MY FRIEND: ELIZABETH WHELAN R.I.P.
She loathed The New York Times but would smile at this obituary. Beth was a remarkable, brilliant, witty and courageous woman who jousted tirelessly with junk science charlatans and spurious claims on nutrition. rsk
Elizabeth Whelan, Who Challenged Food Laws, Dies at 70
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Elizabeth Whelan, an epidemiologist who crusaded against what she called junk science by starting a national organization to question conventional wisdom on food, chemicals and the environment, died on Sept. 11 in Manahawkin, N.J. She was 70.
The cause was complications of sepsis, her husband, Stephen T. Whelan, said.
Dr. Whelan (pronounced WHEEL-an) believed that much research concerning complicated health questions lacked proper scientific underpinning, and in 1978 she started her organization, the American Council on Science and Health, to remedy this perceived deficiency.
One of the first scientists to join the initiative was Norman E. Borlaug, the biologist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to the vast increase in global grain yields known as the green revolution.
Dr. Whelan had earlier collaborated with Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, who founded the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, on the 1975 book “Panic in the Pantry: Food Facts, Fads and Fallacies,” which asserted that many federal food regulations were absurd.
The council’s main contention was that some chemicals and products were regulated without proof that they were harmful. Dr. Whelan thus often found herself on the side of industry, which partly financed her efforts, against consumer and environmental groups and regulatory agencies.
At first, the council refused corporate financing, though it accepted money from private foundations. But “in avoiding corporate donations, we were limiting A.C.S.H.’s fund-raising potential to no avail,” Dr. Whelan wrote in a commentary for the organization’s 25th anniversary in 2003.
So the council’s board voted to accept corporate donations as long as no strings were attached. It came to get about 40 percent of its money from corporations, she said in the 2003 commentary.
Critics say that corporations have donated precisely because the council’s reports often support industry positions. “I was regularly called a shill for the food industry,” Dr. Whelan wrote.
The organization has argued in favor of a variety of chemical products, including saccharin and other artificial sweeteners, pesticides, growth hormones for dairy cows, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. But it has also argued for controls on handguns and tobacco sales, and has endorsed bicycle helmets.
Relying on a panel of more than 350 scientists who volunteer their time, the council has produced papers and pushed its views in television appearances and columns by Dr. Whelan and others. It has disparaged critics of smokeless tobacco, which it sees as far less pernicious than traditional tobacco, and endorsed the hotly debated petroleum drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The council has also said that public-interest groups like Ralph Nader’s have frightened people away from making personal choices in cases where no danger has been proved. One of its bugaboos was former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s drive to curtail sales of large servings of sugared soda in New York City.
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Consumer and environmental advocates have challenged the organization’s findings on the safety of various products. One self-described watchdog group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, summed up its view of the council in the title of a 1982 booklet: “Voodoo Science, Twisted Consumerism.”
But the council is undeterred. On its website, it says its critics’ agenda “is to limit or dismantle many technological achievements that contribute to consumer choice and good health.”
Elizabeth Ann Murphy was born in Manhattan on Dec. 4, 1943. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College, a master’s in public health from Yale, and a master’s in science and a Ph.D. from Harvard.
After Harvard, she wrote about health for Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and other magazines. In 1974, she wrote the book “Sex and Sensibility: A New Look at Being a Woman,” which was intended to provide plain, understandable facts about sex to adolescents. She followed up two years later with “Making Sense Out of Sex: A New Look at Being a Man,” co-written with her father-in-law, Stephen T. Whelan.
In between, she wrote “A Baby? … Maybe: A Guide to Making the Most Fateful Decision of Your Life” (1975). In an interview with The New York Times in 1977, she told how she had decided her answer was yes: “I suddenly panicked because I was going to be 30,” she said.
In addition to her husband, Dr. Whelan, who lives in Manhattan, she is survived by her daughter, Christine Whelan Moyers, and two grandchildren.
Her career as an advocate on public health issues began in 1973, when she became fascinated with the so-called Delaney clause, a 1958 amendment to the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. The clause mandated that any chemical that causes cancer in animals or people be banned. As analytic chemistry became increasingly sophisticated, ever smaller amounts of chemicals were found to cause cancer in animals. The law took no account of actual carcinogenic potency.
Dr. Whelan wrote a polemic in 1973 arguing that the development of cancer in one rat out of many as a result of an almost infinitesimal exposure to a chemical could be irrelevant to human health. Using an oft-quoted phrase, she wrote that a particular food additive could be banned “at the drop of a rat.”
She wrote a total of 27 books. Several attacked the tobacco industry for lack of openness; others prescribed diets.
The title of another book, written with Professor Stare in 1983, was emblematic of Dr. Whelan’s consuming passion and sometimes insouciant approach: “The One-Hundred-Percent Natural, Purely Organic, Cholesterol-Free, Megavitamin, Low-Carbohydrate Nutrition Hoax.”
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