Dr. George Tidmarsh, physician, scientist, and biotech CEO, joins Jerry Rogers on “The Business of America” podcast to discuss the risks associated with the common food additive talc-the substance at the center of lawsuits about carcinogenic baby powder. “I believe a thorough, systematic review of what we put into our bodies is essential,” Tidmarsh said. “The revelation to me is that talc is added to our food supply!” See also: “FDA Commissioner Makary Cites Real Clear Journal Article At Panel On Talc In The American Food Supply” “Motivated by Dr. Makary and Secretary Kennedy, I turned my attention to food additives-specifically, substances the FDA declared generally regarded as safe (GRAS) back in the 1970s.” “But no one has reexamined them since. Think of how much science and data have changed since the 1980s,” he said. “Most people know talc from cosmetics or baby powder. It was widely used for hygiene, especially in the genital area. However, talc is carcinogenic. That fact has emerged more clearly in recent decades.” Read more: “Reviewing the Safety of our Foods and Drugs: An Urgent Need for a Comprehensive Reevaluation by FDA of Talc in The American Food and Drug Supply” “J&J, the maker of baby powder, faced judgments and settlements due to cases of ovarian cancer linked to talc use,” he explained. “My revelation was that talc is still being added to our food and drugs. It’s used as a bulking agent and lubricant to help powders flow through manufacturing machinery, both in food and pharmaceuticals. “The updated replacement is magnesium stearate, a modern, inexpensive, safer compound. Yet legacy drugs-like Lipitor, Synthroid, and Nexium-still use talc in the manufacturing process, even though generic versions do not. The same applies to candy, gum, and other foods.” “Talc has a pro-inflammatory property. We use it in medicine to cause scarring in very specific cases. Ingesting it? That’s a concern. And until recently, no one was pushing for change. This isn’t about villainy. No one knowingly added it to poison people. But now we know better,” Tidmarsh said. He concludes: “I’m not suggesting anybody added talc to food and drugs maliciously, knowing that it was bad for us. It’s an antiquated remnant of a different time. Science is, by definition, an evolution of knowledge. To me, there is no such thing as settled science, that is an oxymoron phrase.” “Let me give you an example. You might say to yourself, ‘Well, gee, isn’t gravity settled? Don’t we know about everything there is to know about gravity, and there’s nothing new to learn, there’s nothing new to debate about it?’ That is completely wrong! We now know two things. First of all, in the earliest generation of the universe, gravity was repulsive, not attractive. That’s amazing! That recently came into view within the field of physics — the understanding that in the earliest you know nanoconds to microsconds of the generation of the universe,” he exclaimed. “In addition, physicists still debate what mediates gravity. What, is there a graviton particle? So something as simple as that, which you would think is settled, is not settled. There’s no such thing as settled science. It has to constantly evolve!” “Here’s a medical example: when I was trained, parents were told not to give peanuts to infants in their first year. Do you know what we did with that knowledge? We created a generation of people with severe peanut allergies. Now we know the best thing to do is to expose young children, infants in their first year, to small doses of allergens — and that builds tolerance.” “If we had stuck with the ‘settled science,’ we would’ve kept harming people, generating highly allergic individuals.” We constantly want to reexamine any kind of dogma, theory, or practice that we call science, and update it with new information,” he said. “The FDA panels convened in the ’70s made good-faith decisions with the best available data and determined it was safe. Does that mean we shouldn’t continuously update that?” “We now know, after decades of new information and debate, that talc is ‘probably carcinogenic.’ That is the conclusion of the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which convened 29 experts, debated for months and months, and concluded last year that talc is probably carcinogenic. The EU has now banned talc in cosmetics by 2027.”
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