Can chocolate help you fight heart disease? (Yes.) Is it okay to eat homemade cougar jerky? (Not unless you want to risk trichinosis.) Do honeybees that drink fermented nectar have accidents while flying? (Yes.)
Those are a few of the tidbits to be gleaned from chemistry professor James Collman’s Naturally Dangerous: Surprising Facts About Food, Health and the Environment (University Science Books, 2001). Easy to read, with lots of Far Side cartoons and only two molecular formulas—H2O and O2—Collman’s brief chapters are an unexpurgated romp through grocery stores, gardens, pharmacies and the big outdoors.
“My book is sort of like my lectures,” Collman explains. “I’m not at all politically correct, and I say what I think about everything, which often horrifies students. But that just adds to the joy.”
Trained in organic chemistry and self-taught in physical, inorganic and analytical chemistry, Collman has been at Stanford since 1967. Known for his research in metal-organic compounds and superconductivity, he was named California Scientist of the Year in 1983 for inventing the first catalyst that electrochemically reduces oxygen to water without making any free hydrogen peroxide.
So much for academic credentials. Collman is also a bon vivant of a fly-fisherman, and—readers will learn—a jogger, accomplished cook and licensed scuba diver whose drink of choice is single-malt Scotch and whose canny nose, he thinks, ought to qualify him as a marijuana police dog.
In Naturally Dangerous, Collman looks at the complex science behind hormone supplements and global warming, performance-enhancing drugs and herbal teas. His recurring theme? Though it may be natural, it’s not necessarily safe. “Take windmills,” he says, grabbing the top piece of paper from a wobbly stack of magazine articles that he’s saving for his next book. “This is glowing in its enthusiasm but skips over some of the problems—like windmills make a lot of noise, take a lot of maintenance and kill a lot of birds.”
Collman also has it in for the U.S. health-food industry, a $10 billion-a-year “oxymoron” that “sells materials of uncertain purity and efficacy,” he says. And he’s not much fonder of those who tout the virtues of organic farming. Two billion people worldwide would die of starvation if farmers stopped using synthetic ammonia fertilizers, he says.
But along with these and other “sobering facts” about food, health and the environment, Collman knows when to trot out the crowd-pleasing and bizarre. Heard the one about eating squirrel brains in rural Kentucky? Read on.
