Who doesn't love the idea of quick and easy weight loss? Imagine being able to eat nothing but ice cream, and still losing 10 pounds. It sounds a little too good to be true, and that's because it is. Weight loss is a $66 billion dollar industry, and one of the most advertised, according to U.S. Weight Loss & Diet Control Market.

Forty solid years after the Consumer Product Safety Commission implemented regulations for getting rid of lead-based paint, the US is still on the lead-based paint merry-go-round. Last week, I attended a Congressional hearing entitled “Oversight of the Federal Government’s Approach to Lead-Based Paint and Mold Remediation in Public and Subsidized Housing”, which hoped to figure out how the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) can finally be rid of the pesky threat of lead-based paint in federal housing.

When it comes to cigarettes vs. vaping, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here's why we can't preach an abstinence-only approach to nicotine.

Coffee is alternately championed and derided for its health effects. A new study introduces the genetics of caffeine metabolism into the conversation. 

If health care fixes continue to undermine the doctor-patient relationship, financial costs won't be the only price paid.

Round. Red. Good in salads and great on a BLT. Tomatoes are a typical find in the kitchens of families in the United States, so popular we are the world’s third largest producer of them.
Though some people like to engage in the “tuh-MAY-toh” versus “tuh-MAH-toh” debate, the more popular question when it comes to tomatoes has to do with their classification. Are the circular plants vegetables or fruits?
We're going to answer that once and for all. Maybe. Because science, history, and law create a lot of confusion.

In science and health, we are often looking for results that are considered to be “statistically significant.” The golden rule is if the p-value is less than 0.05, then the result is statistically significant, or “publishable.” However, the interpretation and use of p-values is often misconstrued.
What is a p-value?

Hospital Compare, a CMS website, provides "star-ratings" to hospitals based on performance. It's dropping the safety measures from the star-rating scoring, but it's maintaining the information in another database. Does removing safety measures make the ratings less useful? The answer is, as is often the case, complicated.

Can you catch herpes from double dippers? Unlikely, but it's hard to tell because what passes for science in reporting this story clearly flunks science. 

Many believe that “genetically modified organism” is a term that has some significance for interpreting the safety of food. Most life scientists – geneticists, biologists, ecologists and agronomists – are pretty certain that the opposite is true. Here's why.