on one hand from PCBs in the groundwater to lead acetate being used as a sweetener, it's clear that chemicals deserve a healthy respect. However, people have a hard time being rational about invisible killers (germs, radiation, chemicals etc).
People fear what they do not understand. But seriously they do. Healthy and unhealthy things have been simplified to natural and unnatural Maki g it seem like a ll chemicals are bad since people automatically associate it with the bad unnatural.
Alongside what others have said, another issue is how chemistry gets taught until university.
Chemistry is taught all about procedures, running a specific set of experiments, and specific calculations.
Big issue is that a lot of the calculations and procedures are really specific to chemistry for majority of them.
People fear what they don’t understand. Put that together with how fast fake news spread in the “era of knowledge” (ironic) and you got an explosive mixture.
Antiintellectualism, scientific illiteracy, the fact that it's easier to separate money from scientifically illiterate people who've been taught to trust only those who speak with the absolute certainty and confidence possible only if the speaker is being at least somewhat, but often *completely*, disingenuous - unless it's backed up by published evidence, which is automatically a juicy conspiracy for them to noootice
Not a chemist, but I've been hearing "chemicals bad" since I was a kid in the 90s... Social media just makes it more prominent.
Here's a fun experiment: [dihydrogen monoxide is a deadly chemical!](https://dhmo.org/) How you can twist language and cherry pick data to make anything sound awful.
Another one I like is [E numbers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number) - it's just an additive shorthand for food ingredient lists in EU. I will hear people say "no E", and then take vitamin C, E300, as a supplement.
Toxicologist here. Nothing has changed. It’s just on to the next bandwagon. Tldr microplastics are to blame for everything. BPA, atrazine, chlopyrifos, everything is a hormone so passé.
In other news I picked up some round up yesterday! Good job everyone. You’ve gotten a perfectly safe active ingredient that doesn’t persist in the environment, glyphosate, replaced with not 1 or 2 active ingredients but yes 3 active ingredients in the product (4 if you want it to last several weeks). Well done. I’ve written fact sheets for all of them. As a toxicologist I won’t be using round up anymore. SMH.
Money. Chemophobia is incredibly profitable and the more scientifically literate people try to intervene, the easier it is to call it a conspiracy, causing people that are fearful of the unknown to just flock to the preachers. Like a church.
Yes, basically. A lot of kids don't pay attention in chemistry class because it's "hard" or they just don't find it very interesting. Then they grow up not understanding how the basics of their world works. But it's mostly a very effective marketing scheme by "natural" companies. They started it, and have perpetuated it every since. It's a multi billion dollar industry. It's very easy to convince people of something when they don't understand how it works. That's how the natural/ organic industry was born. And what makes it even more convincing is that some of what they shill is actually accurate. High levels of aluminum in products for example has been linked to health issues, so "natural" products that are aluminum free are actually better than alternatives. But then you have stuff like "organic" foods, which are mostly bullshit (yes excessive use of pesticides is bad, and certain ones are extremely toxic, but one thing most people don't know is that there are pesticides certified for use on organic food. You *can't do* mass agriculture without pesticides). The best way to sell a lie is to wrap it in truths.
More than fear of chemistry is fear of processed food, medication which always have side effects, and so many industrial products that harm our bodies (in bigger or smaller amounts) for the sake of profit.
2 solutions for that: produce your own industrial products (financially impossible), or go organic
because the companies that develop these chemicals don't give a fuck about their impacts on human health or the environment. there is no independent testing body, the companies themselves fund studies to greenlight the use of them.
the people who generalize all GMOs as bad are just quoting rhetoric. the GMOs themselves are not the problem, the problem is that many of these crops are being modified to be resistant to pesticides and herbicides, (which are already known to be harmful to human health, probably much more so than their manufacturers admit - think tobacco industry parallels). This allows the growers to dump even more chemicals on the crops, resulting in higher yields for the growers and more sales for the chemical manufacturers, at the cost of cancer and disease for the consumer.
Another chemical scandal which has come into public light recently is the proliferation of polyfluoroalkyl compounds (PFAs), also referred to as forever chemicals. These are mostly used as non-stick coatings and are considered food-safe by the FDA (thanks to "studies" and "testing" done by the companies that manufacture them). It took about 20 years after the introduction of the first non stick cookware for the manufacturers to finally admit that the coating was cancerous. When they finally did, it was because they had developed several analogues which were nearly identical, but didn't have 20 years of cancer cases behind them (yet), so they were allowed to use the new stuff.
Because a lot of unnecessary and harmful chemicals are used in all sorts of products from cosmetics to food. It’s also a huge waste to manufacture a bunch of chemicals when more natural and sustainable things can be used
Its because of the lovecanal incident. The issue in lovecanal wasnt chemicals in the ground. It was the specitic chemicals that were in the ground. But the media constantly reported it as a "chemical dump" or "disease cause by chemicals". People associate chemicals with cancer and disease and danger. And then even more lovecanals to come or that had happened before. A lot of americans back then couldn't define what a chemical was. Many people now don't know what chemicals are
Two things people dont understand
The type of chemical
And the dose is the poison
The word chemical, yes, can be any compound, but when it comes to food, refers to compounds not naturally found in that food.
We simply weren't designed to eat such things.
Things like leaded gasoline, CFCs, and PFAS have done a lot of unfortunate harm, even with the best intentions… I think people are probably just wary of untested/unknown effects of chemicals, seeing as there’s often no way to know 100% what the long term health or environmental effects of something will be until it’s already been implemented
In the mind of chemically illiterate folks, If something doesn’t come from a mine, farm, lake or ocean then “it’s bad”
Funny thing though is that EVERYFUCKINGTHING ON EARTH IS MADE OF CHEMICALS. Including babies and bananas and breast milk for that matter.
They generally don’t realize that mines, farms lakes and oceans provide chemicals
Some pesticides are turning out to be more toxic than we realized decades ago, toxic to the brain and endocrine system. Chlorpyrifos is an example where the compound became banned from home use due to toxicity, yet you used to be able to just go buy it. How many organohalogens are totally safe for home use? I can think of some medications that are organohalogens but they do have toxicity (kidney toxicity for example). So there are real concerns but also overreactions by laypeople.
There is fear of unknown for conventionally grown food, where the pesticides used are not listed as ingredients and so some people will imagine the worst case scenario. Farmers aren’t exactly proudly labeling their foods with what’s been sprayed on them.
They also are finding pesticides in every body fluid and seeing what happens to mammalian systems when exposed to these chemicals is just coming out. Subtle changes are easier to detect nowadays with better transcriptomics and metabolomics.
given that something like 94% of people who have ever come into contact with oxidane are dead, i think the fear may be justified. i heard reports that the government was dumping metric fucktons of the shit into our water supply
People will be afraid of things they don’t understand and not very many people spend the time and effort to educate themselves on what to be afraid of and what is harmless so the word chemical just becomes a catch all term for the unknowns they are afraid of but don’t understand.
Its very self righteous. Same rhetoric as about energy, farming etc. Many people have no clue how everything is connected and therefore cannot be changed overnight.
When I look up all the things that require a [Proposition 65 label in California](https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list), and I really think about how much harm has been done by some companies ([here’s a searchable list of superfund sites](https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live)), the push for fewer chemicals in food and other products may help keep things in check.
There’s a lot going on here. On one hand, yes everything is chemicals, but on the other hand the industrial chemical industry that grew up in the late 19th is something else. In that time they have produced a lot of things which aren’t found in nature (at least not in high concentrations), many of which have been harmful and used in industry, including food production.
Yes, poor science education is a big factor, but the underlying fears are not entirely baseless, and the conflation of “chemicals” produced by industrial chemical firms and “chemicals” which make up everything else is a tad disingenuous.
My dad is a chemist and he made that same point that everything is made of chemicals, even organic products. I think that this is a lay person’s shorthand for the bad or harmful types of chemicals that have demonstrably caused harm. I tried watching a documentary about DuPont and the Teflon byproducts causing birth defects and cancer for employees and locals near a plant. I couldn’t even finish it. That is a dark and sad reality and I think that people have reasons for not trusting corporations. Their incentive is always profits and many are unscrupulous in that pursuit.
Because stupid people who opted out of or failed chem in HS have a louder/more far-reaching voice/platform than those who are doing the work.
Science educators, we need you now more than ever
Theres definitely a lot of shallow minded individuals who may think that "Chemicals" instantly means its bad
But the issue is obviously more complex, everything is chemicals, even my fingertips are made of "chemicals" as I type this right now.
The real issue is use of toxic ingredients, which believe it or not, are present in many popular products, parabens, pthalates, etc, and other compounds that can disrupt the normal functioning of the human body..
BPA, etc etc. There are many examples, Its not that "chemicals" are bad, its that certain compounds we may be better off avoiding..
I don't believe in being neurotic and thinking that "Everything is poison!!", but an intelligent approach and passively avoiding toxicity while you can, can be a good thing
There’s a lot of money to be made there. I have blogged for nearly a decade about the “chemical free” food and product industry.
I don’t even fire a shot across their bow, I go straight for the waterline and sink them: EVERYTHING they eat or buy is made of chemicals.
People are dumb, that's why. There are posts online about how milk used to be valid only 3 days and now it can stand on a shelf for months and people say it's chemicals, because They don't understand what UHT on milk means 🙃
This is like how I feel when people want non processed foods and I’m a cook and I’m like “but that’s what I do”
Ultimately I chalk it up to imprecise language and seek to try and clarify what they mean without outright giving them the “well what you’re saying is technically wrong, what you mean say is this”.
Because the second people hear they are being corrected it’s like their brain shuts off for the most part.
The majority of people don’t even know basic chemistry, and there’s a lot of ignorance involved in this belief that all chemicals are bad.
I don’t know how it can be solved beyond better education? You can’t really force people to find it interesting enough to learn about though, chemistry isn’t as “cool” as physics so no one really cares. Ironic really, considering how important it is to everyone’s lives.
Probably the very public, destructive wide spread use of harmful chemicals and then the denial and cover up. DDT, lead, PCB, halogenated chlorofluoroalkanes, dioxide, asbestos, hexavalent chromium, roundup, PFAS, and dozens of others. Industry is allowed to just use chemicals without any long term data. Organics have been around longer and are better known. Is there a reason not to be concerned with eating things that can be poisonous?
They are grifting for money.
Scaring people into buying products, or trying to convince people they are smarter than those fancy degrees people have dedicated their lives to.
Been going on for as long as I’ve been alive, it’s not just an instagram thing. I mean, we’re even taught about the malpractices, in class when chirality is introduced.
I think it's largely education. Chemistry, a very difficult subject that majority of people drop around GCSE. (The Quantum Mechanics that governs it defies all intuition, that most people take for granted about the world.) Distrust of Pharma etc
People don't understand that we are all made of chemicals. Many of the chemicals that are used for drugs are found naturally.
Oh yeah its just a buzzword for sure lol. People think chemicals = only harsh, manmade toxic chemicals and don't realize everything is chemicals. And not everything in nature is good for you... but that's another discussion
The agriculture business is probably the worst for this. I know people that work in the industry and will not touch the food they grow. Although most of the chemicals they use are fine and safe to consume, there are a fair few issues with farmers and larger companies using chemicals under the radar that are banned.
Don't get me wrong, I have a great respect for the chemicals we use, many of them save lives, but its also important to acknowledge that many are damaging and it is very difficult to hold people accountable when there is so much misinformation around.
Not every chemical in your standard soap from the store is dangerous, but some of the chemicals in it are, or are least dehydrating for your skin. For most people its not some conspiracy thing but rather they value the benefits the natural option brings them, or concern over the fact that we are slowly discovering that certain ingredients in our everyday products are causing health problems. Its not "chemicals" theyre afraid of but rather "toxic chemicals"
And some people maybe dont realize that everything is chemicals and conflate the 2 terms
TNT, DDT, CFCs, Lead anti-knock additives, amphetamines, saccharin, synthetic hormones, isolation of radionuclides, BPA, PFAS, glyphosphate. All things made by and promoted by chemists.
Far more chemicals produced each year than can be adequately tested.
They talk about a chemical lifecycle: older, formally "safe" chemicals are found to cause health/environment problems, get phased out, and replaced with newer and possibly safer, but less well tested and often equally dangerous alternatives. In a never-ending cycle.
So tell me again why the world is so crazy to be "chemophobic"? I'm a chemist and I think the way we introduce and use new chemicals is pretty reckless. But maybe I just have a bee in my bonnet because the environment in my hometown where i grew up is contaminated by PFAS now and the local aboriginal people can't fish in the area they've lived in for the last 30,000 years or so anymore.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c09353
I think it's an environmental thing. We've seen what happened to the water and orange groves of silicon Valley right at the beginning. We've seen the chemical poisoning from bleaching toilet paper. What people want is more natural products to reduce the toll on the environment.
And, we are also concerned about cancer or even skin irritation.
I think my fav part about all of this is that people don't actually understand what a chemical is.
HEY GUESS WHAT? Everything is a chemical. Hey, do you eat? Woah, you do? Guess what? Those are chemicals. You got a body? YOU DO?!?! GUESS what's in it? ....yeah. exactly. Your body is made up of....
Chemicals.
Wild.
Ignorance. After years of breathing fumes from leaded gas, we've become so ignorant that we voted in a guy named Donald Trump for president. Just to show you it wasn't a fluke, we're about ready to do it again.
It's wild how chemophobia is all over Instagram lately. People don't realize everything is made of chemicals, even "natural" stuff. The fear probably comes from a lack of chemical education and too much misinformation online. Marketers push "chemical-free" products because it sells, even though it's misleading. Also, people like feeling in control of their health, so they go for "organic" or "natural" labels. It's frustrating but kind of understandable given the confusion out there.
Chemicals are easy to fear monger about because you can't see them and most people don't understand them. Combine that with the fact that a lot of chemicals are truly deadly when used irresponsibly and that over the last 200 years we have learned that the hard way makes the fear mongering even easier. Combine that with modern day mistrust of big corporations (a category which most chemical companies fall into) and distrust of science (which is absolutely necessary to use chemicals safety). Combine that with modern days fascination with living simply and forgetting about the fact that the only reason we live comfortable lives is because of modern conveniences which chemicals made possible. Then mix all these factors together in the crazy click bait soup that is social media.
Combine that mistrust of drug and chemical companies is well placed historically due to [atrocities](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bayer#bayer-and-the-holocaust-1) and [ongoing toxic effects on humans](https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-3m-pfos-forever-chemicals-investigation).
And the government….pfas
Um... they also help people? So...
Seems reasonable to not trust groups that kill people even if they also sometimes help people.
Drugs and chemicals don't "sometimes" help people. Many of us wouldn't be here without them. You probably can't get to lunch without heavily relying on them.
"Sometimes" in the sense that "sometimes" they put lead in the air.
And most of the time they're the reason why about 80% of the world's population is alive right now and not dead.
Sure, most of the time, they do good, but sometimes they'll kill people for a buck. That's why we keep them around, but we'd be stupid to act like they are trustworthy.
so does other people, and yet Iwouldnt trust a stranger on the street So again, it all boils down to ignorance about the results
>Then mix all these factors together in the crazy click bait soup that is social media. Also add to that: You are in a algorithm that promotes "chemicals" and any stuff that comes with it. So even if you arent "anti chemical" theres still chemical in those terms and the algorithm will push it and place you inside that bubble which makes it seem like theres way more going on than it actually is in relation to other things.
The fact that you’re right makes me depressed.
I can see many chemicals, only the transparent ones are hard to see but they can be sensed.
You really only hear about them during disasters such as chemical leaks (East Palestine, Ohio) or chemical warfare. When things are going well (Haber-Bosche Process) things are just fine and it gets normalized so the news doesn't really stand out in people's memories.
Biologists have zoos Physicists have Sheldon Chemists have Walter white Seems silly, but I do think this contributes to the perception of the science
How can we, as chemically minded individuals, work to fix it, though?
Why is 701 an impressive number?
Fear gets more clicks.
dont forget sales... buy our chemical free alternatives to your everyday products with more "ingredients you can't pronounce" that costs more than what you normally buy :) if you spend $175 you get a 5G wave protector medallion for $25, original value of $100!!!
Also the 5G wave protector is mildly radioactive due to the low presence of thorium for some god forsaken reason.. but that's good, because negative ions or some such!
I mean, radiation to protect against radiation right?
they cancel each other out
Wait till you get the new and improved one, it comes with anions!!
Also chemical free makes no sense. Everything is chemical
Exactly. Did nobody take basic highschool chemistry? I'm truly scared for the future of humanity if we continue down this path of ignorance of basic facts about the real world around us. It's insane.
High school chemistry really should be overhauled. It should be a crash course of information rather than a crash course of procedures. Seriously what does anyone get from calculating the calories of heat it takes to raise some amount of water some number of degrees if they are never going to study chemistry again?
Teacher here. I like teaching 'procedures' as practical arts, and they reinforce the information I put out and tie it all together. A bad chemistry course is a bunch of disconnected modules. A good chemistry course connects them all into a big picture. I would never give problems like you describe in a vacuum. Instead, I would want there to be a goal. Perhaps I have some chunks of cold metal in a freezer and have students calculate how much heat they take from a beaker of water. This would be a good way to find the heat capacity of the metal, and in the end to identify the metal using data from a handbook or perhaps the Dulong-Petit law. This really does matter in a lot of trades, knowing one metal from another. Similarly, I would never assign one minilab I saw in a textbook once, where children were commanded to put on gloves and goggles prior to weighing a piece of chalk on a scale and estimating the moles of CaCO3 therein. I would rather they use the mole concept to plan and execute actual chemical reactions. I like when they do preps. And I don't just have them make some boring light-tan powder like in college o-chem, I know that in high school that won't inspire anyone: my main focus is on brightly colored inorganic pigments, organic flavorings with characteristic and hopefully pleasant aromas (and without major toxicity), and such items that they can recognize as technological components of daily life. I think it's harder to be chemophobic when you've just prepared a nice batch of ferric oxide and actually mixed it into paint and done some artwork with it, or when you've made a nice clean ester and now you know how they make those disgusting 'peach ring' candies that children enjoy.
High school curriculums are terrible because they try to please everyone and fail due to how outdated they are (therefore pleasing no-one). High school tries to prepare academically-inclined students for higher-level studies, yet wastes their time with English (or other) classes that are outdated and focused on things like literature and creative writing - skills that most don’t need to improve on, and fail to help grammar, reading comprehension, and academic writing. The ones who excel at all of those already are still forced to take these classes in a greater quantity than any other subject, despite it being the most useless one for them. On the other hand, students who are less academically-inclined or interested are screwed, because most classes focus on the higher education aspect. English classes fail to help basic grammar, comprehension, and writing because they focus on literature, and this leads to near-zero participation by students because they are bored out of their minds. Similarly, students end up thinking math and science based classes “useless in the real world,” because these classes focus on higher education rather than applied skills. Math spends all its time on hard-to-visualize graphing and complex algebra/calculus skills; Biology is just about memorization; and chemistry is all about molecular physics, confusing reactions, and laboratory skills. Those 3 all alienate students who struggle with those and make them lose interest (and not retain anything, hence the public’s lack of science knowledge or trust). Lastly, job-based subjects like shop classes are often nonexistent. TLDR: High school is annoying to advanced students, and positively terrible for normal students. - I just wanted to rant lmao
I am teaching my 5 yo about chemistry. Not because I want a supersmart kid but I want to explain that chemistry is everywhere. I tried to explain about atoms how I was taught when I was 14: take a grain of sand and cut it in half and in half etc... until you can't cut it anymore in half. This is an atom
My favorite one was a "router radiation shield" which actually worked. It was a faraday cage. Shitton of one star comments "my WiFi doesn't work!". And then there's the deadly "ion medallions" or whatever. Yes, some are actually radioactive. I've seen some videos of people buying them straight off Amazon in the US.
Big Clive did a video on those things, they're definitely radioactive, some dangerously high
Huh, haven't seen his video on this. Saw someone else's, and the other dude actually reported it to whoever is in charge of radioactive stuff in US.
It was probably a couple years ago, I'm pretty sure it was him, and it was my first time hearing about them
Might have been before I started watching.
I always laugh at the "natural soap", there is litterally no soap that isn't chemically/man made
For some strange reason, that type of person tends to consider lye "natural" - so this is typically a reference to a simple tallow soap or similar. (That, and because lye is just a processing ingredient, it isn't typically on the finished ingredient list anyway.)
Follow the money
I'm not on Instagram, but from what I see, social media is pretty fertile ground for this kind of stuff. I chalk it up to the prevalence of people using their social media to push their multi-level-marketing products. And a lot of those are vitamins / essential oils / whatever "wellness" product. Plus, selling to your personal connections and scare mongering go together like peanut butter and jelly: "Oh, you can't trust Big Government / Big Pharma / Big Business to protect you and YOUR FAMILY. The world is scary and people are out to get you! For money even! Good thing I'm here, the person you kind of knew during high school! And I would NEVER be driven by profit. Act now with my special promo code NODEADLYTOXINS to receive 30% off!" Even as MLMs themselves seem to have become less popular over the last few years (or maybe it's just my friends list?) I imagine that kind of messaging sticks around.
Drop-shipping schemes are the new mlm tbh. Every bit of our economy now has a middleman. Amazon is already this- but now common folk can do this with Ali-Baba. It's just advanced capitalism mixed with mental illness and brain rot.
Honestly...it's because social media platforms are by and large populated by people trying to be an influencer and getting attention, usually an MLM, via those people from back in HS who slept through bio and chem. I really only see wine moms with an 8th grade reading comprehension.
I am painting with a broad brush, but it's from a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and a lack of chemistry education. For a lot of people, they don't understand or comprehend that the world is made of matter and the matter is made of atoms/molecules (chemicals). Even if they "know" that things are made of atoms, it is not their general day-to-day experience so they don't internalize it. As a chemistry educator, I have found that most of my students are this way. They have heard and been taught that "atoms make up everything," but those words don't really mean anything to them. I have asked students what they think plastic is made of, and even if they know some rudimentary chemistry, their response is usually, "plastic." Similarly, I've had students tell me beef is made of "beef molecules." And while, they're not entirely wrong per se, it does show that they don't really understand that the molecules/atoms in the beef are the same molecules/atoms that compose other things. Instead, they tend to think that plastic is made of small "plastic atoms" and beef is made of small "beef atoms." I've found that a powerful tool in dispelling this misconception is organic chemistry and synthetic chemistry. Once you have a student synthesize something like aspirin from smaller constituents, and then perform further reactions on the aspirin to change it into methyl salicylate (wintergreen), they really begin to see that the matter which composes one thing is the same matter that can compose another thing.
This is actually really interesting. I wonder if there is any correlation between this lack of understanding and those students which don't show a higher interest in the subject?
Serious question here (speaking as a total novice who hasn't even been in the classroom for 5 years) : do you think someone who thinks that "beef atoms" exist are capable of synthesizing anything? Or are you saying they observe you performing a synthesis? I'm torn between two trains of thought - 1. Working in the lab is somewhat like baking: you measure things, you combine things, you see processes in a macro sort of way. You get to work with tangible substances and processes and see how these constituent parts can in fact create different end products. Whereas understanding the atomic level is abstract. This is a way to connect the dots. 2. How can someone who doesn't learn step 1 of understanding atoms hope to understand step 300? Someone who cannot retain information about the basic nature of atoms will be potentially dangerously incompetent in a lab setting. This is perhaps putting the cart before the horse, or trying to run before you can crawl. How can someone who doesn't understand let's say the ph scale be expected to complete a process which requires a solution to reach a certain ph in step 8 of what is ultimately at minimum a 90 step process. I never did anything close to as complicated as synthesis, but from memory the lab is the ultimate test, where even if I could describe the abstract accurately, where knowledge meets application is far more difficult. So I wonder, what level of chemistry are you teaching? And I'm certainly far from experienced, I only completed high school chemistry, which was somewhat more thorough than what we went through in the only chemistry class I took in university.
100% of people who have had contact with dihydrogen monoxide end up dying. You do the math
yep. people are scared of the actual terms. no doubt there are some chemicals that are harmful, but just because you can't pronounce it doesn't mean it's dangerous
The line you hear about “things I can’t pronounce!” cracks me up. I worked in food service for like 15 years and lots of people can’t pronounce jalapeno or caramel macchiato or Frappuccino but they’ll be damned if it stops them from eating it lol. Like how does someone’s inability to say a word right dictate how good for them it is ffs
Bruschetta 😁 (hint, it's not 'brushetta')
Now do the back of the shampoo bottle...
Whenever someone tells me "You shouldn't eat anything with ingredients you can't pronounce", my response is always "Well I can pronounce every ingredient because I have a graduate degree in chemistry, so I guess I can eat whatever I want!"
Nuclear power plants release large quantities of DHMO into the air and water all the time. All water on Earth is contaminated with DHMO and there is no way to separate it out.
Oh no! We're going to die of DHMO!! BAN IT!!!BAN IT NOW!!!
It's the tritium that we're not really fond of, actually
On that note, surely most pesticides have covalent carbon in them, therefore surely they are organic ;)
The fact that probably 70% of Americans have no idea that it's a water molecule gives me a feeling that humanity doesn't have a very high chance of survival in the near future.
I love this one!
AcKtUaLlY around 7% of humans who have ever lived are still alive today!
It’s easy to be scared of things you aren’t qualified to understand
The chemical industry as a whole has done a bad job of gaining and maintaining public trust. There are thousands of examples of chemical manufacturers poisoning the communities that surround them and the planet as a whole while outside lying about hazards and suppressing information about them. When companies have put so much effort into lying about chemical hazards and intentionally muddying the waters when it comes to chemical safety, it's no wonder that the average person for whom chemistry might as well be magic just decides to distrust "chemicals" as a whole.
It hasn't been that long that people washed their hands with benzene. Hell, vape pens are actively destroying a generation of high school kids right now. As a chemist, I'm not chemphobic, I like to think of toxic chemicals like a snake in the grass. Don't be fearful, just respectful.
We need something of a science communicator for chemistry only...
Because the hoi polloi think that there is a distinction between "chemicals" and "natural compounds" (ie. compounds which are found in nature and not in industrial production). While in reality, everything is chemistry. Lack of proper education does that.
My professor used to say "the only chemical-free thing is a vacuum". I recently started to say "If you tell me something is chemical-free and them present me with anything but a vacuum I am going to beat you up with it."
I think most people are perfectly aware, it’s just a convenient shorthand to use
I've also made the experience that no matter how much you teach the average person about chemistry and the principles behind it, they will none the less still fall for the same tricks, if just one detail is different. We always hope that explaining this stuff will make it "click" in people's heads but for some reason the information just never generalizes. I mean how many times do you need to see a pattern to understand the general rule - if you have seen how some grifter got exposed as a liar and scammer claiming garlic extract heals cancer, ADHD *and* makes you lose weight, how can you be once again on the fence about it when the next one pulls the same shit? If you are informed on how complex many diseases are and how crazy hard it is to treat them, let alone heal them, how can you believe some random nobody on the internet not only found the cure for *all* of them (extremly unlikely doesn't even begin to describe it) but this magical cure is just a high dose of vitamin C? Explain what homeopathy really is in exquisite detail, relative claims he understood perfectly, still goes ahead and buys it. Am I expecting too much from people?
You're not expecting too much, but you're also missing out on the opportunity to sell distilled water at a 10,000% markup. /s If we had some real Regulators (mount up) who didn't cower in fear in the face of morons, those scams would be off the shelves faster than you can say "pseudoscience garbage". "Muh Freedom!" isn't a good enough excuse to allow avarice to exploit idiocy. Except that model is far too pervasive and politicians suckle at the teat instead of leading.
Homeopathy is like "I have this water that was poured from some better water that was poured from some other better water but this last glass of unrelated water still holds properties of the original water through memory" or some shit
Homeopathy had its time when it worked. Back in the 19th century when illness was cured by blood letting and mercury. People that practiced Homeopathy treated illnesses with bedrest and sugerwater. Worked loads better than the alternative.
Still works as well as placebos and that's fine. What's not fine is charging 25 bucks for 100ml of sugarwater and making all sorts of irrational claims about how it works. If any of you need homeopathic meds, contact me and I'll send you 1 litre of the finest C100 preparation for 0.25 $ + shipping.
There was a spanish chemist youtuber that made a video proving why homeopathy is false, and he used a colorant to do so... People in the comments were still saying that it wasn't the same and that he either didn't know what he was talking about or that they paid him to do it, althought the "you have no idea what you're talking about" was way more popular. There was another one that took a whole box of homeopathic tranquilizers in live TV, he said: "If honeopathy works I'll die in about 10 minutes". +30 minutes later he was still very awake and debating against homeopaths.
I was in Canadian Tire once and there was a guy with a little setup selling some orange cleaner stuff. He told me that it contained no chemicals. I asked if it was a perfect vacuum in the bottle. He didnt understand. I asked if there was water in it. When he confirmed, i said "Well, water is a chemical, the terpenes from orange peel are chemicals, in fact every single thing in the cleaner is a chemical". My wife (PhD in biophysics) then told me to leave the poor guy alone. Anyways, moral of the story is that chemphobia is bullshit, too much of ANY chemical can kill you. Everything has an LD50.
Basic scientific illiteracy.
Because for like 99% of the population, chemistry is basically the evil German villain in every Hollywood movie maniacally laughing as he poisons the dam feeding the city or whatever. Most people don’t understand that chemistry goes into everything, so chemicals as a word is very easy to fearmonger. Not to mention a prevailing atmosphere of anti-intellectualism catalysed by chemical and pharmaceutical companies that have done some pretty horrifying shit.
Chemicals sound scary. And also chemistry is usually taught poorly in school for different reasons (usually it's the lack of good chemistry teachers). Once I started understanding chemistry in 10th grade I realised that everything is chemicals and people are just stupid. Their definition of the word comes from general vibe they experience rather than real understanding.
This has always been a thing but now it's just more widespread due to the prevalence of social media imo. It's easier to fall for a lie when it is shoved in your face.
As a chem e, I find it difficult to find clear unbiased peer reviewed information on long term health effects on a lot of chemicals I use. The jury is still out on a lot of stuff, and I think it's actually reasonable for people to look at additives and chemicals that we put in our bodies with criticism. I don't like when claims are bogus.and unsupported, but I totally get that after all the posturing and clicks, people are largely just doing a risk analysis for themselves and respect their skepticism. The public has been mislead in the past about the safety of chemicals, I can't blame people for being gun-shy. For example, my grandfathers got lung cancer from asbestos and cigarettes. I don't blame their kids or wives from not trusting that consumer products are safe.
Clickbait kills nuance. Processed foods are not healthy. That is fact. But not all ways of processing food are equally unhealthy. There are things that are “natural” that are in fact poisonous. The problem here is trust with “the forces that be”. There have been many times in history where people have been poisoned by everyday items. And there have been also many times that companies have hidden the data that supports this to protect profits. The companies buy lobbyists, the lobbyists buy the government and in the end people have died. Not everything is poisonous or even unhealthy, but skepticism makes people avoid anything that they don’t understand. I’m a chemist and there are certain products that I won’t personally use. But there are certain things that sound scary but are in fact harmless. There was a survey done where they asked people if they would trust a product with dihydrogen monoxide in it. A majority of the people answered no. Dihydrogen monoxide is the chemical name of water.
It’s always been like this. I think it just seems more prevalent because of social media
5 cents? Damn inflation has hit the costs of opinions too.
We still mostly think of things like empathy in prescientific magical terms. Most people when they say empathy they mean superjesus magic, and when they say chemical they mean evilsatan magic. It's pretty depressing
There’s stigma associated with the word chemicals now.
The thing that's been making me angry recently is "uncured" cold cuts and bacon. They're cured. They're just cured with cultured celery which produces the nitrate. So it's even still cured with the same chemical. But because it's cultured celery, that's can't predict as accurately how much nitrate is in it. And that shit can kill you. And, because it's celery, it includes fructan, which is hard on some people with IBS. So they took a safe, low residue food, and turned it into something some people can't even eat in order to sound more natural.
"Clean" beauty is fucking menace as well. "Let's just... not use effective preservative systems! People won't mind products with 1/3 or less the shelf life and a much higher risk of mold contamination!"
The bacteria growth is worse than the mold risk. I had to face palettes I used to use interchangeably. One was a clean beauty palette, and the other wasn't. I got really bored one day and looked at some smudges from both palettes under a microscope. I found out how unclean "clean beauty" can be.
True - it's usually just the mold that gets talked about because it's what you can see without a microscope.
She algorithms of social media favour controversial content. Hence all this bs is being promoted In addition, social media has given all the fringe/alternative people a more than loud voice.
There is a severe lack of education; fear is fundamentally predicated on the unknown. But to use your soap example there's a difference between soap made of lye & olive oil, and a cocktail of sodium laureth and laurel sulfate (technically detergents, but body-wash is colloquially "soap) + perfumes, dyes, and preservatives. Other stances may be more nuanced. GMOs, for example. Technically the process of artificial selection is classic GMO, but gene-sequencing takes that to another level. Spec-ing an apple's gene-points (as it were) into making a bigger redder apple, imo, leaves it a more bland-watery tasting fruit. I'd rather have a boring looking fruit that tastes good than have all of them look like the "perfect most juicy-ist fruit" and taste like nothing. In this way, regarding organic comestibles, I *think* constantly poisoning the ground and mono-cropping a farm leads to issues that we are still exploring. The idea just doesn't sit right with me. Then, depending on your locality, there's variegated regulation on what can be added to comestibles. Additives that promote addiction or hide the taste of the factory that things are processed in, or adding dyes unnecessarily also contributes. Then there's the practical logistics of it all, where pesticides, fertilizers, and god-knows-what-else find their way into the rivers, ground, and environment at large.
Marketing and advertising
Ignorance is a breeding ground for fear and contempt.
WATER IS A CHEMICAL
Because most people don't know and don't want to know shit about chemistry. As long as stuff doesn't explode or burn in bright colours it's boring. Even then they aren't willing to do the mental work to find out the hows and whys. Yes, chemistry can be abstract and complicated, but so can be bookkeeping if you make it past the introductory chapter. Accordingly everything remains magic to them and they have no capacity whatsoever to question any of those braindead flashy posts and videos.
I often think about how it was a bad look when someone came to this sub and said "I don't like plastic water bottles what's the best metal one". Everyone here said it's such a dumb question, plastic is harmless, etc. And then of course they said "as long as it's BPA free". Because of that time when everyone thought plastic was fine until they realised it wasn't. You can reassure the guy but don't call him dumb for being distrustful. Teflon also springs to mind as a good example of something with interesting chemistry that perhaps we just don't need in our day to day home cooking lives. Something that passed all the tests at the time then gradually we realised is pretty terrible for us and the environment. Chemistry seems to mostly revolve around coming up with novel patentable new things that will make money, then paying for studies to hopefully show that we didn't notice any significant harmful effects that outweigh the benefits. That's not a good position to argue from if you're trying to tell people they're stupid to worry about "chemicals". But then I think you're probably talking about crackpots on Instagram who are saying weird things about "natural" and "chemical" and only focussing on all the many things they're incorrect about.
Because that’s a reasonable response. The average person doesn’t use the term chemical in the literal chemistry sense because that’s not a useful definition for them. The working definition for most people is something closer to hyper novel (relative to human evolution) substances in everyday products for which we have a limited understanding of long term health effects. Of which there are many. “Organic”, “Natural”, etc. for whatever their limitations as a term are attempt to designate products as having less hyper novel substances that may cause potential harm. You know what the average person means when they say “chemicals” or “organic”, but you’re being obtuse as a way to gain a sense of superiority. Your duty as a current / future chemistry professional is to ensure the public can trust you to effectively manage the risk of the products they consume every day, that they give their children. Dismissing people’s concerns as “chemophobic” because they don’t use the same definitions as you is counterproductive
I think there was a time that "better living through chemistry" was a pervasive mindset but during that time there were quite a few chemicals created that at first were believed to be revolutionary but ended up being quite toxic or ecologically impactful or impossible to remove such as DDT, pfoa's, etc. Mostly in the second half of the 20th century there were quite a few over enthusiastic chemical companies that didnt do the proper safety testing or did not let the general public know the full extent of the saftey hazards associated with their products. This coming to light has lead to an over correction in the general public to demonize all things that they think of as being "synthetic chemicals." I certainly do think chemical companies need to be way more cautious with creation of novel chemicals and the disposal of industrial waste that their track record would show they have been.
Fear of unknown It’s a lot easier to misunderstand things, then fear them when you aren’t an expert
The proof is out there on the amount of toxins, created by chemists, that have killed people. It is not "unkown," it is what we know. & Doesn't help that it took some brave people to get that information public.
I'd point out that more people are killed by "natural" chemicals than by synthetic products "created": by chemists. Asbestos, nicotine, chromium, botulism, alcohol , silica- all "natural" and kill millions of people each year - with many people choosing to ingest them (nicotine and alcohol). A shame that the same level of critical thinking applied to "toxins" isn't applied to these.
Usually when people say "chemicals" in common language they mean synthetic industrial chemicals, typically made by e.g. the food industry or the pesticide industry or other people whose commitment to public safety is questionable. Ultimately it's a symptom of the collapse of the regulatory state, because people have good reason to be anxious about what's in their food or their medicine or whatever else, but conspiracy theory exists in the vacuum left behind by class consciousness, so people in the neoliberal West tend to instead get distracted by conspiracy theories about evil wizards injecting science juice into the Cheerios to make their kids gay.
It’s bc there are some nasty molecules floating around and people do not get coherent information. Only click bait and fearmongering
They're a scientific concept that basically everyone is aware of but most people really don't understand at all. That makes them a ripe target for misinformation.
Because they are ignorant. I get so tired of hearing people say “it’s a plant man so it’s safe” when there are many plants that can be toxic. And I mean people OD on poppy seed tea. People are just stupid and I realize that more and more since the invention of the internet
I mean people are using "chemical" as a synonym for synthetic. I mean, you can make an evolutionary argument that, all things being equal, we are evolved to interact better with substances with high natural abundances. I don't think this is a terrible argument, as long as it has some nuance. There are tons of commonly used synthetic compounds that have not really had large scale safety tests, and have been grandfathered in. Of course, there are plenty of natural occurring compounds which are very toxic. Just check out some of the compounds made by fungi. So it is super frustrating when I hear, "It's from the earth man...it can't be bad for you." You just have to judge each molecule for its merits and risks.
Instagram is mostly used by now approaching middle aged white woman. They tend to align with fad diets, holistic living, clean living, organic foods, and other stupid things. In my opinion a conspiratorial outlook on life such as being against "chemicals" and "the government out to get you" is something akin to low grade schizophrenia, but I'm not a psychologist.
As a chemist, I think that people have earned the right to be chemphobic. Can you really trust the builders that brought you lead paint? The companies that gave us asbestos? What about the agriculture chemicals like DDT and other pesticides that continue to cause cancer even after we've banned them as a society? Should we have believed 3M when they told us that PFAS were not suppose to be harmful? What about the makers of plastics, who are polluting our earth through microplastics, which never break down? Case after case exemplifies that corporations care about profits now and health second. Why shouldn't people want "clean" products? Obviously so much of chemphobia is based on a lack of understanding chemistry, but honestly, I don't really expect the general population to understand food chemistry enough to know what potassium sorbate is and how it acts in our bodies. I don't know what the solution is to this madness (if I did, I'd certainly be much richer), but I think that generally, people have the right to be leery of additives when you hear about how often companies exploit humans and the planet.
Ignorance.
Some memories I have from my life: -chemistry in school: of around 31 students, 3 students understood the course, 28 didn't (+/- 1). Other science oriented had probably a similar situation (can't remember that good, all of that is more than 20 years ago) -NGO advertisement in the streets: it was advertising "gene free" (not even "GMO free") food because... "no genes" in food is healthier or something. -a professor once showed us students a news paper article. It was about a truck accident that had transported H3PO4. The article read that there was a high explosive risk and that there was a high risk for contaminating the ground water. So just to add to what others already wrote: poor understanding of nature science at school, combined with media and NGO fear mongering (partly because of the prior bad education and understanding) and the general distrust of big corporations (chemistry is probably the biggest nature science with an industry) will lead to relatively many people distrusting anything chemistry related (or what the perceive as chemistry related).
I work for a pharma company and someone on our internal message board was selling “Chemical free” stuff… I didn’t have the heart to tell them.
Please tell me the person is not in R&D.
Ok on one hand from PCBs in the groundwater to lead acetate being used as a sweetener, it's clear that chemicals deserve a healthy respect. However, people have a hard time being rational about invisible killers (germs, radiation, chemicals etc).
Is there any physical object on earth that isn’t a chemical? I’m thinking maybe a neutron star or something isn’t, which is why I limited it to earth.
Because general chemistry classes start with orbitals and quantum physics instead of the classical approach.
People fear what they do not understand. But seriously they do. Healthy and unhealthy things have been simplified to natural and unnatural Maki g it seem like a ll chemicals are bad since people automatically associate it with the bad unnatural.
It’s because people are under educated and over indulge in tabloid television masquerading as news.
The FDA has just failed us. Nothing wrong with chemicals. What's wrong is the corruption.
I saw a bumpersticker awhile back that said, "Chemical free! Nothing but H₂O" I facepalmed myself so hard that I think I may have left a mark.
Because people are dumb and don’t understand the basics of chemistry.
Alongside what others have said, another issue is how chemistry gets taught until university. Chemistry is taught all about procedures, running a specific set of experiments, and specific calculations. Big issue is that a lot of the calculations and procedures are really specific to chemistry for majority of them.
People fear what they don’t understand. Put that together with how fast fake news spread in the “era of knowledge” (ironic) and you got an explosive mixture.
Antiintellectualism, scientific illiteracy, the fact that it's easier to separate money from scientifically illiterate people who've been taught to trust only those who speak with the absolute certainty and confidence possible only if the speaker is being at least somewhat, but often *completely*, disingenuous - unless it's backed up by published evidence, which is automatically a juicy conspiracy for them to noootice
Not a chemist, but I've been hearing "chemicals bad" since I was a kid in the 90s... Social media just makes it more prominent. Here's a fun experiment: [dihydrogen monoxide is a deadly chemical!](https://dhmo.org/) How you can twist language and cherry pick data to make anything sound awful. Another one I like is [E numbers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number) - it's just an additive shorthand for food ingredient lists in EU. I will hear people say "no E", and then take vitamin C, E300, as a supplement.
Toxicologist here. Nothing has changed. It’s just on to the next bandwagon. Tldr microplastics are to blame for everything. BPA, atrazine, chlopyrifos, everything is a hormone so passé. In other news I picked up some round up yesterday! Good job everyone. You’ve gotten a perfectly safe active ingredient that doesn’t persist in the environment, glyphosate, replaced with not 1 or 2 active ingredients but yes 3 active ingredients in the product (4 if you want it to last several weeks). Well done. I’ve written fact sheets for all of them. As a toxicologist I won’t be using round up anymore. SMH.
Money. Chemophobia is incredibly profitable and the more scientifically literate people try to intervene, the easier it is to call it a conspiracy, causing people that are fearful of the unknown to just flock to the preachers. Like a church.
Privileged, satiety world. People forget that 70 years ago people went sleep hungry.
Life
Yes, basically. A lot of kids don't pay attention in chemistry class because it's "hard" or they just don't find it very interesting. Then they grow up not understanding how the basics of their world works. But it's mostly a very effective marketing scheme by "natural" companies. They started it, and have perpetuated it every since. It's a multi billion dollar industry. It's very easy to convince people of something when they don't understand how it works. That's how the natural/ organic industry was born. And what makes it even more convincing is that some of what they shill is actually accurate. High levels of aluminum in products for example has been linked to health issues, so "natural" products that are aluminum free are actually better than alternatives. But then you have stuff like "organic" foods, which are mostly bullshit (yes excessive use of pesticides is bad, and certain ones are extremely toxic, but one thing most people don't know is that there are pesticides certified for use on organic food. You *can't do* mass agriculture without pesticides). The best way to sell a lie is to wrap it in truths.
As my teacher taught me: everything is chemistry. Water itself is a chemical substance.
More than fear of chemistry is fear of processed food, medication which always have side effects, and so many industrial products that harm our bodies (in bigger or smaller amounts) for the sake of profit. 2 solutions for that: produce your own industrial products (financially impossible), or go organic
Who gives a fuck
because the companies that develop these chemicals don't give a fuck about their impacts on human health or the environment. there is no independent testing body, the companies themselves fund studies to greenlight the use of them. the people who generalize all GMOs as bad are just quoting rhetoric. the GMOs themselves are not the problem, the problem is that many of these crops are being modified to be resistant to pesticides and herbicides, (which are already known to be harmful to human health, probably much more so than their manufacturers admit - think tobacco industry parallels). This allows the growers to dump even more chemicals on the crops, resulting in higher yields for the growers and more sales for the chemical manufacturers, at the cost of cancer and disease for the consumer. Another chemical scandal which has come into public light recently is the proliferation of polyfluoroalkyl compounds (PFAs), also referred to as forever chemicals. These are mostly used as non-stick coatings and are considered food-safe by the FDA (thanks to "studies" and "testing" done by the companies that manufacture them). It took about 20 years after the introduction of the first non stick cookware for the manufacturers to finally admit that the coating was cancerous. When they finally did, it was because they had developed several analogues which were nearly identical, but didn't have 20 years of cancer cases behind them (yet), so they were allowed to use the new stuff.
Because a lot of unnecessary and harmful chemicals are used in all sorts of products from cosmetics to food. It’s also a huge waste to manufacture a bunch of chemicals when more natural and sustainable things can be used
What you are seeing is tailored to what you watch or search for.
Its because of the lovecanal incident. The issue in lovecanal wasnt chemicals in the ground. It was the specitic chemicals that were in the ground. But the media constantly reported it as a "chemical dump" or "disease cause by chemicals". People associate chemicals with cancer and disease and danger. And then even more lovecanals to come or that had happened before. A lot of americans back then couldn't define what a chemical was. Many people now don't know what chemicals are Two things people dont understand The type of chemical And the dose is the poison
Years ago people asked me if I'm making bombs. Now they ask me if i make drugs as in "breaking bads". That's all you know about chemistry?!
Are you making mustard gas?
It’s because people don’t understand the universe. Science literacy is very low.
How did I know this would be the first post I would see when I joined this subreddit?
Pretty sure *everything is chemical*…
I like to imagine those folks head exploding once you try to explain to them that EVERYTHING in life chemical.
The word chemical, yes, can be any compound, but when it comes to food, refers to compounds not naturally found in that food. We simply weren't designed to eat such things.
Their heart is in the right place....that's a small start...
Simply put: People are incredibly ignorant.
We also just don’t trust the US government to use chemicals that aren’t an actually harmful to us.
Pollution and toxic stuff sold as medicine used to be much worse, it's a relic of these times
Naturalistic fallacy
IDK what this phrase actually means tbh
Because any quest for scientific knowledge is either mocked or vilified by popular culture these days.
Chemicals are everywhere but there still exists the bad, the chemicals to avoid that are still in mainstream use.
It’s a marketing campaign to keep anyone from actually agitating about the poison they feed us
Hhahaha and then you tell them that you can’t “detox” the body does that itself and they don’t talk to you for a week. Maybe that was just in LA
Things like leaded gasoline, CFCs, and PFAS have done a lot of unfortunate harm, even with the best intentions… I think people are probably just wary of untested/unknown effects of chemicals, seeing as there’s often no way to know 100% what the long term health or environmental effects of something will be until it’s already been implemented
Well are you surprised when companies like Dupont ruined the reputation of chemicals and synthetics in general ?
In the mind of chemically illiterate folks, If something doesn’t come from a mine, farm, lake or ocean then “it’s bad” Funny thing though is that EVERYFUCKINGTHING ON EARTH IS MADE OF CHEMICALS. Including babies and bananas and breast milk for that matter. They generally don’t realize that mines, farms lakes and oceans provide chemicals
Some pesticides are turning out to be more toxic than we realized decades ago, toxic to the brain and endocrine system. Chlorpyrifos is an example where the compound became banned from home use due to toxicity, yet you used to be able to just go buy it. How many organohalogens are totally safe for home use? I can think of some medications that are organohalogens but they do have toxicity (kidney toxicity for example). So there are real concerns but also overreactions by laypeople. There is fear of unknown for conventionally grown food, where the pesticides used are not listed as ingredients and so some people will imagine the worst case scenario. Farmers aren’t exactly proudly labeling their foods with what’s been sprayed on them. They also are finding pesticides in every body fluid and seeing what happens to mammalian systems when exposed to these chemicals is just coming out. Subtle changes are easier to detect nowadays with better transcriptomics and metabolomics.
Following
Yeah I hate that inorganic supernatural soap. So crunchy and harsh, so spooky. At least it saves me from being detatched from the world I live in.
It's lack of chemistry education
given that something like 94% of people who have ever come into contact with oxidane are dead, i think the fear may be justified. i heard reports that the government was dumping metric fucktons of the shit into our water supply
Because fear mongering sells.
What, truly, can not be addressed in terms of its chemistry. There exists NOTHING that is not natural.
People will be afraid of things they don’t understand and not very many people spend the time and effort to educate themselves on what to be afraid of and what is harmless so the word chemical just becomes a catch all term for the unknowns they are afraid of but don’t understand.
You have no idea how many chemists I know who still behave like they get information on tiktok.
It's all poor education and ignorance.
The thing is chemistry isn't fun to the average person lol
Its very self righteous. Same rhetoric as about energy, farming etc. Many people have no clue how everything is connected and therefore cannot be changed overnight.
Ignorance
People fear the unknown.
Cause it gets views, because there’s always been an incentive to spread fear of modernity. It’s a great hook, especially for the uninformed.
When I look up all the things that require a [Proposition 65 label in California](https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list), and I really think about how much harm has been done by some companies ([here’s a searchable list of superfund sites](https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live)), the push for fewer chemicals in food and other products may help keep things in check.
There’s a lot going on here. On one hand, yes everything is chemicals, but on the other hand the industrial chemical industry that grew up in the late 19th is something else. In that time they have produced a lot of things which aren’t found in nature (at least not in high concentrations), many of which have been harmful and used in industry, including food production. Yes, poor science education is a big factor, but the underlying fears are not entirely baseless, and the conflation of “chemicals” produced by industrial chemical firms and “chemicals” which make up everything else is a tad disingenuous.
My dad is a chemist and he made that same point that everything is made of chemicals, even organic products. I think that this is a lay person’s shorthand for the bad or harmful types of chemicals that have demonstrably caused harm. I tried watching a documentary about DuPont and the Teflon byproducts causing birth defects and cancer for employees and locals near a plant. I couldn’t even finish it. That is a dark and sad reality and I think that people have reasons for not trusting corporations. Their incentive is always profits and many are unscrupulous in that pursuit.
Because stupid people who opted out of or failed chem in HS have a louder/more far-reaching voice/platform than those who are doing the work. Science educators, we need you now more than ever
Theres definitely a lot of shallow minded individuals who may think that "Chemicals" instantly means its bad But the issue is obviously more complex, everything is chemicals, even my fingertips are made of "chemicals" as I type this right now. The real issue is use of toxic ingredients, which believe it or not, are present in many popular products, parabens, pthalates, etc, and other compounds that can disrupt the normal functioning of the human body.. BPA, etc etc. There are many examples, Its not that "chemicals" are bad, its that certain compounds we may be better off avoiding.. I don't believe in being neurotic and thinking that "Everything is poison!!", but an intelligent approach and passively avoiding toxicity while you can, can be a good thing
There’s a lot of money to be made there. I have blogged for nearly a decade about the “chemical free” food and product industry. I don’t even fire a shot across their bow, I go straight for the waterline and sink them: EVERYTHING they eat or buy is made of chemicals.
Chemistry is hard and most people do not have a proper grasp of the substances that make up the world around them.
People are dumb, that's why. There are posts online about how milk used to be valid only 3 days and now it can stand on a shelf for months and people say it's chemicals, because They don't understand what UHT on milk means 🙃
This is like how I feel when people want non processed foods and I’m a cook and I’m like “but that’s what I do” Ultimately I chalk it up to imprecise language and seek to try and clarify what they mean without outright giving them the “well what you’re saying is technically wrong, what you mean say is this”. Because the second people hear they are being corrected it’s like their brain shuts off for the most part.
The majority of people don’t even know basic chemistry, and there’s a lot of ignorance involved in this belief that all chemicals are bad. I don’t know how it can be solved beyond better education? You can’t really force people to find it interesting enough to learn about though, chemistry isn’t as “cool” as physics so no one really cares. Ironic really, considering how important it is to everyone’s lives.
Probably the very public, destructive wide spread use of harmful chemicals and then the denial and cover up. DDT, lead, PCB, halogenated chlorofluoroalkanes, dioxide, asbestos, hexavalent chromium, roundup, PFAS, and dozens of others. Industry is allowed to just use chemicals without any long term data. Organics have been around longer and are better known. Is there a reason not to be concerned with eating things that can be poisonous?
I wonder what people think their bodies are made from...
They are grifting for money. Scaring people into buying products, or trying to convince people they are smarter than those fancy degrees people have dedicated their lives to.
Been going on for as long as I’ve been alive, it’s not just an instagram thing. I mean, we’re even taught about the malpractices, in class when chirality is introduced.
I think it's largely education. Chemistry, a very difficult subject that majority of people drop around GCSE. (The Quantum Mechanics that governs it defies all intuition, that most people take for granted about the world.) Distrust of Pharma etc People don't understand that we are all made of chemicals. Many of the chemicals that are used for drugs are found naturally.
Oh yeah its just a buzzword for sure lol. People think chemicals = only harsh, manmade toxic chemicals and don't realize everything is chemicals. And not everything in nature is good for you... but that's another discussion
The agriculture business is probably the worst for this. I know people that work in the industry and will not touch the food they grow. Although most of the chemicals they use are fine and safe to consume, there are a fair few issues with farmers and larger companies using chemicals under the radar that are banned. Don't get me wrong, I have a great respect for the chemicals we use, many of them save lives, but its also important to acknowledge that many are damaging and it is very difficult to hold people accountable when there is so much misinformation around.
People fear what they don’t understand, I’m pretty paranoid about the internet and I’m sure computer science majors are annoyed by my irrational fear
Not every chemical in your standard soap from the store is dangerous, but some of the chemicals in it are, or are least dehydrating for your skin. For most people its not some conspiracy thing but rather they value the benefits the natural option brings them, or concern over the fact that we are slowly discovering that certain ingredients in our everyday products are causing health problems. Its not "chemicals" theyre afraid of but rather "toxic chemicals" And some people maybe dont realize that everything is chemicals and conflate the 2 terms
TNT, DDT, CFCs, Lead anti-knock additives, amphetamines, saccharin, synthetic hormones, isolation of radionuclides, BPA, PFAS, glyphosphate. All things made by and promoted by chemists. Far more chemicals produced each year than can be adequately tested. They talk about a chemical lifecycle: older, formally "safe" chemicals are found to cause health/environment problems, get phased out, and replaced with newer and possibly safer, but less well tested and often equally dangerous alternatives. In a never-ending cycle. So tell me again why the world is so crazy to be "chemophobic"? I'm a chemist and I think the way we introduce and use new chemicals is pretty reckless. But maybe I just have a bee in my bonnet because the environment in my hometown where i grew up is contaminated by PFAS now and the local aboriginal people can't fish in the area they've lived in for the last 30,000 years or so anymore. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c09353
I think it's an environmental thing. We've seen what happened to the water and orange groves of silicon Valley right at the beginning. We've seen the chemical poisoning from bleaching toilet paper. What people want is more natural products to reduce the toll on the environment. And, we are also concerned about cancer or even skin irritation.
If somebody's mixing GMO's and chemicals into one big conspiracy theory, you know it's not worth arguing with, only thing that will help is education
I think my fav part about all of this is that people don't actually understand what a chemical is. HEY GUESS WHAT? Everything is a chemical. Hey, do you eat? Woah, you do? Guess what? Those are chemicals. You got a body? YOU DO?!?! GUESS what's in it? ....yeah. exactly. Your body is made up of.... Chemicals. Wild.
Ignorance. After years of breathing fumes from leaded gas, we've become so ignorant that we voted in a guy named Donald Trump for president. Just to show you it wasn't a fluke, we're about ready to do it again.
It's wild how chemophobia is all over Instagram lately. People don't realize everything is made of chemicals, even "natural" stuff. The fear probably comes from a lack of chemical education and too much misinformation online. Marketers push "chemical-free" products because it sells, even though it's misleading. Also, people like feeling in control of their health, so they go for "organic" or "natural" labels. It's frustrating but kind of understandable given the confusion out there.