I should be receiving a massive salary from Greenpeace and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. But let me explain.

The following letter to the editor appeared in the August 5, 2004 Wall Street Journal:

Recently two items of interest to medical providers and consumers appeared in the press:

"This was worse than labor" read the opening line of an Associated Press piece yesterday. What caused this mother of two such pain was not the repeated slamming of her fingers in a car door or an accidental fall on her tailbone. She was recalling her recent experience with the foodborne bacterial pathogen, salmonella. The source of the outbreak, which has afflicted over 300 individuals in five states, is not one of the usual suspects.

Readers of ACSH's website know that we have been skeptical for years about the value of antioxidant supplements for the treatment or prevention of various diseases like cancer or heart disease (see pieces here, here, and here).

For Immediate Release
WASHINGTON, DC, August 2, 2004 -- Consumers Against Pharmaceutical Profits (CAPP) formerly known as the Committee Against New Drug Innovation (CANDI), calls on officials to end the dangerous practice of buying cheap drugs from foreign Internet pharmacies. States such as Minnesota and Wisconsin are encouraging their citizens to purchase drugs from foreign Internet pharmacies despite the fact that these pills, while less expensive than the ones monitored by the FDA, are sometimes known to be counterfeit.

An August 1 AP article by J.M. Hirsch quotes ACSH's Dr. Ruth Kava and notes that fruits and vegetables aren't all that expensive, despite people frequently claiming that cost prevents them from consuming these items (and as ACSH's Jeff Stier has said, the low cost of fruits and vegetables undermines NYU nutrition activist Marion Nestle's argument that obesity is caused by the dangerously low price of fast food):

While the attacks on the World Trade Center have had incalculable effects on Americans, a recently released and widely publicized study gives hope that at least one of the effects of the disaster the release into the air of a substance known, at high doses, to be a carcinogen is not a long-term health concern even for those who spent a lot of time near the site.1

The Senate is currently considering a piece of legislation, already approved by the House, to legalize the importation to the U.S. of pharmaceuticals from dozens of countries around the world. Like some pharmaceutical bill from hell, it would undermine the foundations of modern pharmaceuticals -- the safety and efficacy that have made the U.S. drug industry the envy of the world and the source of the majority of the world's new pharmaceuticals for decades.

For years now, scaremongers have been trying to frighten consumers with the specter of so-called "Frankenfoods," especially food plants altered by gene-splicing to include pesticide resistance or higher levels of particular nutrients. Several years ago, for example, alarmist groups raised the fear that a protein added to StarLink corn would cause fatal allergic reactions in consumers. It didn't happen. But that hasn't stopped such accusations from getting much media play and causing some consumers to mistrust the latest methodologies.