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California has given up all pretense of being a state governed by reason or common sense: Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled that coffee must carry a cancer warning label. The judge’s ruling is scientifically illiterate.

Coffee has been consumed widely since about the 1600’s without any apparent ill effects. Therefore, the scientific burden of proof is on those who say that coffee is dangerous.

Instead, the lawsuit has turned science upside-down by requiring coffee companies to prove that their product isn’t unsafe. That is absurd, not only because it violates 400 years of common sense about coffee, but because it is impossible to prove a negative. Science also cannot prove that ghosts aren’t real. Perhaps all California residences should carry a...

176522797For years, we ve been hearing about how the obesity epidemic will pose an ever-greater public health threat if we don t somehow manage to slow it down. Obesity puts one at risk for diabetes, debilitating arthritis and other chronic ills. And according to a new study published in The Lancet Oncology, excess body weight is associated with about 3.6 percent of cancers worldwide about 481,000 new cancer cases each year.

Researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) led by Dr. Melinda Arnold used data from 2012 on...

Do you think video games have led to more violent attacks by young people? You are not alone. Lots of people do. It was in every major newspaper because a meta-analysis once showed it was so.  But then another meta-analysis showed that belief is false.

Journalists gushed over both claims(1) even though one was suspect to anyone who understands the nature of selection bias in meta-analyses. So let's discuss what a meta-analysis is and what it can and cannot do. 

What meta-analysis is: It is just what it sounds like, an analysis of analyses, which is better than a literary criticism of literary criticisms, though in...

Stonyfield Farm, an organic corporation started by Samuel Kaymen in 1983, really rocketed to prominence when its then president, Gary Hirshberg, discovered a way to increase his market share with not much marketing cost at all: where most companies marketed by saying all the benefits and improvements they have, Hirshberg began marketing what it did not have. And that missing thing was science.

Lots of sugar? His yogurt has that. Nonetheless, Hirshberg began marketing his yogurt as baby food. Powdered milk imported on giant emissions-belching ships from foreign countries? It has that. Nonetheless, Hirshberg began marketing it as "organic" and...

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1. Bleacher Report notes that Pop Warner has become the first National Football Organization to ban kickoffs. Obviously kids should be kids, but with increasing concern about concussions in developing brains, this was just a matter of time. However, as we noted in the peer-reviewed document on concussions they referenced,...

Are you afraid of developing dementia in your golden years? If so, a few simple changes to your diet may be in order, according to Dr. Uma Naidoo, a nutritional psychiatrist at Harvard University and the author of “This Is Your Brain on Food." In a piece for CNBC over the weekend, Naidoo highlighted five troublesome foods: added sugars, fried foods, high-glycemic-load carbohydrates, alcohol and nitrates in cured meats. There is some evidence, she argued, that limiting consumption of these items may “fight inflammation and promote brain health, sharp thinking and good decision-making.”

There's no denying the connection between diet and brain...

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...

E-cigarettes heat liquid to create a vapor that often contains nicotine and/or flavoring. Often they are inhaled because smokers use them to quit (smoking cessation) or to replace cigarettes (harm reduction.) As e-cigarettes have grown more popular, they have become controversial, and that means rebellious youth may want to give them a try.

Since they are a tobacco product, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been worried that rebellious experimentation might be a gateway to real cigarettes, but surveys so far show little migration. And since e-cigarettes are still unregulated (see the American Council on Science and Health testimony on proposed...

The terms "natural" and "organic" have spurred a cottage industry in which companies and internet sleazebags compete to suck money out of the thoroughly manipulated and misguided American public. And it's been a smashing success! 

For example, how many of you know that organic foods:

  1. Are grown using chemicals -  pesticides and herbicides. To be certified organic, farmers are permitted to use chemicals from a different list, all of which have their own properties, including toxicity. 
  2. Offer no additional nutritional value than their conventional counterparts.
  3. Cost a whole lot more than their conventional counterparts.

And did you know that:

  1. Lead is natural
  2. So is uranium
  3. And so are dioxins (1)...

1. NPR used us to fact check the claims of a California judge who declared that coffee must come with a cancer warning - because the beans are roasted and IARC has declared everything a carcinogen. Various regional NPR sites also carried us. The links are at the bottom.

No one really pays attention to these warning labels in California by now - IARC has also declared bacon, tea and toast, plus the frying pan for the egg (so basically of breakfast) a carcinogen - but it's the trial lawyers who are behind this. In the 1970s, the litigation group Center for Science in the Public...