Weekend Briefs: ACSH and International Business Times, American Thinker and NY Times

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1. A new study came out last week showing populations that had heavy vegetarian diets have also evolved a mutation that leads to more colon cancer. They seem to have mitigated it by having a diet with a particular balance of Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids, according to International Business Times, which used our report at American Council on Science and Health as a source.  Vegetarians went bananas over it. Why? It has just as much rigor as when IARC said red meat caused cancer, a result they embraced without any critical thinking at all.

Maybe being vegetarian also leads to a mutation that stops skepticism.

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2. In American Thinker, I urge the public to stop being scared into believing they have something called "pre-diabetes" - because at least how it's defined now, it has no clinical relevance. Very few people considered to have the American Diabetes Association's definition of pre-diabetes will get Type II diabetes, so it will just lead to a lot more medication that won't help, but will cost a lot and perhaps have side effects.

In opposition, they had an alternative medicine proponent who used her article as a platform to endorse "Clinton doctor" Mark Hyman - unsurprisingly, also an alternative medicine proponent. Why would they be happy about pre-diabetes? Since few will get actual diabetes, they can claim they prevented it with mindfulness meditation or holistic eating or whatever other trend they want to create in order to write a New York Times-bestselling diet book this year.

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3. But the New York Times is not completely taken over by acupuncture-endorsements.

They have created a new Health Briefs section and their segment on folates used an evidence-based organization - us.

4. In the "let's separate health threats from health scares" department, the fringe political site Think Progress has attempted to use the Zika virus to advocate for abortion law changes in states where citizens they oppose politically live.

They imply that women living in states without any abortion guidelines will have fewer Zika brain-damaged babies than women living in states with more restrictions.

Remember when people used to care about more diversity? Now the goal is to scare everyone into voting the same way.

If you want to understand the health threat of Zika versus political health scares, you can see our analyses here.