1. I was on a podcast with Julie Gunlock of the Independent Women's Forum to talk about Rachel Carson and her book "Silent Spring", which argued that manmade chemicals affect the health and safety of humans.
ACSH In The Media
1. Nutella scare redux. After we criticized the EU food safety in USA Today for its badly-reasoned claim that nutella was going to give people cancer, they have promised to reexamine palm oil health risks. That's a win for science, health and evidence-based thinking a sign that governments are being forced to steer away from epidemiological associations - and find evidence for a biological mechanism. That last part is what environmental activists fear.
1. A student at Emerson College has gone John Birch Society, alleging he just sort of knows fluoridated water must be bad for us because he read it somewhere on the Internet and thinks being contrarian to accepted science and medicine is journalism. Well, it is. Shoddy journalism, anyway, and the world is already deep in that. The error he makes is a common one for people who don't understand science - a pathogen equals pathology or any chemical that can be toxic at high levels must be toxic at low levels too.
That's absolutely untrue. This has been known for centuries, even by liberal arts majors.
1. If there's a science and health list, we want to be on it, and if there is a black list I generally definitely want to be on it - but not always. In this case, the list not to be on is the Real Clear Science worst websites for 2016. As you might expect, they are the sites we criticize, like the supplement hucksters Joe Mercola and "Health Ranger" Mike Adams, food scaremonger Vani Hari (the "Food Babe" - ® Food Babe LLC) and others.
The American Council on Science and Health and has entered a content sharing agreement with the prestigious science site Live Science. Live Science, which produces excellent biomedical and health news reporting, will allow ACSH to reach millions more readers around the world.
1. Is feminism incompatible with science? Absolutely, as are most "-isms" that put an ideological agenda ahead of reason and suppress evidence that is in conflict with their cultural goal. Alex Berezow noted how neo-feminists who don't care about equality (many are in academia and are critical of academia) but need an excuse to hate science have perverted the movement's original goals. They are postmodernists, but without the clever intellectual flourishes of philosophers, and so come across as political propagandists.
1. If you read The Economist, you will note an article by our Senior Fellow In Biomedical Science Dr. Alex Berezow. The Economist audience cares about sexual cannibalism? In spiders? EVERYONE cares about that. It's lurid, it's provocative, and it's in October, which means it feels like Halloween.
Sure, it feels vaguely socialist to have the male of the species sacrificing himself for the good of the many, but parents do that all of the time.
American Council on Science and Health Director of Medicine Dr. Jamie Wells has been named one of America's Top Pediatricians by Consumers' Research Council of America.
Dr. Wells is a Board-Certified physician who previously served as a Clinical Instructor/Attending at NYU Langone, Mt. Sinai-Beth Israel and St. Vincent's Medical Centers in Manhattan. In school she was President of the Yale Science and Engineering Association, and elected President of Jefferson Medical College's Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society. She has also repeatedly been named a New York Super Doctor in New York Times magazine, making her among the top 5% of physicians as chosen by other doctors.
Sick of junk science and scaremongering about health? #GetWells!
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.
Michael Pollan, food activist and journalist, is the proverbial man trapped in the past. His latest piece for The New York Times criticizes the Obama administration for not catering to his bizarre beliefs about how food production actually works. And along he tries to smear ... the American Council's president, and you.
1. The medical testing company Theranos didn't need any more bad news - so it is odd that they went out of their way to find some. Starting on July 21st, we had been trying to put our scientist Dr. Julianna LeMieux in touch with someone - anyone - from the science part of the company, especially after “one of the top 10 medical and technological innovations in 2013” fell from grace so far in so short a time.
1. In US News and World Report, they cover a publicity briefing by Greg Glassman, CEO of the Crossfit extreme exercise empire. Glassman is trying to generate some traction for his recent publicity stunt claiming he knows that soda causes diabetes, despite the fact that the evidence is similar to claiming spoons do. Yes, people with Type 2 diabetes are more likely to drink soda, but they also...well, you go ahead and make the other analogy, I don't need to spoon feed it to you.