ACSH offers Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss and Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln — Chair of the Agriculture Committee — seats at our impending Sound Science Caucus for their stance on genetically modified (GM) food policy.

The results of a recent study conducted by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle suggest that using fish oil supplements may reduce women s risk of developing breast cancer by 32 percent. Yesterday, Good Morning America medical contributor Dr. Marie Savard reminded viewers that these results are only preliminary but show promise as a preventive measure against breast cancer.

Duff Wilson of the New York Times presents new CDC data indicating that the teenage smoking rate has not declined fast enough, failing to reach the goal of 16 percent by 2010. Currently, high school students make up approximately 20 percent of smokers.

ACSH is joining several public health and interest groups as an amicus, or friend of the court, to appeal the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision to treat e-cigarettes as drug delivery systems rather than as tobacco products. E-cigarettes are a recently developed nicotine alternative that mimics tobacco smoking without the inhalation or emission of the harmful tobacco combustion products that come from smoking cigarettes.

The U.S. Apple Association (USApple), a national trade association representing all divisions of the apple industry, is advising Alzheimer’s patients to drink one, 8-ounce glass of apple juice per day in order to improve their mood and behavior. According to a clinical trial of 21 Alzheimer patients between the ages of 72 to 93, an intake of two, 4-ounce servings of apple juice daily for one month improved anxiety, apathy, agitation, depression and delusions.

Cancer incidence rates and the number of deaths due to cancer continue to decline in the United States, according to the Cancer Statistics 2010 report issued by the American Cancer Society (ACS). The incidence of cancer has decreased by 1.3 percent per year from 2000 to 2006 in men and 0.5 percent per year from 1998 to 2006 in women, while cancer death rates have dropped 21 percent since 1991 among men and 12 percent since 1992 among women.

In his response to the Center for Science in the Public Interest s (CSPI) threat to sue if they do not remove toys from their Happy Meals, McDonald s CEO Jeff Skinner castigates CSPI for their inflammatory rhetoric and believes they owe Americans an apology:

Yesterday we commented on Mayor Michael Bloomberg s endorsement of a plan to ban smoking in parks and beaches based in part on a New York City-funded study in 2009 claiming that 57 percent of non-smoking New York City adults, compared to 45 percent nationally, tested positive for the presence of cotinine, a marker for nicotine exposure.
With due diligence, ACSH s Jeff Stier found the original publication of the cited study which states:

ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross greeted staff this morning with a spirited Buon giorno! upon his return from the July 2-7 Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) conference series in Turin, Italy during which ACSH hosted a presentation on Reducing the toll of smoking-related disease and death: the case for tobacco harm reduction. The three keynote speakers included Karl-Olov Fagerstrom, Karl Erik Lund, and Lars Ramstrom world-renowned science and policy experts on tobacco and nicotine.

Smoking Cessation Can Tobacco Be Part Of The Solution?
Turin, Italy (July 6, 2010) -- The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) today led a panel of the world s leading tobacco and nicotine experts on science and policy in the area of Tobacco Harm Reduction i.e. how smokeless tobacco products can be used as a small backfire to put out the larger, more deadly forest fire of cigarette smoking.