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The world is getting fatter, and public health experts don't know what to do about it. As we discussed in part one, a wide variety of interventions, everything from calorie labels to soda taxes, have failed to reduce obesity rates to any significant extent. Yet researchers working in this field can't bring themselves to give up on policies designed to “nudge” (or even coerce) consumers into making healthier food choices.

Here I want to examine why these interventions haven't worked and why many obesity experts seem to have such a hard time accepting this fact. Nobody knows how to rid the world of obesity, but the considerations below should at least point us in the right...

Screen Shot 2014-09-18 at 2.26.24 PMSome junk science studies can be difficult to detect. Some, however, require no effort at all. Here we have one shining example of the latter not that you could tell from all the media hype surrounding this nonsense.

The new Nature article, claiming that artificial sweeteners might contribute to obesity, seemed to be so chemically naive, that ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom, after a brief perusal of the authors and their...

The world of chemical scares is a bit like a perpetual horse race, usually with the same tired old horses –various chemicals – in the same race. Today, featured in the 5th race at Oncology Downs in New Jersey is Packet of Cancer – a four-year-old thoroughbred filly that was the prohibitive favorite at 3-5. The horse, which was a 3-1 underdog only last week, has attracted some serious wagering following the publication of a paper in PLOS Medicine about the association of two artificial sweeteners with cancer. The filly came flying out of the gate never looking back, and won by seven lengths.

Here we go again. Yet one more study in a seemingly infinite collection of them...

Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 12.25.02 PMWe thought we hammered an Israeli study on artificial sweeteners pretty hard in our Sept 18th Dispatch article Israeli study on sugar substitutes is complete bullsweet.

Maybe we did, but we were seriously out-hammered by Matt Raymond s piece Of Mice and Media: A Credulous Response to an Iffy Sweetener Study.

Raymond, the Senior Director...

754303_70954179The claim that artificial sweeteners might contribute to obesity is one we have seen many times in the past. The newest study on the subject is a research article...

Microbiome. Microbiome. Microbiome. Microbiome. Microbiome. Microbiome.

Like fashion, science and medicine can be SO trendy. Over the past few years, alteration of the gut microbiome has been blamed for everything from obesity and diabetes to maybe even climate change on Pluto. But perhaps nowhere has it been invoked more than in the ongoing witch hunt against artificial sweeteners.

One convoluted theory after another has been proposed to try to explain why artificial sweeteners are as bad for you (or worse) than sugar itself. In particular, they alter the (sigh) gut microbiome and also fool the body into thinking that sugar has been consumed simply because they are sweet—something...