I support ice cream and disagree that the Food and Drug Administration should prohibit all ice cream. Keep your hands away from my spoon, FDA!
Okay, the FDA doesn’t want to ban ice cream. It just wants the power to do so. It wants the power to define substances like dioxin as health threats at any level of concentration whatever. And guess what. There’s dioxin in ice cream. Steven Milloy, with the Cato Institute, reports that a few years ago FDA issued an alarmist reassessment of dioxin. Congress asked FDA to get an independent scientific assessment of its conclusions, but the agency has yet to do so. Milloy thinks it’s because they know their “finding” wouldn’t survive that evaluation. “Left to its own devices,” says Milloy, “the EPA might set a limit 1,000 times lower than [existing standards].
It’s no wonder Congress was skeptical. . . .” The EPA wants to say that any level of dioxin, no matter how far below the current threshold, is potentially cancerous. Milloy points out that new super-stringent standards would give the agency “potentially unlimited regulatory authority over any source of dioxin emissions.”
Like many chemicals, dioxin exists in nature as well in human technology. And Milloy notes that just one serving of “Ben & Jerry’s ice cream [contains] about 2,000 times the amount of dioxin that the EPA claims is safe . . .” There’s dioxin in ice cream. Now you know. But you’ll keep eating ice cream. Why am I not surprised?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.