The April 9 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is a theme issue. All the research reports deal with some aspect of obesity, one of the nation's increasingly prevalent health threats. Obesity onset is often insidious: a person doesn't go from being a healthy weight to obese overnight. It can take many years of small changes in behavior to lead to obesity. A new report on data from the venerable Nurses' Health Study at Harvard documents one factor that can increase the risk of obesity.

Submitted by
The American Council on Science and Health
March, 2003
Overview

There seems to be some disconnect from reality when one hears strident voices dogmatically proclaiming that our food system has "failed" and must be entirely transformed, or that the "Green Revolution" (which boosted crop yields through improved fertilizer use) is a failure. People who say that must think, as Tertullian (and later St.

Bullies would call people sissies for being afraid of swing sets, but some of those same bullies probably grow up to complain about chemicals in their environment, which are far less dangerous than swing sets. Take the case of pressure-treated wood.

Somehow, the sociology of bogus scares seems all the more predictable when you see it play out in a foreign land, perhaps because you can ignore the cultural nuances that give a scare the appearance of legitimacy to natives and keep your eyes on the illogic of the scaremongers.

The authors of the short volume Misconceptions about the Causes of Cancer (UC Berkeley scientists Lois Swirsky Gold, Thomas H. Slone, Neela B. Manley, and Bruce N. Ames) deserve a great deal of credit for having the courage to write a somewhat dry book. But let me explain.

A New York City ban on smoking in bars goes into effect this coming Sunday, and a statewide ban goes into effect four months later. Some see it as reasonable regulation. Others condemn smoking but question the rationale for the regulations. And some see it as a direct blow against liberty. The differing opinions were nicely summed up by the article "Pataki Inks Strict Smoking Law" in today's New York Sun, which quoted, among others, ACSH's own Jeff Stier:

Not everyone is celebrating this year's fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick's achievement: the deciphering of the double helix structure of DNA. To some, the molecular biology of DNA is a symbol of the much-despised, modern, Western, reductionist science that is blamed for every conceivable ill from imperialism and male domination of women to environmental degradation.
Break It Down, Build It Up

We know that cigarettes are bad for our health, but there is an indirect way they can kill that we rarely stop to think about. Cigarettes are the number one cause of fatal house fires.

The Toll

A grim reminder that almost anything, not just synthetic chemicals, can be toxic in extraordinarily large amounts:
A Florida baby sitter was charged with murdering a 3-year-old girl by forcing her to drink so much water that she died of "acute water intoxication," police said on Monday...the child, Rosita Gonzalez, died of hyponatremia, which occurs when the body contains so much water that sodium levels are dangerously diluted, causing cells to malfunction.
Reuters, March 10