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1. Dr. Gary Null, one of the Four Horsemen of the Alternative (along with Oz, Chopra and Weil), is now most famous for hosting a conspiracy theory radio program and producing straight-to-video movies funded by organic food groups.

Environmental Working Group has never produced a science study but they have overturned 500,000 biologists, according to Null, while the US EPA, which just cleared glyphosate of weird claims made by an IARC Working Group that was hijacked by an Environmental Defense Fund consultant, is secretly suppressing damaging data about Monsanto. 

He makes even wackier claims, like that former FDA official and current ACSH friend Dr. Henry I Miller, has "a history of denying smoking’s association to cancer and heart disease" - his source...

November 23, 2007: Giving Thanks, Donations, and Dispatches

-- ACSH staffers (from their respective hometowns) hope everyone had a delicious Thanksgiving yesterday. (We also hope you shared your ACSH Holiday Dinner Menu with your family! If you did not request a copy, you can download one here.)

-- ACSH Trustee -- and past president of the New York Academy of Sciences -- Rodney Nichols suggested we invite ACSH donors to have an "honorary seat" at our morning table, weighing in on the day's news topics, and asking questions. We loved the idea!

So, we are inviting you to sponsor a morning meeting. With a donation of $250 or more, you receive a seat at our table, as you join us...

ACSH Phthalate Panel:

C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD, Chair;
Daland R. Juberg, PhD;
Elissa P. Benedek, MD;
Ronald W. Brecher, PhD, CChem, DABT;
Robert L. Brent, MD, PhD;
Morton Corn, PhD;
Vincent Covello, PhD;
Theron W. Downes, PhD; Shayne C. Gad, PhD, DABT;
Lois Swirsky Gold, PhD;
F. Peter Guengerich, PhD;
John Higginson, MD, FRCP;
W. Hans K °nemann, PhD, RIVM;
James C. Lamb IV, PhD, DABT;
Paul J. Lioy, PhD;
Kimberly M. Thompson, ScD

To the Editor, Medscape*

We thank Dr. Schettler for his review[1] of the Report of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) Phthalate Panel[2] and for the opportunity to reaffirm our conclusions and to address his criticisms. All panelists received a copy of...

A new paper grabs media attention by suggesting household chemicals cause obesity in babies - and it does so by changing the gut microbiota, whatever that is.

Oh no. What household chemicals are we talking about? Let's get rid of those. Well, we don't know. Nor do the authors of the paper. As if 'changes in gut microbiome', the 2000s version of endocrine disruption hysteria, was not suspect enough, they used Body Mass Index (BMI) of infants and toddlers, which makes BMI even less valid than it otherwise is. The only correlation they could find, in their look at data from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) birth cohort on microbes in infant fecal matter, was that families who...

Monsanto, perhaps to rebrand itself, and certainly to remain a leader in agricultural biotech has helped establish and fund Pairwise Plants a start-up using CRISPR-Cas9 technologies to modify seeds. They have given the new company money and their vice-president of global biotechnology to head the start-up, so this is a strategic business move not simply hedging their bets. This is important because CRISPR-Cas9 may genetically modify a crop, but it doesn’t necessarily result in a genetically modified organism, the dreaded GMO. To understand how that can be, we need to understand both genetic modification and federal regulations.

Mutagenesis

Mutagenesis broadly refers to creating a change in DNA (a mutation), and until the advent of agriculture, about 10,...

In America, we have abdicated our personal responsibility regarding food to the government. With FDA and USDA we are guided by bans, subsidies, and taxes, lest we be rudderless about how to eat breakfast. Our parameters are food pyramids and nutritional guidelines and IARC warnings and activist groups promoting scary agrichemical stories and newspapers touting miracle vegetables.

But evidence? That's lacking. 

In 2008, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told us if we ate less meat global warming would be halted. Meat was 18 percent of human-induced...

1. Dr. Alex Berezow set off a Seattle firestorm last week when he announced that misguided policies, which had led to a surge in homelessness (and therefore drugs and crime) had caused him to buy a house outside the city. In the Seattle Times, Alex notes his ongoing concern, and that when he asked the City Council member he voted for to provide insight on how they will address the problem, she compared him to Hitler. Not easy to take for a guy whose grandparents were fortunate enough to survive Germany under the Nazis.

Seattle used to pride itself being an equally nice but more practical version of Seattle. Now it is a very...

Decades ago, when activist groups were promoting every trace chemical they could find as a carcinogen (1), the American Council on Science and Health debunked a lot of those myths with the help of Walter Cronkite, the long-time CBS anchor who had become known as “the most trusted man in America.”

The documentary was called "Big Fears, Little Risks" and what we importantly noted was that an alarming number of cancers were caused by smoking and obesity. Joining Cronkite in that documentary were people like Dr. John Higginson, the first director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and Dr. Bruce Ames, creator of the Ames Test. Cronkite was already a legend and that documentary made him more so.

...
Does this image scare you? If so, please donate to Friends of the Earth. Credit: Westerhoff and Schoepf/ASU, CC BY-ND Does this image scare you? If so, please donate to Friends of the Earth. Credit: Westerhoff and Schoepf/ASU, CC BY-ND

An in-house study commissioned by the activist group Friends of the Earth unsurprisingly found exactly what the anti-science environmentalists hoped to find: nanoparticles of hydroxyapatite(1) with a needle-like shape were in baby formula.

They...

Just about every health guru on the planet, as well as many respected science organizations, has their advice regarding purported inflammatory and anti-inflammatory foods and their purported role in the prevention or development of a myriad of diseases. But is this advice based upon a clear understanding or a premature assumption of the biological reactions which are occurring with various foods after they have been digested? 

Since this issue is far too expansive and thus virtually impossible to isolate all of the incredulous comments regarding anti-inflammatory diet plans, I am going to use a group who many would normally consider as being on “top of the food chain” so to speak regarding sound nutrition science advice. Most individuals would agree that the following group...