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Given the media attention devoted to weak observational claims about health (miracle vegetables, chemophobia of the month) and the rampant mistrust of science that has resulted, it is worth asking if they're worth the expense at all. 

The answer is that they probably are, though only for smaller programs. 

If you are not familiar with the term, an observational study is just what it sounds like; in contrast to an experiment, which is what most people think of as science, an observational study instead observes a population to see what they have in common, such as the impact of various lifestyle and environmental factors on diseases. There are two types of observational studies: case-control and cohort. In my short primer ...

Summer is upon us. While you're firing up your grills, rest assured that the ACSH staff will remain diligently working so that you don't need to worry about IARC telling you that a single hot dog will give you cancer.

Here's where we appeared in recent days:

1) We keep getting love from the Washington Post. Not too long ago, Dr. Josh Bloom was interviewed by the Post for an article on how activists exploit public fear to make safe chemicals sound scary. That article was reprinted by other outlets, most recently by Pennsylvania's...

In a blow to trial lawyers hoping to profit from a sympathetic jury in San Francisco, not to mention organic trade groups and activists at the University of California San Francisco, Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos has shown she is likely to grant Monsanto's request for a new trial in the case they lost brought by trial lawyers who claim a weedkiller which can only affect the shikimate pathway in plants somehow caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma in a human.

In the first trial, an attorney from Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman assured jurors they would "change the world" if they found Monsanto liable. Brent Wisner painted a picture of terrified corporate executives lamenting a decision against them. suggesting the science community knows it is wrong and was worried about being caught....

It's impossible to live in the modern world and not be exposed to some food fad or another. The Ketogenic Diet, the Alkaline Diet, the Raw Foods Diet, the Dukan Diet, Whole30 - and that is just in the last year. Pick a fad diet and if you are in the nutrition sphere you can guess what year it happened. Try it yourself: wheat belly, grain brain, and paleo.

And the war on milk and cheese has been going on for decades, with trial lawyer groups like Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) claiming that Big Dairy was manipulating government nutrition standards. Dairy products promote excess weight gain and even increase appetite, they have long claimed, and only huge financial settlements for lawyers at CSPI would stop it.

Obviously, there is no biological...

Upon seeing what he deemed a poorly-constructed paper by a colleague in physics, Wolfgang Pauli is apocryphally said to have, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

By that he meant the author didn't even have enough command of the basics to be incorrect, it was just gibberish. This now applies to the work of MIT computer scientist Stephanie Seneff and whatever Anthony Samsel claims to have expertise in. When a collaborator of a true anti-science crank, Gilles-Éric Séralini, famous for weird claims like that GMOs are a "pesticide sponge" and who manufactured a (now retracted) paper claiming that rats somehow get cancer if they eat GMO feed, debunks you, you are "not even wrong" by people who are "not even wrong."

I don't even know what the term for a higher order "not...

Note: This article is republished with permission from the Genetic Literacy Project. The author, Dr. Geoffrey Kabat, is an ACSH advisor and epidemiologist. The topic of pesticides, and glyphosate in particular, is rife with misinformation, much of it purposeful and malicious. Dr. Kabat debunks a particularly atrocious study that ignored data that did not fit with the authors' hypothesis -- one of the hallmarks of junk science.

In early 2019, mainstream press reports on the alleged dangers of Bayer’s Roundup weed killer prominently featured an...

The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act amends the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and was signed into law June 22, 2016. It created a mandatory requirement for EPA to evaluate existing chemicals with clear and enforceable deadlines, to do so in a transparent fashion, and to do so using risk-based chemical assessments rather than rely on simple epidemiological correlations. 

EPA selected the first 10 chemicals to undergo risk evaluation under the amended TSCA and to make those understandable for the public, the American Council on Science and Health is producing risk-based evaluations of each, which will then be compiled into a free downloadable book...

Whole Foods chemists, an incongruity if ever there were one, must have a helluva job. They somehow must explain to suckers customers how the same chemical can be both good and bad for you. And also how an inorganic salt can be "organic" depending on its source. This takes a degree of creativity, and Whole Foods is nothing if not creative, especially when it comes to science. 

Let's start with meat. The company is quite clear that preserving meat with nitrates is a big no-no.

Let’s nix the synthetic nitrites and nitrates. While they occur naturally in some foods in small amounts, nitrates...

The following was written with a straight face. I swear.

"Do you take a packed lunch to work or buy a sandwich from the shop? The carbon footprint of your sandwich could be having a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions according to new research.

EurekAlert! January 24, 2018

So was this:

"Researchers at The University of Manchester have carried out the first-ever study looking at the carbon footprint of sandwiches, both home-made and pre-packaged."

Yes. It real.  And here's the paper that was referred to in the EurekAlert! 

"Understanding the impact on climate change of convenience food: Carbon...

Karl Meltzer's newest feat, setting the land speed record traversing the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, was unquestionably remarkable and therefore newsworthy. Yet among its media coverage, two of the most prominent reports played up the angle that one particular aspect of his achievement — the ultra runner's food consumption during his historic dash — was quirky, out of the ordinary, and in some ways bizarre.

However, for the most part, that was just not the case.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution and...