Whelan says she was motivated to found the American Council on Science and Health after doing research for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer about a section of the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 to ban certain chemicals from foods. With further research, she says she found that public discourse and public policy were chemophobic. Her first book, Panic in the Pantry (1976), challenged the notion, popular in the 1970s, that "natural" was better and that "chemicals" were dangerous.[4]