If people on St. John's wort were depressed before, imagine how they'll feel when they realize the supplement is interfering with their contraceptive pills. Recently, two Swedish women and at least seven British women have gotten a little more than they expected when the St. John's wort they were taking for depression interacted with their oral contraceptives, resulting in unwanted pregnancies. Sweden has now made it mandatory that all St. John's wort products carry warning labels, alerting the public to such unfortunate drug-supplement interactions. St.

There are organized marches nationwide to raise money to find a "cure" for breast cancer. Each day, the volume gets turned up on the debate over the usefulness of mammography for finding and "curing" cancer. Even the United States Post Office had a stamp advocating research to "cure" breast cancer.
Ironically, however, the real progress against breast cancer is taking place in another sphere: chemoprevention of this disease.

"Many of the states that received billions of dollars in the national tobacco settlement have invested some of those funds in the stock market, benefiting the same tobacco firms that were meant to be punished by the settlement, according to a research group."
CNSNews.com, March 12, 2002, reporting the findings of the Investor Responsibility Research Center

Marion Nestle, New York University Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies, is furious at the food industry for making Americans fat and sick. And she has written a book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, documenting her charges.

Supporters of organic agricultural systems promote their exclusive use for a variety of reasons. These include: a dislike of large agribusiness; fear of health effects from traces of synthetic pesticides, bioengineered material, or irradiated products; concern about the environmental effects of conventional agricultural systems; and finally a belief that organic products are nutritionally superior to conventionally-produced ones.

Last week's Journal of the America Medical Association reported that air pollution, particularly pollution characterized by combustion-related fine particulate matter, causes lung cancer.

A new Harvard School of Public Health study, published in the March 6 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showed a lower risk of prostate cancer in men whose diets were rich in tomatoes and tomato-based products containing the antioxidant lycopene. Results were taken from the Health Professional Follow-Up Study, in which the dietary and health histories of 47,000 men, aged 40 to 75, were tracked for a period of 12 years. It was found that those who ate two or more meals a week containing tomato products reduced their risk of prostate cancer by 24 to 36 percent.

Nobel laureate in medicine Sir Paul Nurse (Associated Press, Feb 25, 2002):
"We will always have cancer with us because of natural mistakes in the natural body, so it will never be eliminated, but I think we can do much better than we are doing now...The single most major hit we can get for short-term cancer rates is to eliminate the use of tobacco."

The following letter from an ACSH Advisor appeared in the March 11, 2002 Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick courted African countries' support for biotechnology-derived crops while on a grand tour of Africa last month. Before the trip, he accused the Europeans of "going around Africa and trying to scare people," and he blasted biotech's adversaries, calling their opposition "equivalent to that period when people were opposed to machines."

Agricultural literacy is at a low level in the land of plenty. There may be a law that dictates an inverse relationship between abundance and knowledge about the source of the abundance. We do not burden ourselves with factual information about that which we take for granted, namely, food, health, and a comfortable life in a non-threatening world. As long as the fridge is full, the car always starts, and the TV keeps entertaining, why bother to know what makes all that happen?