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BENZO(A)PYRENE AND THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF STANTON GLANTZ
Stanton A. Glantz is a major figure in the anti-smoking movement. He has received massive and uncritical publicity from the media for his claim that secondhand smoke causes heart disease in non-smokers, and he has testified to Congress and various federal agencies as a representative of the American Heart Association and other anti-smoking groups. In his testimony to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration advocating a total ban on workplace smoking (Sep. 21, 1994), Glantz cites some laboratory studies purporting to show that various animals fed benzo(a)pyrene (BaP), a ubiquitous product of combustion, or exposed to cigarette smoke, develop atherosclerosis as a result. He rationalizes that "BaP is an important constituent of ETS," and he implicates it in particular as the cause of 30,000 to 60,000 heart disease deaths in non-smokers. But this is a flagrant example of sophistry, half-truth, and exaggeration, which becomes obvious from the bigger picture that he doesn't tell us.
That isn't even enough to account for the purported active smoking heart disease risk. Passive smokers would get less than 1/1000 of that 16%, or 1.00016 times those unexposed to ETS. [*] Yet, Glantz claims that ETS increases the risk to non-smokers as much as active smoking does to smokers. Neither Glantz nor any anti-smoker ever addresses the issue of BaP in food. Hattemer-Frey & Travis' research was "sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Interagency Agreements applicable under Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc., Contract No. DE-AC05-84OR21400." They conclude that "BaP may pose a serious health threat to the U.S. population" on the basis of 345/million lifetime additional cancer cases only (about 1232/year), from this greater BaP exposure. Meanwhile, the anti-smokers claim 3,000-5,000 lung cancer deaths from ETS, and 12,300 other cancer deaths as well. If these and Glantz's heart disease deaths were extrapolated to total BaP exposure, it would require the deaths of over 312 million people per year! This is more than the entire U.S. population. The measured concentrations of BaP in soil range from 0.4 to 40 ug/kg (Shabad 1971; Borneff & Kunte 1964; Fazio & Howard 1983), which is comparable to measured concentrations in cooked beef (0.2 - 24.1 µg/kg; Panalaks 1976; Fazio & Howard 1983; Ljinsky & Ross 1967; Doremire et al 1979; Fazio & Howard 1983; IARC 1983; US EPA 1980) and in leafy vegetables (7.0 to 48 µg/kg; IARC 1973; US EPA 1985; Fritz 1971; Archer 1979; Kolar 1975; Grimmer 1978). Glantz's cockerels would eat a lot of dirt in an ordinary barnyard, and rabbits eat leafy vegetation; so, like humans, they would be exposed to more BaP in their normal diets than from a few whiffs of cigarette smoke in his lab. Benzo(a)pyrene and other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are generic products of fossil fuel combustion. They settle out of the atmosphere, mostly into the soil and also onto vegetation, from which they are consumed. Of course, they're not going to tell the public about the con job they've pulled with secondhand smoke. The fact that there is BaP in food will be sprung as a supposed "new discovery" at their own convenience, although the dates of the above studies prove that they've known it all along. There is more at stake here than just a ban on workplace smoking. Glantz's crackpot science is the basis of the "biologic plausibility," rather than just circumstantiality, of the ETS/heart disease association: "The causal link between passive smoking and atherosclerosis appears to be complete," he says. If you swallow the line that trace amounts of BaP cause heart disease and cancer, you've been set up to submit to a ban on all combustion, a new high in regulatory lunacy which could shut down nearly all industry (and even driving) in America.
[*] Source of data on non-smokers' exposure to ETS constituents is Dr. Gio
Batta Gori, a toxicologist with training in epidemiology and broad interests
in smoking and health, cancer causation and risk assessment; President of the
International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, and a Fellow
of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences. In the 1960's and 1970's, he was
Deputy Director for Cancer Cause and Prevention at the National Cancer
Institute, and received the Public Health Superior Service Award in 1977 for
activities as Director of the Smoking and Health Program. The article is
"Mainstream and environmental tobacco smoke," published in Regulatory
Toxicology and Pharmacology 1991;14:88-105, co-authored with Dr. Nathan
Mantel, a highly respected name in epidemiology and statistics.
Higher estimates for non-smokers' exposure are produced by various
fallacies: extrapolation of cotinine measurements from much smaller particles
of vapor phase nicotine, to estimate levels of larger particulates which
settle out faster; tests conducted under unrealistic conditions; misrepresent-
ing sidestream smoke concentrations at the burning tip of a cigarette as the
concentrations that non-smokers breathe; and "forgetting" that smokers inhale
sidestream as well as mainstream smoke.
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From: HA Hattemer-Frey, CC Travis. Benzo-a-pyrene: Environmental
partitioning and human exposure. Toxicology and Industrial Health 1991;7(3):
141-157: This analysis found that "the food chain is the dominant pathway of
human exposure, accounting for about 97% of the total daily intake of BaP.
Inhalation and consumption of contaminated water are only minor pathways of
human exposure [2% from air, and 1% from water]. The long-term average daily
intake of BaP by the general population is estimated to be 2.2 micrograms (µg)
per day. Cigarette smoking and indoor activities do not substantially
increase human exposure to BaP relative to background levels of BaP present in
the environment." And, "... average smokers (i.e., individuals who smoke 20
cigarettes a day) are taking in an additional 780 ng of BaP daily, which means
that smokers get an additional 16% BaP from smoking" [based on pre-1979
cigarettes. Newer low-tar cigarettes contain about half that].