cancer, liver disease, and cognition problems such as memory loss. As I read transcripts related to the suit, I was struck by Cochran’s exclamation, “There is always some study, and they’ll study it to death, then thirty years later, you find out it’s bad for you.… We know it’s bad for us right now!”8 In language that everyone can understand, Cochran was expressing an important precept that we have long shunned in the United States, called the precautionary principle.
