The Consumer's Good Chemical Guide is a balanced account of chemicals such as perfumes, sweeteners, alcohol, cholesterol, fats, fibre, painkillers, PVC, dioxins, nitrates and carbon dioxide, which have often been the cause for media alarms and popular concerns, but mainly wrongly so.

• Published: 1994
• Publisher: W. H. Freeman
• ISBN: 0716745054

Did you know?

This book was the winner of the UK Science Book Prize in 1995. It was written after I was approached by Dr Michael Rodgers, a book commissioning editor, who knocked on my office door at Imperial College London one day in 1993. He was an enthusiastic reader of The Independent newspaper for which I wrote the 'Molecule of the Month' column and he liked it. He suggested I write a book along the same lines, but looking in more depth at areas where chemistry played a part in everyday life. This gave me a chance to explain things which were often presented as alarming. A year later it was published and to my surprise it won the Rhône Poulence Science Book Prize.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
1. Perfumes
2. Sweetness and light
3. Alcohol
4. Cholesterol, fats and fibre
5. Painkillers and painful decisions
6. PVC
7. Dioxins, the world's deadliest toxins?
8. Nitrate
9. Carbon dioxide CO₂
10. Take care
• Appendix of chemical data
• Bibliography
• Index