A bill recently introduced in the California State Assembly would prohibit five chemicals: brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, polyparaben, red dye #3, and titanium dioxide – all banned in Europe – from food products in California. Let’s dig past the headline.
Harm Reduction
That's a good question. Masks remain one of the non-pharmaceutical means of controlling the spread of infection. But how effective has COVID masking been in practice?
With much fanfare, the EPA announced the proposed drinking water regulations for two “forever chemicals,” PFOA and PFOS. EPA Administrator Michael Regan said, “Communities across the country have suffered far too long from the ever-present threat of PFAS pollution. That is why President Biden launched a whole-of-government approach to aggressively confront these harmful chemicals, and EPA is leading the way forward.”
A perceptive reader wrote, noting that I repeated a fictitious quotation of Francis Bacon. ChatGPT has been around for only a few months, and it seems I have already been fooled.
I was struck by this large heading on an EPA website, “Rebuilding the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program.” This program does not need to be rebuilt; it should be eliminated and consolidated with existing programs within the EPA.
Undoubtedly, nursing homes were a great source of COVID mortality. While there were multiple underlying causes, the only protection individuals in the nursing home had from the staff caring for them was staff vaccination. A new study demonstrates an interesting disparity in which staff chose to be vaccinated.
Many herbal dietary supplements are complex, highly variable, impure, and unsafe. They need better oversight.
A new study looks at an old “problem.” How do primary care physicians decide on referrals to specialists, such as surgeons? Hint: It is not the same way they choose medications.
Can we agree that whatever of the multifactorial causes of obesity you emphasize, obesity results in other health-related problems? Can we also agree that many of those multifactorial causes are present in childhood? Then doesn’t screening for obesity and early intervention make sense; that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?
With gyms closed during the height of the COVID pandemic, exercising at home became a “thing.” Not everyone had the money for a Peloton, and many of us turned to walking – after all, it was outside, we could socially distance, and it could while away some time as we “got our exercise.” A new study looks at walking and how it may trim our waistlines.
The height of absurdity may have been reached in a recent article about how the firefighters’ union is warning its members about the health risks from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in their protective gear. “We need to combat what’s killing us,” said the union president.
The most recent scare by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) over PFAS in freshwater fish was picked up by CNN and all the major news organizations and presented as fact. But the EWG models skew the results. There are other ways that EWG uses deceptive means to reach its conclusions and deliver the scariest outcomes possible.