Radon Fear Redux, Wheatgrass Is Useless and More ACSH In The News

In Bridgeton, Missouri, some residents blame their lung troubles on what they call toxic fumes linked to radioactive waste which was linked to the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Next month, Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services will release its study on the area and the waste illegally dumped there. Residents and, of course, politicians, say they already know the answer and will continue to know it whether the study agrees or not. But is that really possible? Even the above-ground testing range in Nevada where numerous actual bombs were set off is now deemed safe.

American Council on Science and Health adviser Dr. Jerry Cuttler, who has more than 50 years of experience with nuclear radiation, says if people are getting ill, it is not from nuclear waste. Low-level radiation “is generally a health benefit,” he told the journalist at Urban News. “The natural radon level in an open area is very low. To find a harmful radon level, you would need to go into a uranium mine that has no forced ventilation.”

2. Wheatgrass is useless.

One surefire way to know a health food is useless is if Mike Adams, the self-styled "Health Ranger" and staunch opponent of science, hawks it to gullible believers on his website.

And he does.

In Wheatgrass: Superfood or Just Plain Ol’ Wheat?, Lynsey Grosfield at Modern Farmer contrasts “holistic health practitioner” Ann Wigmore, founder of the Hippocrates Health Institute who insisted wheatgrass was a “living” food, with our own William Jarvis, Ph.D, (RIP) who said, in true American Council on Science and Health fashion, “The fact that grass-eating animals are not spared from cancer, despite their large intake of fresh chlorophyll, seems to have been lost on Wigmore.”

Dear Natural News readers: it's just plain old wheat. ACSH readers, you already knew that.

3. Australian study says retirement is beneficial to seniors, but American research has conflicting results

I have a friend who retired last summer and then nine months later he died. You can bet part of me thought, don't retire, but I once also read that most people died in their beds and this did not cause me to start sleeping in a booth at the coffee shop instead of my bed.

Governments which raised taxes in order to take it upon themselves to help older constituents (they vote!) have now realized they have to increase the retirement age because there are no longer enough workers to feed all of the senior citizens modern science and medicine is now keeping alive.

Yet what age is the proper age? It's arbitrary right now. Even the age to retire is muddied by the junk science that such population scholars produce. One will claim older is better, one will claim earlier. Like economics, it's whatever you want it to be.

We recently pointed to two recent research studies and International Business Times tackled the issue using some of our work.