Too much caffeine during pregnancy could increase the risk of miscarriage, which is a pregnancy loss before twenty weeks of gestation, according to a new study being published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology). But if you pick up the most recent issue of the journal _Epidemiology_, you will find a study stating that there is no link between miscarriage and caffeine consumption -- so what should a woman contemplating pregnancy believe?

A January 22, 2008 blog entry by Diana Young, R.D., notes ACSH's survey of Nutrition Accuracy in Popular Magazines:

This piece first appeared on MedicalProgressToday.com on January 18, 2008.

A Denver man, Wayne Watson, is suing the grocery store where he bought microwave popcorn which he ate daily -- about two bags per day. The popcorn was flavored with diacetyl -- naturally found in butter and some other dairy products. Diacetyl, when inhaled in large amounts, is thought to be responsible for a rare lung disease -- bronchilitis obliterans. It has been diagnosed at unusually high rates in workers in a factory that produced the butter-flavored snack.

Reuters' wire service does a good job of finding and reporting on health stories -- perhaps too good. This morning, for example, I received a short story about a New Zealand study on older women, which found that those who took calcium supplements for five years were more likely to experience a heart attack than those who did not. What the story didn't say, though, is where this study was published -- or even if it was. Perhaps it was just a report presented at a scientific meeting -- which would mean it hadn't been peer-reviewed, and thus could be considered preliminary.

"Oh great, my child's going to be a mutant," says Lou Terrier as the woman explains to him why she wants to look inside his car.
--First line of a "Men's Health" article
The current issue of Men's Health magazine contains an article that, while making every effort to be scary and authoritative, actually contains no good advice about anything relevant to men's -- or anyone's -- health.

Nora Ephron's many-faceted career includes acclaim as a film director, producer, screenwriter, and novelist. Now she may also claim fame as an intuitive epidemiologist -- thanks to her recent column in the New York Times ("The Chicken Soup Chronicles" ).

New York, NY -- January 14, 2008. When it comes to health issues, who should you trust to give you the truth: celebrities or scientists?

Along the lines of "you can have too much of a good thing," a recent report in the British Medical Journal describes the result of over-consumption of sugarless gum sweetened with sorbitol, a sugar alcohol.

The Food and Drug Administration has finally taken action against pharmacies that sell so-called bio-identical hormone therapy. Last week, letters from the FDA were sent to seven compounding pharmacies, instructing them to stop using false and misleading terminology such as "bio-identical" when selling their products. Furthermore, the FDA told the pharmacies to discontinue the use of estriol, a form of the hormone estrogen, which is essentially an unapproved drug.