WARNING: Read this before you sit down to today's Thanksgiving feast.

Actually, there's no real danger. On the contrary, this may set your mind at ease. The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) is a public health and consumer education institution, with a board of 350 physicians, scientists and others, dispensing balanced analyses on issues related to food, nutrition, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and the environment. You might call it the rational antithesis to the so-called Center for Science in the Public Interest, a radical Naderite group whose mission is to continually terrify us about everything we eat, drink or breathe.

Each year, the ACSH publishes a Holiday Dinner Menu listing the toxic substances you'll be ingesting. These are not manmade or the residue of pesticides. These chemicals are all a gift from Mother Nature. Holiday Dinner Menu

Cream of mushroom soup: hydrazines

Carrots: aniline, caffeic acid

Cherry tomatoes: benzaldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, quercetin glycosides

Roast turkey: heterocyclic amines

Bread stuffing: furfural, acrylamide, ethyl carbamate, psoralens, d-limonene, dihydrazines

Cranberry sauce: furan derivatives

Broccoli spears: allyl isothiocyanate

Sweet potato: ethyl alcohol, furfural

Pumpkin pie: benzo(a)pyrene, coumarin, methyl eugenol, safrole

Coffee: benzofuran, 1,2,5,6-dibenz(a)anthracene, and so many other things you don't even want to know.

Before you send for the stomach pump, you should understand that the ACSH's intent is to put health hazards in perspective and drive home the point that potentially toxic substances are ubiquitous in nature and, unless taken in grossly excessive quantities, pose no health risk to humans. Irrational fears have been fueled by sensationalism about "rodent carcinogens," substances that have been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats when these animals are exposed to massive overdoses.

For example, furfural, one of the naturally occurring toxic chemicals in that bread stuffing, is a rodent carcinogen. But considering the difference in body weight between a human and a rodent, you would have to eat 82,600 slices of bread every day for two years to consume as much furfural as rats are given to increase their risk of cancer. That's a lot, even for Uncle Harry. Another ACSH analysis calculated that Harry would have to eat 3.8 tons of turkey to match the equivalent rat consumption that can lead to cancer. That's a lot of wishbones.

Dr. Bruce Ames and Dr. Lois Swirsky Gold, both Ph.D's at the University of California Berkeley, observe that: "No human diet can be free of naturally occurring chemicals that are rodent carcinogens. Of the chemicals that people eat, 99.99 percent are natural."

Dr. Alice Ottobini, a scientific adviser to the ACSH, explained: "We survive because we do not take in 100 cups of coffee at one time, or 100 pounds of potatoes, or 10 pounds of spinach . . . . No animal on earth could survive a day . . . if it were not capable of handling small amounts of a wide variety of foreign chemicals. It is only when we overwhelm the natural defense mechanisms of our bodies by taking in too much at one time, or too much too often, that we get in trouble."

In other words, we needn't succumb to hysterical "chemophobia" whether the chemicals are natural or manmade. Moderation is generally a good rule. (Look what happened to Britney Spears when she ate too many broccoli spears — with hollandaise sauce.)

There's no shortage of real dangers out there. We needn't obsess on imagined ones. Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family is a once-a-year event. Indulge and enjoy it. And feel free to pass the heterocyclic amines.

Mike Rosen's radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.