The CeraVe Lawsuit, Driscoll's Strawberries, and a Peptide Explosion
Two scares, a wellness craze, and why we'd rather teach you to spot the next one
In the early-ish days of Unbiased, we were doing constant debunks (mostly COVID and the COVID vaccines back then), before we broadened out to basically every public health topic under the sun. We’d dig through our DMs, looking for patterns in the questions and worries people kept sending. When something started generating buzz that the evidence didn’t support (usually fear), that was the signal to do a debunk.
The thing is, debunking is exhausting, because the falsehoods start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’. So, we shifted gears toward more of a prebunk approach, helping people spot the red flags themselves so they’re less susceptible to misinformation, whatever the topic happens to be (because honestly, who can predict what the next one will be). But every now and then, something crops up that does warrant a direct response.
Here’s a round-up of three recent ones worth flagging.
One quick note before we get into it. Nobody paid us for any of this. Driscoll’s and CeraVe didn’t ask us to make these posts and didn’t sponsor them in any way. We made them because our DMs filled up with people who were scared after seeing a wall of alarming content. And responding to a specific false claim about a product is not the same as endorsing the company behind it. We looked at these particular claims on the science. Full stop.
Strawberries covered in pesticides?
A wellness blog called Mamavation had a lab test two containers of Driscoll’s from a single store on a single day, found trace residues of 12 pesticides in the conventional box (and none in the organic one), and framed them as “PFAS pesticides.” That one shopping trip became worldwide headlines claiming strawberries cause cancer. People were tossing fruit. So, we sat down with a toxicologist (the amazing Dr. Joe Zagorski) and ran the actual numbers.
Take indoxacarb, one of the residues on that list, as an example. To reach its safety threshold, which already bakes in a 100-fold buffer, a 154-pound adult would have to eat 123 pounds of strawberries every single day for the rest of their life. The “PFAS pesticide” label doing all the scaring isn’t a recognized scientific category, and even the blog’s own reviewer conceded the EPA disputes that classification. The organic box showing nothing wasn’t the damning contrast it looked like either. Organic farms use their own approved pesticides, which a synthetic-focused residue panel can miss, so a non-detect there says less than it seems.
The fear underneath most of this is also the most reasonable one, that even trace amounts add up over the years and never leave your body. It’s a fair thing to wonder. The “forever” in “forever chemicals” is about how slowly these break down in the environment, not about your body being unable to clear them. Even PFOA and PFOS, the legacy chemicals that started the whole worry, are eliminated by the body over time, and population blood levels have dropped by something like 80% since they were phased out. Pesticides like the ones found here are metabolized and cleared faster still. And the safety thresholds toxicologists use already assume a lifetime of daily exposure, so the “it adds up over decades” part is built into the number. Joe’s take on the bigger version of this, the whole cocktail of residues over time, is honest and measured. It’s a real and active area of research, but the trace levels on food are unlikely to rise to a level of concern.
The part that actually worries us isn’t the trace residue. It’s that a scare like this pushes people to eat less produce, a genuine health cost, in exchange for a risk the numbers don’t support. And USDA’s pesticide monitoring finds residues across produce sitting well below safety limits year after year.
Strawberries get this treatment on a schedule, too, because they top the EWG’s Dirty Dozen list almost every year. We write about that list a lot, because it ranks produce by how many pesticide residues turn up, not by whether any of them come close to a harmful level, and even its own authors concede it doesn’t assess actual risk. The main thing it reliably does is make people anxious about some of the healthiest food they can buy. We covered the strawberry case in full here, and the broader Dirty Dozen problem in our pesticide Q&A (here’s part one and part two of our series, and there are more posts coming!).
CeraVe’s cancer lawsuit
The viral version was that CeraVe is being sued because its products cause cancer. But nobody is actually suing because they got cancer. The real cases are consumer claims arguing buyers wouldn’t have paid what they did if they’d known about possible benzene, and even if the plaintiffs win, the result is refunds or new labeling, not a court ruling that the products cause cancer.
The frightening test numbers came from a lab that heated the products to hot-car temperatures to generate them, and whose leaders hold a patent on a more stable version of the ingredient, so it stands to gain from the alarm. The FDA called that lab’s testing method unvalidated, then ran its own tests under normal conditions and found the vast majority of products had little or no benzene. CeraVe wasn’t among the few that were recalled, and the agency’s conclusion was that even decades of daily use carries very low risk.
The people actually using these products back that up. They don’t carry more benzene in their blood than non-users, and they don’t have higher cancer rates. That tracks with what we know about benzene, which is a carcinogen at the high, repeated doses you get from gasoline and cigarette smoke, not from trace amounts in a face wash. The honest caveat we make in the post is that benzoyl peroxide can form benzene when it gets hot, so don’t leave acne products baking in a hot car. The jump from that to “your cleanser causes cancer” is where it tips into fearmongering.
Peptides everywhere we look
The wellness craze of the moment. Peptides themselves are just short chains of amino acids, the same building blocks that make up proteins, and the science on how they work is well established. The problem is a distinction the industry is counting on you missing, which is what Part one of our ongoing peptide series digs into. The FDA-approved peptide drugs like insulin and GLP-1s, backed by decades of trials, are not the same thing as the unregulated wellness peptides (BPC-157, TB-500, and friends) sold for recovery and anti-aging. Most of those have little or no human data, some were built as research tools and never meant for people at all, and stacking several at once just multiplies the unknowns.
So, why are peptides suddenly everywhere? Every single time I open social media, another celeb is touting them as a panacea. Mostly that’s because someone is paying for you to hear about it. The wellness industry is enormous, influencer marketing is its engine, and there’s usually a discount code attached. There’s also a genuine reason people reach for them, though. Conventional medicine has real gaps, and people dealing with chronic pain, fatigue, and aging are often told nothing can be done, so a confident promise of control lands even when the evidence hasn’t caught up. Our bottom line is uncomfortable and not very satisfying. We just don’t know yet, and that’s true whether you’re hyping these or fearing them.
Part two is coming, and a preview of where it lands. It follows the patents and the regulation. The popular line that “pharma can’t patent these, so they’re hiding the cure” isn’t true, because peptides can absolutely be patented. The real reason industry hasn’t chased most of them is that the data isn’t there (though the biological reasons for caution are), and the majority of compounds that look good in mice fail in people. And while the FDA is reviewing whether to let compounding pharmacies prepare some of these, moving a peptide into a new regulatory category isn’t approval and isn’t new evidence. What’s changing is access, not the science.
Huge thanks to Unbiased Scientist Dr. Leigh Baxt for so much of the work behind these peptide posts. Her page is full of great videos if you want to go deeper.
The pattern
Look across all three and the same shapes keep showing up. There’s usually a scary-sounding label or a single study doing far more work than it should, a tiny or cherry-picked sample, a financial incentive sitting just off camera, and headlines sprinting way ahead of the evidence. That pattern is the whole reason we lean toward prebunking now. We can’t write a post for every panic (again, the falsehoods don’t stop comin’), but we can help you recognize the moves, so the next one lands a little softer. And when something genuinely new and worrying does come up, we’ll be here for that too. In the meantime, eat the strawberries, and most importantly, stay curious.
One of the best parts of this work is the people I get to do it alongside. A lot of the Unbiased Science team are science communicators in their own right, and their recent stuff is all worth your time. Here are a few I’ve been reading and recommending lately:
Aimee Bernard, PhD gave a TEDx talk, “Confessions of a Scientist,” on a gap I think about constantly, which is that we train scientists for years to make discoveries and never teach them how to talk about the work.
David Higgins, MD, MPH wrote “Trust Me, AI Recommend You Vaccinate Your Children,” built around a real exam-room moment with a family who’d changed their mind about vaccinating their newborn. It’s a thoughtful case that even as AI gets eerily good at delivering vaccine facts and mimicking empathy, the hardest conversations still come down to human trust.
Sarah Berg, MD wrote “STIs Don’t Check IDs,” an OB-GYN’s case that sexual health is a lifespan conversation, including why STI rates are climbing among older adults.
Deanna Altomara, MPH wrote “Oh, Rats! From Plague to Hantavirus,” which takes you from a plague tour beneath Edinburgh to a cruise-ship hantavirus outbreak and lands on why prevention does so much of its work invisibly.
Katie Schenk, MSc, PhD wrote “Service, Trust, and the People Inside Public Health,” a Memorial Day reflection on service, moral injury, and institutional trust in the public health workforce.
My husband was an agricultural scientist who worked for over 30 years to help growers develop pest management programs. Growers don't want to use any more pesticides than they absolutely have to. Most employ every cultural practice possible to control insect and disease problems; spraying pesticides is usually the last option. Actually, individual gardeners are more likely to grab pesticides first or misuse them. And thanks for reminding people that organic does not mean pesticide-free.
"The main thing it reliably does is make people anxious about some of the healthiest food they can buy." 👍
I work in the produce industry and used to be a pest control advisor writing recommendations for crop pest management programs, including pesticide applications, for both conventional and organic systems. Thanks for your clear and accurate characterization of EWG's scare tactics.
In that case, the financial incentive is not sitting just off camera, it is well within the frame; It's the organic industry and retail interests first creating and then profiting from the anxiety of those with the most disposable income. And as you say, this results in less consumption of fresh produce by those populations who would benefit most from it.
At its core, organic production is market-based, not performance-based; organic produce is not demonstrably safer or more nutritious, but the marketing strategy appeals to those convinced that anything natural, or as close to natural as possible, is better, as you discussed in your last post. It's a marketing strategy that works for everything from detox products and cancer therapies to everyday items on the grocery store shelf.