latest round up

Today I learned that the news doesn't care if it tells the truth and could fire you as a newsperson if you wanted to not lie.

Yesterday I learned that if you decide to feed ants cornmeal in the hopes that they will leave your kitchen alone, they mine it. They don't have support timbers and line things with concrete like smugglers crossing the border, but they make little holes they can actually disappear into. And also in yesterday's news, if you work out really, really, really hard for five minutes, you can make your muscle damage look like you had worked out for something like four hours. Whatever kind of muscle damage is apparently how you measure endurance, so extreme interval training could be just as good for endurance training as going out for hours. I don't see the couch potato crowd leaping off the sofa for five minutes, plus warm-up and cool down and stuff like that, and working to the point of pain three times a week, but it might help those of us who like to exercise but get stuck in the house sometimes.

And since I haven't covered anything death-worthy lately, here's an article about how long various pesticides can linger in your house, thus killing you, your kids, and your pets. Also, the crying Native American guy on those '80s littering PSAs was Sicilian.

undergarments, anti-microbials, gout, and fire

Today I learned that Victoria's Secret bras will kill you, maybe with formaldehyde. At the end of the article, the Formaldehyde Council swears they didn't see anything and weren't even there, but it's possible it wasn't formaldehyde. Get an EI to sniff it, and then we'd have an answer. And in related news, Victoria's Secret thongs will take out your eye.

In other news of things that aren't there, antibiotics are the fungi-derived variety of antimicrobials, and organic meats only have to be antibiotic-free. The anti-microbials used are theoretically anti-parasite drugs, which I guess could theoretically include food-grade diatomaceous earth, which I wouldn't have a problem with, but the article doesn't say, and I don't have time to call all the companies involved. I tolerate whatever Whole Foods' suppliers are doing, so if the anti-microbials involved turn out to be just like the antibiotics we've been overusing, I'd probably just die anyway, but for the record, I wasn't there, and I didn't see anything. (What? Everybody else says it.)

And:

• Sufferers of gout can end up oozing white stuff, and apparently it can be due to genetics, not gluttony.
• I couldn't figure out why I got heart palpitations every time I went outside starting Friday morning until I read this article about a local wildfire. It started on Thursday and only recently became newsworthy.

how to decontaminate a dryer

If you're looking for how to simply get synthetic fragrance chemicals out of your dryer, this is going to be overkill. You can probably just scrub the drum, even the fins, and potentially soak any badly affected plastic (probably the lint screen) in vinegar, so cherry pick from the following:

Today we're going to document for posterity the appropriate way to decontaminate a tumble dryer that has had bad air (smoke, for example) sucked through it.

1. Order new drum seals because they typically take a few days to come in, and then you have to boil them about 4 times. Maybe 'seals' isn't their official name, but I'm talking about the felt padding that the drum rides on. If you have weak contamination, maybe you can boil the contaminant out of them, but it takes a lot less boiling to get the 'new' out of new ones than it does to get the crap out of old ones. Trying to save yourself $60 by boiling the old ones for a month is not at all worth it.
2. Take the case apart until you can take out the drum. With the drum out, take out the screws that hold the fin-thingies in place. Find something like a plastic storage tub where you can soak the fins in vinegar for at least 24 hours. 50:50 vinegar and water works fine.
3. Continue disassembling the case until you can reach every surface in the air stream. You don't have to worry as hard about the air stream after it leaves the drum, but those surfaces can ooze contamination backward when the dryer is off, so at least get the ones close to the lint filter.
4. Throw out the heating element. You can't scrub it with Bon Ami, and you can't soak it in vinegar. We can get new ones for our machine on Ebay for about $25, or if you're excited about having it right away, you can pay something like $70 for one at the local appliance place.
5. Commence scrubbing all the exposed surfaces with a Bon Ami paste if the contamination is really stubborn. You can get away with a scrubby sponge and less Bon Ami on less contaminated surfaces. If you have a tube you can't get your arm in, try a brush. We extended the handle on a toilet brush using plastic water pipe. We had to cut the brush's handle at the correct diameter to fit in the pipe (allow extra length so you can taper the brush handle), but wedged in there, it's pretty solid.

Theoretically when all the boiling, soaking, and scrubbing is done, you can just put the whole works back together. Here are some things that could slow you down:

• The bare metal sleeves around the heating element and on the way to the drum are some kind of metal that leaves a taste in my mouth, so you can't necessarily get those parts perfect.
• The seals on my dryer very likely have wool in them. I will probably never be able to sniff those without getting heart palpitations, but I can tell the difference between a wool reaction and a dryer contaminant.

And so you aren't left wondering what might kill you next, there's a giant DDT deposit off the coast of Los Angeles.

beasties, lunch, 'do no harm,' tent prep, and mental illness

Today I learned that:

• The javelina around here get fed by morons frequently enough that if they come upon you, and you have food, they expect some. They're a little scary to chase off on account of those tusks they have.
• Chipotle is one of the safer places to eat.
• The waiting rooms at various doctors' offices can vary greatly depending on the occupants. Today I had to take two showers to get the fumes off me, and I think I still made the really, really sick lady sick when I visited this evening, a total of three showers later. That doctor has a safer office farther away that only gets used three days a month, and I will be going there.
• You can cut nylon with a soldering iron.
• Getting your hormones straightened out using various supplements can cause shoe purchases. I don't understand it, but now I want high heels. It feels like a mental illness.
• You can get eyeliner that is just made of mica and various oxides. I'm not sure whether my current mental illness requires eyeliner or not, but it required at least looking it up.

odds and ends

Today I learned that you can download sewing patterns. I'm thinking of making a dress, so I'll have to look into that after I finish sewing a couple more dome tents, for which I never found a pattern. I somehow think a dress would be easier than a dome tent, but it's been a while.

In things that'll kill you, pesticides still give you Parkinson's, and pollution will give you liver disease. Hormones just make you weird instead of killing you.

a day in the life: be a grown-up and get a mammogram

Today I learned that the majority of the people at a radiology clinic are there for chest x-rays. I was wearing a mask the whole time I was exposed to them, but my husband reports that they reeked of smoke. They didn't sound so good, either.

The radiology clinic is something I learned about because I recently had the bad judgment to turn 40, and even if your hormones aren't all screwed up from a chemical injury, doctors like to start taking pictures around then. They may even glare disapprovingly when they find out you didn't get a practice mammogram back when you turned 35, despite the fact that at that age you may have been, as my grandmother says, too sick to die.

I also learned that if you bring your husband to keep an eye on you (and he definitely needed to keep an eye on me -- he had to cart me outside into fresh air in a hurry at one point), the tech will inform you that the mammography area is strictly off-limits to anyone of the male persuasion, and she will try to leave him in the waiting room. I went along with that for about 4 seconds, when I pointed out that he was my caregiver, and there should be some allowance for that. When I went as far as to suggest we preserve other patients' dignity by getting him a blindfold, she checked with her supervisor, who allowed him in. Problem solved.

We also have some new rules to go along with the obvious 'bring your own gown' and 'whatever else you may do, do not forget your mask':

• However cute your hair may be down, you should wear it up in buildings filled with synthetic fragrance and smokers unless you want to wear your mask after you leave until your hair offgases.
• Wear a button-up shirt to doctor visits. A t-shirt is hard to get off over a half-face respirator, and if you take the mask off, your first breath contains a bunch of carpet-cleaner chemicals.
• Do not, under any circumstances, remove your mask. Failure to observe this rule may result in a quick trip to the parking lot wearing not exactly what you'd hope to be wearing in a parking lot.

giant sponges, car parts, and a tv breakthrough

Today I learned that you can roll up the carpet from a 1998 Plymouth Neon and fit half of it into a standard-sized storage tub. The hard part is if the tub is filled with diluted ammonia, and then it's a b**** wrestling the soaking wet carpet onto the clothesline. In related news:

• If you completely take out the interior of a Neon with a mold problem so bad it smells like a swamp from 5 feet away with the doors and windows closed, and you spray whatever you couldn't take out with 20% hydrogen peroxide, the swamp smell goes away.
• Seat cushion foam parts are like giant sponges, but if you can't bend them so they're submerged in ammonia, it's hard to tell if you got the whole thing wet, thereby killing all the mold.
• Wet giant sponges are really heavy.
• 1998 and earlier Neons had inferior head gaskets, so we might need to learn how to change a head gasket.

We have a project on our hands, but the price was right, and if we can permanently banish the swamp smell, we will have beaten some mold. That kind of thing is very good for morale around here.

In other news, the really, really sick lady's husband got ahold of a used rear-projection tv which he then spent probabably six weeks decontaminating. The upshot is that when the really, really sick lady's sister's phone line conked out, she had something else to do besides talk on the phone for the first time in eight years.

Morale is up all over.

recipes must be followed to the letter

Today I learned how to make "salt rising bread." This is what the pioneer ladies used to make when they couldn't get yeast, and it has nothing to do with salt. According to the internet, the pioneer ladies liked to make a starter using cornmeal and maybe a potato or two in water, plus maybe a bunch of other stuff, and they kept their starters at exactly 110^o F (they apparently had super-accurate wood stove thermometers) for 8 to 10 hours. Then, if the starter worked, they could make some bread, but if it didn't, they threw it out and started over.

In the interests of not adding any more corn to my diet, I tried putting a starter made of only flour and water in a warm spot (the oven with the light on) for 8 to 10 hours and throwing it out when it didn't 'start.' Then I remembered that following directions when it comes to food was never my strong suit, and I made another starter that I set out on the counter until it started, dammit, and then I made bread.

Thus I will conclude that:

• Patience is a virtue;
• Having a high tolerance for junk on your counter can be a good thing;
• Following directions is only a useful skill if you are dealing with some aspects of government or attempting to get good grades in school.

In other news, the really, really sick lady watched five minutes of the Weather Channel today after not having a tolerable tv for 8 years. She seemed kind of unimpressed, but 5 minutes of tv is a huge step forward considering her usual entertainment is watching (a) the bugs outside her window, or (b) the ceiling. Also, the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years passed her driver's license eye test, so she's good to go for another 5 years, whether or not her car is.

It's been an exciting couple of days.

rear enders, tomatoes, and how to stay in shape

Today I learned that in Winnipeg, even as the cops were claiming that red-light cameras were improving driver behavior, accidents and resulting injuries went up about 60%. It appears that while the the cameras may have modified red-light running behavior, they don't do much about tailgater behavior.

In other news, by abusing tomatoes consistently for months, I finally got in trouble with them, at the height of this pollen season. I expect to get them back again by about August, just in time for mold season.

In yet other news, today I saw an ad on tv. It started out by mentioning how hard we all work to stay in shape, so I was expecting it to be for some kind of exercise equipment that made staying in shape easier. It was an ad for baked Lay's potato chips, so maybe bending your elbow is more strenuous than I thought.

fat, spam, and recycling

A few days ago I learned that the obesity epidemic can be blamed entirely on people eating too much. The model researchers used to predict the overall fatness of the US population based on national food consumption (and waste) predicted even more obesity, so people have apparently been exercising more. They found that to combat the extra calories, you'd have to walk an average adult an extra two hours per day and an average kid two and a half hours. The kids could instead lose one "fizzy drink" (350 calories) per day, but the grown-ups have to figure out how to ditch an extra 500 calories, which the article says is equivalent to a hamburger. (I think it must be a little hamburger.) (I don't know much about the caloric content of hamburgers.)

Then I got distracted, but somewhere in there I learned that Blogger's spam detector thinks this blog is a spam blog, so I am dutifully reporting it here just like all the other bloggers whose blogs have been 'detected.' Maybe I look like a pusher of non-shampoo hair cleaning products, but, honestly, I think the majority of the people who come to this blog are looking for some variant of 'shoplifting tools,' which I mentioned once in 2007.

In other illegal news, reusing a priority mail cardboard box is illegal even if you turn it inside out and no one will know except the recipient. I do not expect this information to generate much in the way of page visits.

things that'll kill me, personally

A couple of days ago, I went to the local EI doctor, where I learned that, having previously dealt with the life-and-death part of mycotoxicosis, now I should probably deal with a (relatively) minor mercury problem, and I should have kept taking various food-oil omega-3 supplements and vitamin E. (Apparently if you're an EI, vitamin E won't kill you, but it could help straighten out your hormones.) I also learned that there are some food-based supplements you can take for a case of candida, and this is where today's lesson comes in. If you have the ability to sniff foods to see if they'll make you sick, you should open up the freakin' supplement capsules and sniff the contents before you swallow them.

This has been another edition of Learning Things The Hard Way. Please visit our (totally imaginary) sponsor.

scoping out the drive-in options

Today I looked up the Wolverine movie on Rotten Tomatoes, where I learned that 5 out of 15 male reviewers liked it, but 3 out of 5 female reviewers liked it. From this unscientific sampling, I infer that Van Helsing would have gotten better reviews if Hugh Jackman had spent more time in it with his shirt off.

chemical burns, tvs, horror food, pit bull history, and masked hilarity

Today I learned that a bunch of sorority girls got chemical burns on a slip-and-slide lubricated with laundry detergent. Somehow this was supposed to raise money for firemen. Three things:

1. "He added, 'We're really fortunate that the women in Greek life on campus really made the event special.'"
2. When you've been out of college for a while and your only contact is articles like this, it makes you wonder how any college students survive long enough to graduate.
3. Laundry detergent will kill you, but not in a way I had considered.

Also,

• Old tvs are funny looking.
• A canned whole chicken could be used for a horror movie.
• Pit bulls as we know them today are not actually pit bulls. Real pit bulls, renamed Staffordshire terriers or American Staffordshire terriers around 1936, were medium-sized, perfectly good basic working dogs. The ones you hear about in the news today are essentially the puppy-mill products of a mixture of breeds, and I can expound for hours on the topic of badly-bred dogs. You can see them on the street if you look -- some of them, when they walk, look like they were assembled by Frankenstein, but without the bolts sticking out.

And now I have a good physical understanding of why dogs fuss at you when you crinkle paper around them, with an added hilarity bonus for those of us who have much too much experience wearing respirators.

things you can wash with

Today I learned that researchers have found that you should bleach your children if they have eczema because that kills the bacteria associated with the problem. Ok, they said to put a 1/2 cup of bleach in the kid's bath, but as an EI, that still sounds pretty lethal to me. Makes you wonder what lye soap did to eczema, back in the day.

In other bath news, I've been washing my hair with salt, baking soda, or this funky super-organic clay-based "wash" since whenever I got in trouble with that last shampoo. Salt is good for not-too-stinky hair, baking soda is pretty good for grocery-store hair and minor greasiness, and the clay stuff is really good for everything. So far my scalp smells better than it did when I used fragrance-free shampoos, I don't get little frizzies on top anymore when I blow-dry my hair, which isn't all flat and perfectly straight like it used to be, and it looks fantastic, assuming it isn't falling out of a braid. I would wear it down all the time, but having easier-to-work-with hair hasn't done anything for my hair-in-the-face tolerance.

arm pains, well-fed deer, alcohol, pot, and death in a patch

Today I learned that if you have to go to the store and also need to get in the sauna, both of which require a shower afterwards, you should not attempt to conserve showers by getting in the sauna first, drying yourself off, and then heading to the grocery store. (You can't do it the other way without getting store chemicals in your sauna). By the time I got cleaned up, whatever I'd sweated out had burned my armpit. And in not exactly armpit-related news, if you work out on your rowing machine before you knead pizza dough, kneading can be really tiring.

In newspaper news:

• People besides my uncle have noticed that the deer hang out in the suburbs during hunting season. Also, suburban deer do not have a hunger problem when their numbers increase. They just eat more azaleas.
• The Pentagon parking lots trap drunk drivers.
• You can rent the basement of a shopping mall, but it's not necessarily the best place to plant your marijuana crop.

And nicotine will kill you.

doing harm, harming the desert, and death in the asphalt

It's a good thing I didn't declare this blog dead yesterday because today I learned about a bunch of things, some of which will kill you.

We'll start with my personal adventure. I went to the doctor today -- a regular doctor who schedules appointments months in advance -- and learned that you should never, ever try to tough out a waiting room, even if it doesn't seem so bad. You wear your mask, even if you wanted to pretend to be a normie for a couple of hours. Also, the detergent in the cloth drape thingies they give you to wear is actually worse than I remember it, and it didn't even have a fragrance that I could detect. So, wear your mask and don't forget your drape thingy you brought from home. (I did that part right.)

In unrelated but probably much safer-to-visit news (not that it sounds safe), there is an illegal immigrant trash dump right here in town, just south of the intersection of Wilmot and Valencia on the west side of Wilmot.

And speed humps will kill you.

hesitation

I hesitate to call this blog dead, particularly right before MCS Awareness Month, but it appears that with the demise of my laptop and the onset of pollen season, I have very little to say anymore. Next time I find anything of import that will kill you, I'm sure I'll report it, but until then, good night and good luck.

still not too bright over here

Today I learned that the toothbrush lady has been suffering from an incipient migraine (now a full-on migraine) and hasn't made a lot of sense lately. Nylon does not give her anaphylaxis, but it's unclear whether or not she tolerates it. I'm going to shut up on the toothbrush front until everyone involved is verifiably making sense.

So besides taking a brain-fogged person at her word, this morning I came to the realization that I had not rotated shampoos recently enough, something that I had discussed as a possibility as recently as last week in this space. I expect this situation has had something to do with the quality of posting lately vis-a-vis the moron quotient.

I could probably fix up that last sentence, which may not say what I think it says, but my head smells like either salad or Easter egg dye, depending on your preference, and I think I'm going to call it a day.

I'm a moron

So it turns out that the lady who is sensitive to toothbrushes gets anaphylaxis from nylon, and my understanding was that toothbrush bristles are probably nylon. I react hard to vinyls and most polyesters, so I would have noticed those, but nylon I don't detect.

This lady appears to react to pretty much everything including cotton, and she's given up trying to find soap she tolerates. I think in her position I might give up on my teeth, too, but I'll look into natural fibers and wood and see if she can't handle some of those.

disturbing behavior

Today I learned that if you don't brush your teeth, you can develop a layer of fermenting carbohydrates on your teeth along with your layer of plaque. This could explain why this one EI I know thinks she's sensitive to toothbrushes -- a toothbrush would knock the fermenting carbohydrates off your teeth, along with a bunch of bacteria, and there's no reason why you couldn't be sensitive to one or both.

The thing is that if I can't convince her she's wrong about toothbrushes, or that she can clean her teeth some other way, things are going to go badly.

I'm not sure I can do it. She's got chemicals in her brain, and it doesn't work right.

chemical sensitivity in the general population

Today I learned that Chantix, a drug that is supposed to take all the fun out of smoking so you can quit, causes a bunch of unpleasant mental side-effects in enough people that a writer wrote a whole article about his side-effects. I can get those same side-effects from going into that Whole Foods store I mentioned. It's too bad that so many chemical sensitivities are bad trips; Whole Foods would be a lot more fun if it made me drunk like one kind of outdoor mold does. (Or did. I've been staying out of mold.)

In other news, I hear you can get fragrance out of clothes by soaking them in a bucket with 1/2 cup of salt for an hour. I also heard from an actual hairdresser that you can scrub your scalp with salt instead of shampoo. Clearly I am still thinking about giving up on shampoo, but it may take until I develop my next shampoo sensitivity to nudge me into actually trying it.

sun damage and potential mold

Today I learned that some weather stations have solar radiation meters so you could maybe figure out how fried you would get going out in the sun at a particular time of day instead of just guessing based on what you remember having seen recently for current readings near that time of day.

In other news, my husband reported a year ago or more that a trip to Whole Foods was more dangerous chemically than a trip to a conventional grocery store. Since I was still unable to deal with the laundry chemicals in standard stores, I didn't believe him, but now I do. Currently I can go in the local Safeway once a day if I want as long as I take a shower fairly soon afterwards. After not going to Whole Foods for several months, the most recent trip resulted in my contaminating not only my half of the bed, but also my half of the couch. These things are easy to remedy -- there's a reason we keep the washing machine in top condition -- but three extra loads of laundry and 18 hours of detoxing seems like a lot for a trip to the 'safer' store.

So next time we need food that we can't get anywhere but Whole Foods, there will be an expedition out to the other Whole Foods, the one that is twice as far away, and we will find out if there is a problem with both stores or just the closer one.

huge improvements

Today I learned that replacing a 25-year-old hydraulic hose ourselves (ok, my husband did it, but I helped) fully repaired the clutch in our ancient car, and it cost less than $100. This approach was quite a bit cheaper than letting our usual mechanic replace the entire clutch, something he reportedly wanted to do the day he first saw the car.

In other news, the ozone pollution in Tucson today (link will work after midnight tonight) is the worst I've ever seen, and I feel pretty good. I wasn't able to get any exercise, but I didn't have to leave town, and I only found out about the ozone pollution because I wanted to see what level of particulates had been kicked up by the wind yesterday. I attribute this health improvement almost entirely to our upgraded house pressurizer. The MERV 16 filter has proved to make a big difference during pollen season, and it appears to keep out pollution, too.

hair care and the economy

Today I learned that there are a bunch of people out there who don't use shampoo and report that their hair is better for it. They're using things like baking soda and vinegar, things EIs use to clean lots of things, to clean their scalps, but then they use conditioner. Apparently conditioner doesn't contain 1,4-dioxane, but why other conditioner chemicals are ok is not clear to me. Also, maybe I'm just lucky, but I stopped using conditioner a couple of years ago, and I didn't notice any difference except that I started getting compliments, so maybe I don't spend enough time admiring my hair in the mirror.

The other thing that isn't clear to me is how you would get store chemicals out of your hair without soap. It's one thing to have shampoo residue in there, but it's another to have it smelling like Safeway.

In other news, the economy finally got around to affecting my household directly -- I got laid off from my geology journal copy editing job. I spent a lot of time in the last few months being extremely ill, so while I am disappointed to miss out on getting paid to read interesting things, but I am hugely relieved to have an extra 5 or 10 hours a week free.

Also, adult diapers and fire don't mix.

statistics and epidemics

Today I learned that Washington, D.C., has an HIV/AIDS epidemic. The rate of infection is 3%, and the cut-off for being labeled an epidemic is 1%. Now, at first I was thinking that maybe to have an epidemic, you had to have a communicable disease, but my husband pointed out that we have an obesity epidemic, so now I want to know why MCS has not been labeled an epidemic. A prominent doctor and author who has MCS wanted to know the same thing all the way back in 2000.

President Obama, we as a population are sitting and/or lying around (each to his own ability) collecting disability and not buying much other than organic food. We'd buy more, but disability doesn't pay and we can't go into stores, anyway. More of us will not make the economy better, but you can create jobs, lots of jobs, trying to look after us. The lady who lives in her car (and has brain damage from insecticide) could probably drive three full-time caregivers to distraction all by herself, but if there were chemically safe places to go or maybe even work, our taxes could go to supporting the three full-time caregivers for that lady, assuming you could keep any of those positions filled. I'm betting they'd turn over faster than clothes in a dryer.

all bad all the time

Today I learned that kids' bath products typically contain 1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde, so it's a wonder that kids don't croak before they're old enough to eat the candles on their birthday cakes. Also, the world is a scary place when the fake news shows have to take the financial-reporting networks to task, spending their entire show being scary instead of funny.

things you could learn reading Cracked.com

Today I learned that some schizophrenia medications inhibit the growth of Toxoplasma gondii, a single-cell parasite that causes schizophrenia in some people. It's much better known as the parasite that reproduces in the guts of cats but lives in cat prey like rats, from whom it removes fear of cats so that they get eaten. I still remember learning about the rats in high school biology.

Also, you can make a 'cool' rocket (one that won't fry your legs) for your jet pack using hydrogen peroxide.

confusion reigns

Today I read an article that says college women think their male friends want them to drink more than the men actually want them to drink. I thought that the whole peer-pressure thing was drink/not drink, so I think I learned that some people worry about how much to drink to be cool. I am mystified, but I've kind of been like that all day.

likely useless information

Today I learned that there is a matching program that helps low-income people save up for things like cars and houses and starting their own businesses, but it sounds like it's underfunded.

In stupid news, researchers asked a bunch of college students what it means when forecasters report some percent chance of rain, and 'a sizeable number' of students answered incorrectly. Now, this is what happens when you ask college students things like that -- they don't read the paper, they don't watch the news, and they haven't thought about it unless they grew up in farm country. Wait until the non-farmers graduate and have to commute through bad weather, and then you'll hear a different story.

That, or the researchers involved aren't familiar with how many people are math impaired to start with and will automatically give you the wrong answer as soon as you mention percentages.

death in pop cans and spaghetti sauce

Today I learned that there's mercury in some high fructose corn syrup, so, on average, all packaged food will kill you.

Also, Ross Dress For Less has queen-size cotton blankets for $15 to $20, and they seem to not stink as much as non-clearance store stuff.

food that'll kill you

Today I learned that some parents raise their kids in such a way that they are scared to eat an Oreo.

I am totally on board with being afraid to eat Oreos.