Acai breakfast bowls are available in nearly every trendy smoothie and juice bar. But if you haven’t indulged in this particular "superfood" fad yet, you haven’t missed out. Turns out acai bowls don’t actually provide a healthy start to the day after all. That's because they're nutritionally equivalent to three bowls of Froot Loops.

If you're a consumer of science news, or just a curious person looking for information on nutrition or medicine, you have to learn how to spot junk science. Especially from sources that are typically reliable. Here are a few guidelines that can help separate sound research from sneaky misinformation.

A long campaign season might make American politicians uniquely incentivized not to solve problems. It's easier to raise money and scare up enough votes to get elected by promising change, rather than actually delivering it. This harms public health.

In the wake of over 1,000 injuries and dozens of deaths due to vaping, the public is right to be concerned about the safety of e-cigarettes. Given that we have covered this issue in some depth, we wanted to provide a resource that answers as many questions as possible and provides links to our other articles.

Four sips from the firehose that is Internet content: Spicy and bitter are ways plants tried to dissuade you from eating them; CRISPR, in service of animal welfare, hits a snag; a podcast contrasts Nathan's Hot-Dog Eating Contest to chemotherapy, and good news science is alive and beautifully well.

Some parents are reluctant vaccinators. That's because of the sheer number of immunizations recommended for their infant in the first year of life. Anti-vaxxers have broadened that argument, suggesting and that there's no scientific basis for the schedules. Now, it's more complicated than their alarmist memes, but why let facts get in the way of a viral meme, right? Spoiler alert: the anti-vaxxers are wrong.

Instead of getting a flu shot, a Columbia University professor who believes in natural remedies chose a "tincture of elderberry." Her effort was rewarded with cyanide poisoning.

The use of self-reported behavior has been an Achilles heel of sorts, regarding the certainty of research outcomes. A new study shows not only that "self-reports" may be incorrect, but the degree of uncertainty introduced by them varies with the self-reporter's age, education and nationality.

A new study estimates that 25% of our healthcare spending is wasted. Physicians, the most easily squeezed, account for about a third. Market failures -- a term for opaque, high prices for pharmaceuticals and the high cost of administrative "complexity" -- account for the other two-thirds.

The science of our health and nutrition has been a hot mess for some time, with multiple conflicting studies all claiming the scientific truth. The recent study on red meat's role in our health is different in several meaningful ways: in how it reports outcomes; how it communicates the certainty of the findings; its intellectual transparency; and to whom it is addressed. Let’s break it down.