Just because some chemical has been shown to have carcinogenic effects in the laboratory, should not necessarily be cause for alarm. Concern maybe, alarm no.

Many naturally occurring chemicals also shown carcinogenic and/or toxic effects in laboratory bioassays. The design of these bioassays are generally skewed towards being overly sensitive. Non-animal studies, which use either, cell cultures or bacteria have been shown to demonstrate alterations to even chemicals that have been in use for many years without any indication they cause any health issues in the real world. Even animal studies do not always correlate to the general use of the product.

Complex interactions between man-made and naturally occurring chemicals, biotransformation, factors such as genetic predisposition, age, sex, ethnicity, dose exposure, route of exposure, length of exposure and a whole host of other factors will influence the effects any chemical will have on a particular individual.

Organic in and of itself is no assurance that the food product is safe. One example of this is peanut butter. Alphatoxins are potent carcinogens, which can be the byproduct of fugal metabolism. Most, if not all of the larger peanut butter producers have machines that screen every single peanut for the presence of fungal contamination and reject those peanuts, which are infected with fungi. Many of the smaller producers, use organically grown peanuts, which due to not using fungicides are more prone to fungal contamination. This combined with fact that these producers could not afford the equipment to screen for fungal contamination resulted in many of the organically produced peanut butters to contain high levels of alphatoxins. I believe this has now been addressed and corrected, but for many years it went undetected.

There have been many hyped media scares over the years, many prove to have no foundation in fact, but once it becomes part of folk lore/urban legends it is hard to shake off the suspicion. The successful key is to most things in life is moderation, not extremism.

Just my 2 cents-
Pete