Food for thought:

The mind is a terrible thing

by Hal Brown

"By and large, in fact, the news from the CR study is good, not bad -- fresh produce is safer than it appears to be, and may be rapidly getting safer." Quackwatch

"Psychologists have studied several perceptual factors that help explain how reasonable people can conclude that they have suffered toxic exposures and injuries when they have not. These include social proof, repeated affirmations, appeals to authority, vividness, confusion of inverse probabilities, confusion techniques, and distraction techniques." Quackwatch.

6/25/99 Coke's problems in Belgium, after scientific analysis, has been determined to not to have constituted any risk to public health. (1) In one instance, an off odor was due to defective carbon dioxide used in the carbonation process, and in the other, and odor on the containers was due to a wood preservative that had adhered to the bottom of some bottles or cans. Smell is one of the most potent, and the most evocative, of all human senses. An odor perceived as foul can trigger intense physical and psychological reactions. That such an odor caused 200 people out of thousands to become nauseous and dizzy is not surprising. Coke's public announcements mention "current public sensitivities to food safety issues" and state: "we continue to work around the clock to develop the additional data requested for satisfactory assurance." (2) Companies can loose customer loyalty if they don't  respond honestly and quickly to such scares, whether or not they represent a real health hazard. (3) Related stories: Salmonella in orange juice |  Dioxin in pigs |  Coca-cola pulls mold contaminated mineral water .

The Coke example represents the psychosocial phenomenon of "contagion", or the harsher term, "mass hysteria", which is well documented in scientific and lay literature. From the classic case study of the handful of children at the sports event who started a chain reaction of vomiting when they threw up after eating hot dogs, to the more recent epidemic of "sick buildings", we can see a cautionary note for all those in the food industry.

Whether it's consternation over residual agrochemical levels on fruit, as covered in Consumer's Reports "How safe is our produce?" [Consumer Reports 64(3):28-31, 1999], and critiqued on the web's health and science watchdog site Quackwatch, or environmental concerns, people are still at the mercy of their own psychology. It doesn't take much for the body to respond to barely conscious fears with physical symptoms.

In the great cranberry cancer scare of the fifties, or the Alar scare of the 1980's, nobody got sick because cancer doesn't hit overnight with symptoms. In the Tylenol cyanide poisoning case, few if any people got sick from untainted Tylenol because everyone knew that the only symptom following ingestion would be sudden death. However, when the symptoms aren't immediately life threatening and are dramatic, the power of suggestion can take over and hundreds or thousands of level headed people may succumb finding themselves suffering the range of gastrointestinal (g-i) distress.

If you need any proof as to how sensitive the g-i system is to psychological suggestion, think about how quickly you can become nauseated at the sight of something you find disgusting or upsetting. Some people can't even listen to gross stories at dinner time without this reaction. Even physicians who may have specialties in areas other than psychosomatic medicine, like the expert on gastroenteritis, Dr. Veronique Verdonck, dismiss the power of the mind to cause severe symptoms. She treated some of the first victims and thought the patients were so sick they couldn't be suffering a psychosomatic reaction caused by contagion from the first student who became violently ill an hour after drinking the Coke.(4)

If you want to learn more about how the human psyche can lead to food product and environmental scares read about Environment Scares and propaganda, also in Quackwatch.

Home