Today is my mother's 90th birthday. She has the dubious distinction of being born the very day World War I began -- July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after it failed to meet the conditions of an ultimatum it sent on July 23 following the Sarajevo assassination. Wife, mother, "career woman" (she served as pioneer self-help book author Dale Carnegie's personal secretary in the early 1940s) , she has seen a lot of life and a substantial amount of societal change -- almost all for the better.

CEI-affiliated Soso Whaley contrasted her weight loss with the weight gain of her fellow McDonald's customer/documentarian Morgan Spurlock (noting ACSH's role) in a July 24 letter to the Washington Times:

A July 26 Los Angeles Times article by Johanna Neuman about the Center for Science in the Public Interest notes ACSH's take on them:

Those Americans who crave being taken care of by the government will be comforted by the latest from Medicare: Obesity is no longer banned from the list of illnesses covered by our national health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. The "disease-ification" of America continues its march...
Click here to read the rest of Dr. Gilbert Ross's counterpoint column from the Daily News.

Irradiated foods dangerous? Here we go again. And this time, it isn't the media sounding the health (scare) alarm but members of the science community. Which just goes to show, having a medical degree does not guarantee a degree of rationality.

This past weekend -- a few days after ACSH's annual staff party at the beach -- I took a car service back to New York. It was relatively early Sunday morning, but the Garden State Parkway was packed -- although traffic was moving. We were not on the parkway more than thirty minutes when I saw an alarming site: three deer feeding on the grass, inching closer to the highway, apparently ready to sprint into moving traffic. Over the years, we have seen deer on the parkway before -- but never in a cluster, and never so close to moving cars.

Health advice abounds these days, instructions on what to eat, what to wear (or not), what pills to take or avoid, and how much sun to expose oneself to all supposedly based on scientific research. Reliance on reports of scientific evidence can sometimes be tricky, however, especially when those reports come from preliminary or otherwise unsubstantiated experiments and observations. In addition to these, though, several examples of supposedly solid, "everyone knows" advice come to mind, advice that may not be as solid as once thought.

The New York Times Science section yesterday discussed the class of pharmaceuticals commonly called "statins." These drugs all reduce blood cholesterol levels, particularly the form of cholesterol called LDL, the "bad" cholesterol responsible for narrowing the arteries supplying blood to the heart and brain. Such cholesterol-containing deposits, known as atheroma, lead to heart attacks and strokes if not treated, either by drugs (such as statins) or interventions such as angioplasty or bypass surgery.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed an amendment allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada and unspecified "other countries," a seeming reversal of current law. I say seeming because in fact this amendment is likely to be eliminated when the House and the Senate meet to coordinate the final form of the bill. Nevertheless, politicians and pundits seem to be in agreement: drug importation is an idea whose time is at hand, if not this year, then next.

Who was quoted in a Sunday newspaper trying to reassure people by saying the following?
"The key thing to remember is that all the products are well within the set safety limits and they are absolutely safe."
A) The spokesperson for a pesticide trade association.B) The spokesperson for a chemical company.C) The spokesperson for an organic food company.D) The spokesperson for a major multinational food company.