 Welcome to our first broadcast of Thinking Out Loud, 30 minutes of thought-provoking discussion with UW-Cheboygan faculty. I'm Jackie Joseph Silverstein, the host of today's show, and the Dean of UW-Cheboygan. Thinking Out Loud will provide you with the opportunity to get to know some of our faculty, who not only share their knowledge and passion for their fields with our students, but who are always generating new ways of looking at and thinking about the themes that run through their fields. During this series, they'll share with you some of their ideas and their experience in a way that we hope will engage you and provide you with food for further thought. For our first broadcast, I'm happy to introduce Professor James Cabral, who many of you probably already know for his cool chemistry presentations that he does each year for young people in our local community. James is starting his fifth year at UW-Cheboygan, where he works to make chemistry interesting and accessible to our students. By all accounts, he's a wizard at that. James received his PhD at the University of Minnesota, where he carried out research on the biosynthesis of a molecule that was thought to be an anti-tumor agent. Today, James is going to talk about the myths and meaning of being chemical-free. I know you'll find his talk to be thought-provoking and informative. But James, welcome. Thank you very much. James, before we delve into the ideas and themes around your talk, I think our audience might like to hear a little bit more about you. How did you get into chemistry and interested in chemistry? It's an area that I know lots of students try to avoid. They're afraid of chemistry. I was always interested in math, but I was lucky enough to get, when I got to high school, that I had some very dynamic chemistry teachers. The first one was General Science, and he was the one who introduced me to the periodic table, which I had some fun memorizing. A very nerdy thing for a ninth grader, but I enjoyed it. And then my chemistry teacher, she was wonderful. And she gave me the ability to sort of explore past what we were doing from the book. And then I took another chemistry course with her the next year. So I really felt connected to the material. And again, once I got to college, I had a great teacher in organic chemistry, and that's how I chose organic chemistry as my focus all the way through graduate school. I see. Could you tell people what organic chemistry is? So this will be part of the talk a little bit later, but organic chemistry is specifically focused on molecules that contain the element of carbon. So anything that contains carbon is considered an organic molecule. Now I know that's a little bit different than how organic is used, but I'll get to that a little bit later. Okay, so why don't you get started? Well, certainly. One of the most important things that I think as a teacher in the sciences is to connect the material that I'm talking about in my general chemistry and organic chemistry courses, the things that are happening outside of the classroom. And as we know, this is a very social media internet-based culture these days. So I'm always on Facebook. I'm always on the internet. I'm doing Google searches, sometimes for leisure, sometimes for class. And one of the things that I'm always looking for is what is the kind of information that's out there that relates to the sciences and chemistry in particular? So one of the things that I found recently was a graphic that is titled Ten Tips on Becoming Chemical-Free. Now you have probably seen chemical-free products available on sale, TV commercials, internet commercials, internet advertisements, but what does that really mean to be chemical-free? Is it something that you can actually be? Or is it a lifestyle choice? Is it a consumer choice? And I'll get into that in a little bit. So ten tips on becoming chemical-free. I won't go through all of them, but I'll go through a few. Buy clothing made of organic fibers or clothing not treated with formaldehyde or other toxic chemicals. Throw that cologne and perfume out. You smell fine. So there's a little bit of humor in this. And then avoid petroleum products wherever possible. And one of my favorites on this list is Clean House with Uncented Natural Cleaners Baking Soda Worse Grape. Now, what is a chemical? That's one of the most important things that gets back to this term that we're using. A chemical is any substance that contains atoms connected through chemical bonds. So that's the technical term. That's what I teach my students every year. All chemicals are matter, and all matter makes up space. So if you can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, it's a chemical. So going back to chemical-free, specifically the Clean House with Uncented Natural Cleaners Baking Soda Worse Grape. Baking Soda is a chemical. So the idea of what this graphic is telling you is try to use as few chemicals as possible. But just by the nature of science, by the nature of the world, by the nature of our universe, it is impossible to be chemical-free. So what does the chemical-free terminology really mean? Well, let's talk a little bit more about chemicals. Regardless of the origin of the chemical, natural or unsynthetic, if it's isolated from a plant or it's synthesized in a lab and mass produced, it's still a chemical. The chemical make-up of vitamin C, if you isolate it from a leafy vegetable or you isolate it from the lab, vitamin C, it's the same chemical regardless of where you get it from. One of the problems with that is that isolation is not necessarily cost-effective. If you get that material from a lab, sometimes it's a lot cheaper, and that's how we can get our vitamin supplements. So we're talking about everything that takes up space as a chemical. So that means that even if you're pouring water over your plants, you're still using a chemical. So what that ultimately means is that chemical-free is a marketing device. Now, I already talked about in the introduction the word organic, and I said that organic means carbon, carbon-based materials. We are organic organisms. If you think about organism and organic, it's from the same source, it basically means life. So we're talking about materials that traditionally have been incorporated into living organisms. That idea has been extended to all things that contain carbon. But if you look at a lot of products that are out in the market, if you go to your local farmers markets, you can see the word organic in a lot of places. So if you go to the USDA website, you can get their definition. Organic is a labeling term that indicates that the food or other agricultural product has been produced through approved methods. These methods integrate cultural, biological and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Synthetic fertilizers, sewage, sludge, irradiation, and genetic engineering may not be used. So again, it is a term, I would still consider it a marketing term, but it has now been adopted by the USDA in order to make a consistent labeling process. So there's other related terminologies that come into contact with organic. Free range, cage-free, natural, grass-fed, pasture-raised, and humane. And you can see how these all connect into, especially for us in Wisconsin, a lot of farming process, harvesting meats, milk, eggs, and related consumer products. But I want to go back to one of those terms, and that's natural. Though there is some regulation by the USDA for the products that you may buy, specifically the ones that you can buy in stores, not necessarily so much the ones that you get at the local farmers markets, but natural is sort of a catch-all term. So if you think about going back to something I already mentioned, vitamin C, vitamin C is a natural chemical. Regardless of whether or not you get it from one source to the other, as I said, it is still considered a natural chemical because it exists in nature. Now, that does not mean that the vitamin C that you get in one material or another that you can buy is necessarily isolated from a natural source. The only way that you can determine that is to say, go to that company's website and find out if they isolate it, they may not tell you, but they can still put natural on their labeling just because it is technically a natural product. So the idea is that companies will use this term to sell a product. They will use organic, they will use natural, and there isn't a lot of regulation. The USDA does regulate mass-produced materials that are presumed to be organic, but the USDA and the FDA have only limited resources for the research into these products. So they can do a little bit, but they can't do everything in terms of determining what is natural, what is organic. So you have to do a lot of that research on your own, and that brings up another issue, websites, blogs. The internet as a whole is an amazing place. So much information that you have at your fingertips. But that means that anyone can put that information out there, put any information out there, and you have to be very careful about what the source of that material is. So websites, organic excellence, made from earth, earth easy. And again, they're using terms like organic and pure and holistic and natural. But a lot of these websites, if they're not selling a product, they're providing you information. There's no regulation about the information that you're giving you. So some of it could be used to sell a product. Some of it may be based on anecdotal evidence, experience, but you still have to take it with a grain of salt. There's nothing to say that someone is lying to you about the information, lying to you about the results of some experiment they may have done, or some experience they may have had with the product. And sometimes when we're talking about chemicals, it'll work in one situation and it won't work in another situation. So there are other marketing devices that even the larger companies out there will use. And again, you have to be really on your guard. One that I always like to use in class is Isoactive. And I won't give the name of the toothpaste that uses it, but it's a toothpaste company that uses the phrase Isoactive and they use it on the toothpaste tubes themselves. It sounds chemical. It sounds scientific, but it's not a thing. There's nothing out there that I know of based on my research for Isoactive. It is just a marketing tool. Then you have supplements that will have names that are chemicals sounding like Enzite and Hydroxycut. And if you think about looking at that packaging, go to Enzite. You will be able to see pictures if you do a Google search for Enzite of a blue pill that looks like it's been put in packaging just like a pharmaceutical drug. And you really have no idea unless you look at the fine print and it says that this material is not FDA approved. It is not going to diagnose or treat any disease. It is just a supplement. And one of the very important things about supplements, and I could go for another half an hour about this, is that supplements generally are not regulated by the government. There are a couple of companies, private companies out there that do quality control on certain supplements, but usually those are related to vitamin supplements and not other diet-related supplements. Supplements that are supposed to treat a rectile dysfunction, diet, weight gain, things like that. So you have to be extremely careful when you're trying to get materials from the internet, from vitamin supplement sources, because you never know the quality of the material. You never know if there's going to be some material in there that you could have an adverse reaction to or something that's really overtly dangerous. Ultimately, it comes down to why do consumers purchase these products, purchase organic natural products? Well, it's a culture now. It's the idea that a lot of synthetic chemicals are bad for us, and that's very true. And one of the examples these days is BPA. You'll see stickers for BPA-free. It's an endocrine mimic, which means that it can mimic a lot of hormones like testosterone and estrogen and cause premature maturity. That has now been removed from a lot of plastic bottles, although it's still out there in the lining of aluminum cans and a lot of other uses. But what these companies tend to take advantage of is an ignorance of science for the general public. People who want a quick fix, who just want to buy a product and use it, whether they're adding a chemical or they're taking out the chemicals and putting organic natural, it's taking advantage of a consumer to research ahead of time. Again, going back to organic and natural, consumers want to avoid processed foods these days. So you're going to see no preservatives. You're going to see natural organic. You're going to see that a lot, a lot more. And of course, if you have shopped for these products, you can see that there's going to be a price increase. So it's expensive to be organic. It's expensive to do natural. It's not necessarily a negative. There are a lot of preservatives and synthetic chemicals out there a little bit goes a long way in terms of dyes. And so you're not getting a lot of that material, but a lot of salt, a lot of sugar, a lot of high fructose corn syrup. There's a lot of research pro and con. I'm not going to go into that today. But again, be knowledgeable about what you're buying. It's all about this push to lead a healthier lifestyle. And so some companies will provide you a great product at a little bit of extra price and you can count on getting the kind of material that you want. Other companies will be out there selling you junk and putting a name on it just to make a profit. So what can you do? Well, the internet is a great resource for better or for worse. Don't take one person, one website, one blog's word as law. If you're looking up a specific product, go to multiple places, talk to multiple people, try a few products, don't spend a lot of money before you find something that works for you. Look into the source of the product. If you're looking at local farm fed, grass fed beef, talk to the farmer who is raising that beef and see what their actual process is, how they're raising it, what they're feeding it. You get a better idea of what you're getting. And then if it's a process, if it's a boxed or bottled or canned product, what is the company doing? How are they processing it? Are they using no preservatives? Get an idea of what's on that ingredients list. Ingredients list, and this is one of the reasons why I became so interested in science that I didn't mention before, because I wanted to know what those compounds were. Looking at the cereal box and what was sodium nitrate. What was sodium beds away? What does it do? What does it mean? And a lot of that information is out there. If you go to Wikipedia, a website that I use for scientific information all the time, you can at very least get the basics, the numbers, the physical properties, what it's used for. And a lot of those wikis actually tell you the biological implications of some of those materials. But you could always go to the USDA website, the FDA website. You could always talk to at your local university, a professor of chemistry, a professor of biology. You can talk to a personal physician. You can talk to a dietitian. So there's a lot of resources out there for getting more information about what you're eating, what you're taking as a supplement. Or just general consumer products. We can go into shampoos and all the other hygiene products. You could go into cleaning products. But the idea is educate yourself. There's a lot of material out there. You can figure things out on your own as long as you don't take one person's word for it. Talk to multiple people, go to multiple websites. Get as much information you can and make an educated decision on your consumer choices. So I could talk for a lot more about this. And maybe we will in future talks. But one of the things that I encourage you to do, my email is on the University of Wisconsin-Shaboyan website. I'm happy to answer questions. I am not an expert. I'm very passionate about scientific literacy and scientific education. So if I can point you in the right direction, I would very least be glad to do so. Thank you. Thanks, James. That was really interesting. And I think an overriding theme I'm hearing about here is something that's really near and dear to my heart, which is the importance of being scientifically literate. And there's another kind of literacy involved here too. And that's technological literacy as well. So to give a few more examples of things that drive you crazy, that we really could do a better job educating ourselves about so that we can make appropriate decisions for our own lives, how we live, the decisions we make when we go to the doctors, those kinds of things. Well, there's just an inundation these days of scientific or pseudo-scientific information along with technology. So not only do we have all of this coming at us, all of these products, and more and more and more products, but now we have this technology coming along with it. The ability to get more and look up more. But it's also about the quickness of getting that information because you can type in a Google search for a supplement and the first 10, 20, 50 websites will be for quick-made websites made by that company to try to give you information that's fake. You know, say, this is a miracle cure for this and you go to a website and it would take you, if you did a Google search, going through to, say, the fourth or fifth page to actually find something that is objectively critical of that supplement. And one of the things that has come across in scientific circles is the CSI effect. And while that specifically discusses, you know, crime scene investigation and be able to solve crimes in an hour and having all this information and glamorous people and 10 people working on individual crimes, it doesn't really work like that. What is sort of a lead into trying to get as much information as short of the amount of time as possible. Spoon feeding slowly doesn't really happen anymore. It's all about what you can grab and what you can put into your brain and hopefully it's the correct information and oftentimes it's not. You know, and that's the way our students that we get at the university are getting their information these days. They have cell phones, they have iPads, they have their laptops, they know how to do Google searches, they know how to use the Internet, they want their texting and they want their simple calls to get everything very quickly, very fast. So as a teacher, you have to understand that and try to get them the right information as fast as you can rather than, you know, preventing them from getting the wrong information as fast as they can. So we have the luxury or our students have the luxury of being taught some of these things and we are producing scientifically literate literate generation, at least here in Sheboygan we are at UW Sheboygan. You know, there are many people out there who never took a biology course. Maybe they took one in high school and maybe that was a long, long time ago. So there are a lot of things, it's easy to mislead people who haven't had the opportunity to have some of those science courses. What kinds of things can they do? You gave some really good advice specifically about kinds of websites to look at, kinds of questions to ask yourself. But what are some of the other things that these people can do to try to educate themselves? I think the first thing is to anytime you get something that sounds scientific is asked, well, is it too good to be true? You know, because as medicated as we are as a culture there's a lot of good quick fixes out there and there's a lot of quick fixes out there that are too good to be true. So the first thing is don't make a rash judgment before buying a product, regardless of what that product is. Because a lot of things out there have a lot of flashing lights, bright graphics telling you this is going to work. But ultimately, everyone is different. Every situation is different. So certain compound may not work the same way for multiple people. So the idea is before buying something specifically spent a lot of money is go to any resource you can and try to make that resource as connected as possible to scientific research. You know, there are websites out there that are connected to primary literature. You could go to professionals, there are professionals out there like physicians and professors and dieticians who can give you information even if they can't figure it out right away. They at least know where to go with information that is based on scientific research. So it can be very difficult these days to find that on your own. And a lot of, for primary literature for those studies that you keep hearing about on the news that this study found that 55% of people did this. The general public doesn't always have access to but there are people around that do have access to we have access to that here at the university. So if you can find someone to contact that does have access to that you get a better idea about the scientific background of such and such product then I think that's a really good way to go. I have another question that I hadn't prepared for but it's one that always comes to mind when people are talking about chemical free and chemicals are bad kind of thing. There's that assumption and that is things like sodium that's been a preservative for probably a thousand years. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, that's not, it's not something that I've done a lot of research on but there are chemicals out there that we sort of take for granted and we don't view them as things that are dangerous because they have a lot of history behind them and if you think about sodium just regular table salt, sodium chloride it has been used as preservative for a long period of time and now we have this excess research if you think about the connections now between excess sodium and high blood pressure if you think about excess sugar and the relationship of sugar to diabetes for the longest time in our history we just used things without looking into the scientific background and now we have the ability to do so so it's not just that we had the desire to since the Renaissance the ability to get knowledge has increased almost exponentially so we're constantly getting better instruments we're constantly understanding more about our universe so now there's a lot more interest in figuring out exactly what these chemicals do and now some of the things that were always thought of positively now there's some negative to go along with it so it's a balance but it's the phrase that you always hear everything in moderation I was just something that was posted on Facebook about processed meats and the compound sodium nitrite and a suggestion by some random blog saying you should completely avoid processed meats well maybe you should I'm not a dietician I'm not a biologist but if you have a little bit another thing we've heard about recently is the amount of mercury in fish considering that we live along Lake Michigan fishing has been a traditional part of the area for a long time fish fries there's going to be mercury in fish but your body has the ability to process a certain amount of a lot of different kinds of chemicals so as long as you don't have too much your body can process it and excrete it without any problems to use so scare tactics is another thing that you see that you're aware of not too much salt, not too much sugar too much caffeine, not too much caffeine and with the media and research these days sometimes it goes back and forth and you never know what to do so I'm not a dietician but what I typically follow is everything in moderation I keep my coffee to two cups a day not get too much caffeine and I don't eat too much fish or red meat but ultimately you have to make your own choices you have to try to make your educated choices the best you can and one glass of wine a day sure, ask me red wine though so we're coming close to the end here and I just wanted to ask one last question kind of a fun question we often think of chemists as that lone figure in a lab in their white lab coat mixing chemicals and when they make a great discovery they're shouting Eureka to themselves because there's nobody else there with them obviously you don't fit that mode does anyone fit that mold these days is that what science is about or how it works I think the people that you're describing that's the industry and academic research you still see a lot of people you see them on the news in labs making discoveries in those white coats but I think there should be if there's not already a push to being a little bit more dynamic because with science being such a part of our culture whether we'd like it to or not there really needs to be more dynamic educators, more dynamic scientists and you see that you see a lot of news media outlets having their science correspondence and they're starting to be younger and a little bit more diverse and then of course then you have things in popular culture like Big Bang Theory which is one of my favorite shows it's sort of glorified and it's sort of the positive and negatives of actual more personality types but I can tell you that at school that we're kind of like that but there's an interest in science that goes along with that you see their nerdy side, you see the comic books you see the science fiction but you also see that they're using real instrumentation that they're really interested in their science and hopefully that will provide a sort of benefit to those who are interested in science and will get more of a push for scientific education Well thanks James, that's a great note to end on I learned a lot today and I really enjoyed your talk and I hope our audience did as well I did too, it was my pleasure