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At a press conference in New York City, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) released two new books on terrorism preparedness and response.

During scenes from the movie The Secret Lives of Dentists, Dana and David Hurst are seen undergoing an unholy combination of adultery and viral gastroenteritis. While Dana (Hope Davis) and their three kids are all feverish and vomiting, David (Campbell Scott) responds to the illness and betrayal in his family by . . . pulling out a pack of smokes.

It's the first day of autumn, which is a good time to ask whether you suffered any shark attacks or nuclear power plant accidents this summer. Probably not, though that's the sort of outlandish risk the media love to do stories about rather than familiar but greater risks such as overexposure to the sun.

[Editor's note: We admire Sandy Szwarc for pointing out some of the excesses in America's war on obesity, such as lawsuits now brewing against fast food chains. But our nutrition director, Dr. Ruth Kava, objects to Szwarc's promotion of an odd, revisionist theory about obesity: that we are neither consuming more nor exercising less but are getting fat precisely because dieting causes metabolic changes that induce obesity. TS]

"No Smoking," the ubiquitous sign in public buildings, should also be present in another building your home. According to the August issue of the British Medical Journal, University of Warwick researchers recommend banning all smoking in parents' homes in order to decrease the potential harm of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) to babies.

The invaluable Snopes.com, which exposes hoaxes, notes an e-mail that's been making the rounds that warns people about purported dangers from heated or frozen plastic containers. Here is the text of the e-mail, with some commentary from HealthFactsAndFears.com:

Editor's note: People sometimes think of smoking as little more dangerous than countless other bad habits, so the idea of quitting through nicotine replacement therapy or pharmaceuticals that combat nicotine cravings may strike some as counterintuitive as though it were a mere switching from one substance to another. But smoking kills about a third of users and has many other negative health effects (see ACSH's book about Cigarettes), while drugs to aid smoking cessation just might save your life.

Editor's note: We just received this letter, a reminder that weighing long-term risks and benefits is often hardest for the young, which is what makes them such an important market for cigarette manufacturers. To help kids get a better handle on the risks, we'll soon publish a teen version of our book Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You, and for smokers of all ages interested in knowing some of the quit-assist options, there's our book Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century.

Suppose your gracious new neighbor took you aside one day and quietly warned that serving non-organic fruits and vegetables to your family was endangering your kids' health. Suppose she offered a professional-looking "index of danger" showing your supermarket's peaches, apples, spinach, celery, and potatoes were all too dangerous to eat. You'd probably be devastated.

As one might have expected, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is taking a wrong-headed approach to solving the problem of the increasing obesity of American youth. According to their latest press release, CSPI thinks that "Replacing soda and junk foods with healthful drinks and snacks...can help combat the skyrocketing rates of obesity in children and teens." Would that it were true.

Here at the American Council on Science and Health, under the leadership of our president, Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, we've always thought of ourselves as cautious, non-panicky promoters of common sense on nutrition matters. And we tend to think of the Center for Science in the Public Interest as scaremongers, always looking for new foods to denounce.

A trip to the supermarket should be a simple task, but nowadays it seems that you need a science degree to figure out which foods should be on your shopping list. Due to revised Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules regarding health claims on products, it is about to become even more difficult. The new health claims will allow food packages to communicate possible health benefits as opposed to proven benefits. The new food label guidelines will allow scientifically supported health claims to be made on food packages, but this refers to scientific support of almost any strength.

Executive Summary

Introduction

If there is one bit of nostalgia that is widely shared by anti-modernists and many in the mainstream as well, it is the belief that our diets are bad and getting worse. What's more, our global fast food chains are purportedly corrupting the diets of other peoples. One way to have a best-selling book with minimum effort and thought is to come up with new "evidence" or examples of how horrible modern nutrition is.

Plants do not have digestive systems, but they do have a genome like the rest of life as we know it (unless one counts viruses as a life form). However, the furor over transgenic ("genetically modified") crops has given rise to the belief among many that foodstuffs such as tomatoes do not have genes unless biotechnologists put them there and do not have toxins unless those toxins originate in factories (just this week, New York Times writer Marian Burros wrote another article implying the purity of organic food, and she is far from alone in purveying that message).

Golden Ages, like most any mythic memory, are less about the past than about the present and a set of ideological guidelines meant to transform it. Tradition sanctifies. If it is alleged that some herbal medicine has been used for thousands of years, then it is thought it must have some efficacy that modern medicine cannot match. After all, that which is of ancient vintage has not only survived the test of time but has the added virtue of being closer to nature.

A multitude of dietary gospels are preached in the media, but only a small portion of the population are pure practitioners of any one of them. To hear all the talk of toxins and poisons that standard modern diets supposedly foist on us, one would think that those of us who aren't following the latest fad diets are on a toboggan ride toward debilitation and death. Strange as it may seem to the true believers, though, the evidence indicates the general public is moving in the opposite direction, toward longer life and better health.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently instituted more lenient regulations regarding the level of scientific evidence needed to note health benefits of certain foods on packages. The FDA determined the benefits of nuts to be at a "B" level on its new ranking system of A (scientifically proven) to D (almost no evidence), according to Lauren Neergaard of the Associated Press. Previously, the FDA did not permit food manufacturers to make qualified health claims on its products.

The summer months often bring bad news: poolside accidents, amusement park mishaps, and hyponatraemic encephalopathy. What? Yes, drinking too much water can cause a serious condition characterized by a lack of salt in the blood, leading to water imbalance and water build-up in the brain. Hyponatraemia actually means low (hypo) sodium (natr) levels in the body. Most recently, a female marathon runner in a 2002 Boston race died because she ingested excessive amounts of a sports drink before and during the race.

Some random thoughts from a food-focused academic:
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Humane Vegecide

A new publication by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century: What Modern Science Has Learned About Smoking Cessation, summarizes the spectrum of methods that have been proven to help smokers quit. The report also describes smoking cessation techniques currently in development and evaluates alternative methods that have been advocated as aids to smoking cessation.

Most of us would agree that it's cruel for hucksters to claim they have treatments for cancer if they do not. We ought to be just as wary of organizations claiming to have unconventional knowledge about preventing cancer by avoidance of various environmental threats. That's the central pitch of the Cancer Prevention Coalition (CPC).