In California, any product containing a chemical known to cause cancer in laboratory animals cannot be sold without a warning label, according to Proposition 65, a state consumer-protection law established in 1986.
But one watchdog group plans to sue a large retailer of natural and organic foods to prove just how ridiculous the law is.

One of the freedoms we Americans hold dear is freedom of choice we want to be free to choose where we live, our type of transportation, what we wear (or don't), who our leaders are, and what we eat and drink. And in most cases, we really do have a lot of choice. Nowhere is this more true than with respect to food. It would be nice, however, if we could make reasonable, informed choices about our diets. Since most of us aren't nutrition experts, we rely on those who are to help us make at least some of those choices, at least some of the time.

Every year over 1.5 million adults choose to have some type of vision correction surgery to rid themselves of glasses and/or contact lens dependence. The most popular of these surgeries is LASIK. While glasses and contacts correct a person's eyes with a prescription, LASIK uses a laser to put the prescription directly on a person's cornea the front, clear portion of the eye. The LASIK procedure can correct relatively high degrees of nearsightedness and astigmatism as well as farsightedness.

Concern about weight and the drive to be thin increase the risk that girls will become daily smokers by the time they're eighteen or nineteen years old, according to a new study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The study appeared in the June 2002 issue of Preventive Medicine.

All right, we admit we've added one more lawsuit to an already litigious universe, but we did it for a good reason: to draw attention to absurd California regulations.
Have you noticed that nearly every square inch of California is now covered with stickers warning you that the state of California is aware of "known" carcinogens on the premises? Thank Proposition 65, a regulation under which anything that can even plausibly be called a cancer risk to lab rats at incredibly high doses must be decked out in this fashion.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A U.S. health education group on Wednesday took legal action against the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods in a bid to highlight what it called absurd food health scares.
A legal notice targeting whole-wheat and organic bread sold by the U.S. chain Whole Foods Market was filed by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) after a worldwide scare over acrylamide, which can cause cancer in animals.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest started its campaign against trans fats six years ago, and ACSH warned back then that the folks at CSPI are a bunch of irresponsible scare-mongers, always claiming in the fine print that they don't mean to alarm anyone but always knowing that their periodic anti-food pronouncements do just that. (Trans fats, like any fats, can be bad for the heart if eaten in excess, but there is nothing strange or toxic or especially insidious about them.)

As befits any birthday celebration, Americans will celebrate this July 4 with food, music, pageantry, and, of course: fireworks!
Who cannot remember the thrill of their first fireworks display, the childish wonder that is rekindled each Fourth? Indeed, many would argue that fireworks are what make this holiday special.
But would anyone say that such celebrations are worth the nearly 100 million fireworks-related injuries cost Americans annually?

By Todd Seavey
Neither ACSH's assistant director of public health Ashlee Dunston nor our medical director Dr. Gilbert Ross think the new nicotine-laced (or "nico") water is a particularly useful or desirable product, but they disagree on whether the FDA followed its own regulatory logic in deciding to ban the product. Whether the FDA should be in the business of regulating at all is a debate that will have to be left for another time.

For many people who smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, abstinence seems impossible. Now doctors and public-health officials are debating whether it's even always necessary.