As you know, some 20 squillion products are being pulled off the shelves as a result of the Sudan 1 colourant being found in a batch of chili powder. A Place to Stand gives us the calculation of the danger:
How do they determine if a material is carcinogenic. Well basically
they force feed a solid diet of the material to rats for years at about
5,000 times what you & I could manage to eat.
This stuff formed only a part of the chili powder – lets be generous & say 10%.
Worcester sauce is not pure chili powder or anything like it – lets say 1%.
The sauce is only a small taster of most most of these products – I’d say 1% would be high.
So
the amount of this "poison" is 1/5000 X 1/10 X 1/100 X 1/100 = 1 part
in 500 million of what sometimes causes cancer in rats. By the theory
that there is no lower level on poisons that might mean 1 death in 500
million or 1 tenth of person here. In fact that is a rather silly
political theory with no evidence behind it – the older theory is that
"the dose makes the poison" which is fairly obviously true since many
trace elements we need to survive are dangerous in large quantities.
As he points out, believing that there is any serious danger in this particular case is akin to believing in homeopathy. Quite nuts.
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