Debunking Junk Science: Kitchen Utensil Toxin Claims Show Experts Aren’t Always Right

Remember when a team of scientists determined with certainty that black plastic kitchen utensils could be hazardous to our health?

This peer-reviewed study sparked a flurry of alarming headlines regarding the presence of unsafe levels of BDE-209, a flame retardant linked to cancer, in everyday cooking items.

But hold on to your horses: The folks at Toxic-Free Future and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who conducted this research have now confessed that they were utterly mistaken.

This wasn’t some complex statistical error or a glitch in the computational biology software they used.

Nope: It turns out they couldn’t even handle third-grade multiplication.

To illustrate: The safe daily limit for BDE is 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight; assuming a body weight of 60kg, their calculations suggested a safe dose of 42,000 nanograms — alarmingly close to the unsafe daily dose of 34,700 from those notorious black plastic utensils.

However, 7,000 times 60 is not 42,000, but rather 420,000. Thus, what was deemed a “worryingly high” level of BDE is, in fact, completely negligible.

They were off by an entire order of magnitude.

It’s troubling enough that the three — yes, three! — researchers responsible for this study, Megan Liu, Erika Schreder, and Sicco Brandsma, managed to make such a glaring error.

Brandsma is affiliated with a prominent European university, while both Schreder and Liu hold degrees in molecular biology.

In some ways, it’s even worse than outright fraud.

These highly qualified individuals didn’t concoct a complex ruse; they stumbled over fundamental arithmetic.

Even more concerning is that this shoddy research made it through peer review, meaning a number of other “scientists” approved it without spotting this colossal blunder.

The past couple of years have witnessed a general decline in academic credibility, plagued by repeated instances of plagiarism and manipulated data, alongside a “replication crisis” that implies many social science “findings” may be unreliable.

So, how much other sensationalist “science” is actually pseudoscientific nonsense produced by supposed experts? One can’t help but suspect it’s a lot.