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Fox News anchor Shepard Smith and HBO’s Bill Maher are at opposite ends of the infotainment spectrum, but they agree on one thing: Americans seem hellbent on killing ourselves.

As evidence, Smith cited that grotesquely American innovation, the bacon cheeseburger grilled in a pair of Krispy Kreme donuts instead of a bun. “It seems almost impossible, and it just seems like the stupidest thing, ” he sputtered on Tuesday’s broadcast, adding:

“It’s 1500 calories, I don’t know how many grams of fat it is, they won’t tell us…we’re told the donut burger is a big hit at a fair in West Springfield, Mass, there was a stand right there outside the city’s “Better Living” center…

…I don’t know, man, there are signs of the apocolypse, this may be one of ‘em.”

Bill Maher, meanwhile, declared that “America causes cancer” on last Friday’s Real Time in an interview with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. “We’re just such a dirty society,” he noted:

“…our way of life, the way we live, how dirty we are, the drugs we take, the food we eat, the chemicals we ingest–it’s just a cancerous country”.

Jackson did not dispute Maher’s characterization. She frankly acknowledged that the EPA has not been doing its job to protect the American people:

“We’re still catching up, right? We’re still learning all the things that industrialization has meant to us as a society, all those chemicals…we’re always playing catch-up, we’re cleaning up, we’re not preventing.”

She announced what amounts to a radical departure from the previous administration’s policies. The EPA is now “trying to get in front of chemicals before they can be put into commerce–we have 80,000 chemicals in this country put into commerce. Can we move the bar back towards thinking about what’s going to happen at the end, can we protect children, as well?”

We ingest and absorb all kinds of potentially toxic ingredients every day in our food, in the products we use, in our air and water, and the scariest part is that even the ‘experts’ really don’t know what it’s doing to us. Avoiding suicidally bad-for-you junk foods like the donut- encased cheeseburger may be a no-brainer, but how do well-intentioned parents keep their children from falling under the spell of those golden arches?

It’s an ongoing challenge, as the New York Times’ Pete Wells noted in his latest column, Happy-Meal Me. Wells caved in to his son Dexter’s desire to eat at McDonald’s and bought his son some fries and McNuggets. In so doing, he introduced Dexter to a whole range of obscure chemicals you won’t find in any kitchen:

…mono- and diglycerides, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a number of phosphates, dimethylpolysiloxane. The last one is used as a lubricant, a dry-cleaning solution, an aquarium sealant, a component of the tiles that let spacecraft plunge through the atmosphere without burning up, a treatment for head lice and the thing that makes Silly Putty elastic. McDonald’s adds it to cooking oil to avoid foaming. I can’t find any convincing evidence that it is bad for you.

Is that because the EPA’s tested dimethylpolysiloxane and found it to be safe? Or is it just one of those 80,000 chemicals on which the EPA is “playing catch-up”?

And what if it has been declared safe? After all, the EPA’s just announced that it was mistaken about the supposed safety of the popular weed killer Atrazine, as the New York Times reported yesterday:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to conduct a new study about the potential health risks of atrazine, a widely used weedkiller that recent research suggests may be more dangerous to humans than previously thought.

The chemical industry continues to insist, of course, that atrazine is perfectly safe. Just as the meat industry rushed to assure us in the wake of the New York Times devastating E. Coli exposé that it’s been totally committed to doing everything in its power to ensure that our ground beef supply is safe.

And yet, in what theTimes characterizes as part of an “expanding effort by the meat industry to make its hamburger safe,” Tyson has only just agreed, in the wake of that article, to permit testing of its trimmings for the E. Coli pathogen, thereby enabling Tyson to sell its trimmings to Costco, “one of the few large grinders to test ingredients for the pathogen as they arrive at its plant”.

Clearly, we can’t count on the meat industry–or the chemical industry–to worry about safeguarding anything beyond their own bottom lines. That’s not news. What is news is this: despite the precarious status of the newspaper business, there is still some invaluable investigative reporting being done.

And what may be even more newsworthy is the fact that under the new administration, the EPA apparently has a mandate to actually start protecting us. Stop the presses! What’s next–a Food & Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture that actually provide us with safe, healthy food? Don’t laugh; it could happen–but not if we don’t demand it.