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At today's Earth Day celebrations, environmentalists will likely point to the clean-up of the toxic waste dump at New York's Love Canal as one of their biggest victories. But was there really a terrible environmental menace to combat at Love Canal in the first place?

The City Council of Aliso Viejo, CA was scheduled to consider a law banning foam cups and containers this week in part, reports the Los Angeles Times, because they contain a potentially deadly chemical some call "dihydrogen monoxide." It is more commonly called water, notes the Times, and city officials say that a paralegal drafting the proposed legislation was duped by Internet sites repeating the nerdy joke that something ought to be done about the dihydrogen monoxide problem.

There's been a lot of controversy over Janet Jackson revealing her breast at the Superbowl, which must make Madonna and Britney envious (though Madonna is cleaning up her act in some ways: she has reportedly quit smoking and is trying to get Britney to do likewise). The real booby prize for Celebrity with a Bad Idea should go not to poor Miss Jackson, though, but to...actress Pamela Anderson.

The media has a responsibility to present information that is both pertinent and based on empirical data. Unfortunately, the media frequently reports health information that piques mainstream interest but diverts attention away from issues of genuine significance. Take the piece called "The Unhealthy 10," which appeared in the April 14, 2004 Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest newspaper. Meg Nugent gives readers a list of the "Top 10 dopey, unhealthy things we do that damage our health." Ultimately, it is the list that is dopey.

Critics of so-called "alternative" medicine frequently raise the possibility that patients who avoid mainstream, scientifically-based medicine in favor of various other modalities may miss getting potentially life-saving therapies. And yes, this does happen. Let's look at one small example.

Walk into any food store. Unless it is a market that carries only ocean fish or meat harvested from wild animals, the food that it sells is a product of domestication and modification by humans. In any supermarket, we find a bewildering variety of foodstuffs that bear only the slightest resemblance to the wild progenitors from which they were once derived. The ancestors of many of our everyday foodstuffs are known to us only because of twentieth-century developments in the science of genetics, which allowed us to identify the wild plants from which they were derived.

The animal rights radicals who used Dr. Atkins' private medical records to out him as a fat guy, the PETA-affiliated Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, don't really care about human diets too much. They just want to make sure animals are not part of those diets. But animal rights are a tough sell, so PCRM feigns concern over the deadly dangers of meat consumption instead.

Today the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released data on the acrylamide content of a variety of new foods (see http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2004/NEW01040.html). The new data expand the database to an additional 750 foods. Acrylamide, for those who have forgotten, is the substance formed in high-carbohydrate foods that are baked or fried at high temperatures.

The nation's supermarkets and restaurants seem to have been transformed overnight into one immense promotional campaign for the (scientifically unproven) Atkins diet plan: cutting carbohydrates. The truth is that virtually any plan to cut calories while maintaining or increasing exercise will cause weight loss, not just one magical mix of food types. But there may be a worse problem with Atkins than the annoying hype and the distraction from calorie-cutting: It may diminish the amount of folic acid women get.

Morgan Spurlock, the moviemaker whose claim to fame is that he ate his way to obesity at McDonald's, seems to have padded his ego in addition to his midsection. In an interview with The Today Show's Katie Couric, Mr. Spurlock said, in part "I think that this film had a tremendous impact on their decision to eliminate supersized portions." Leaving egos aside for a moment, Mr. Spurlock is basically exhibiting his ignorance of the world of food service. Any change, whether in portion size or in menu choices, takes months of planning and figuring of costs and procedures.

An article on the website of the Sierra Club has given new life to the Internet rumor that plastic water bottles are a health hazard, possibly the cause of birth defects such as Down Syndrome. Years of studies on the purported culprit chemical, bisphenol-A (BPA), have not shown any health effects on humans, but one study showing minor effects on mouse egg cells, led by Dr. Patricia Hunt at Case Western Reserve University, has provided the grain of truth leading to the latest excessive fear.

For years now, purveyors of various foods and supplements have pitched their products as being better for health because of the so-called "antioxidant" properties of their constituents. The theory is that highly reactive molecules, called oxygen free radicals or just free radicals, can stimulate the occurrence of diseases like arthritis, atherosclerosis, and various types of cancer.

Morgan Spurlock wanted to be in a movie. And he was in a movie one he made himself which he then presented to the world at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The subject of the movie was the fattening of Morgan himself he managed to gain twenty-five pounds in a month by overeating at McDonald's restaurants. The name of his documentary, Supersize Me, should serve as a warning to the rest of us that eating too much will make us fat (which we might have heard before).

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis in the United States, affecting more than 40 million Americans. A new report released by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) discusses the various manifestations of this slowly progressive disease and notes that newer treatments, both medical and surgical, have changed the outlook for alleviation of pain and restoration of function for most of those affected.

Morgan Spurlock wanted to be in a movie. And he was in a movie one he made himself which he then presented to the world at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The subject of the movie was the fattening of Morgan himself he managed to gain 25 pounds in a month by overeating at McDonald's restaurants. The name of his documentary, "Supersize Me," should serve as a warning to the rest of us that eating too much will make us fat (which we might have heard before).

The Jan. 20 article in the Health Journal, "Toxins in Breast Milk," conveys unscientific assumptions that will needlessly alarm many members of the public, especially women who plan to breast feed. The assertion that a study subject's body "carried 105 chemicals in measurable levels" is meaningless on its face. We all have thousands of "chemicals" in our bodies, both natural and synthetic. Why was the discussion centered on synthetic, to the exclusion of natural chemicals?

When does it become fair to say that offbeat, unscientific ideas are not just harmless intellectual errors but dangerous? Well, to take a few examples, maybe...

when a trainer at hip Crunch Gym, according to a lawsuit, gives a woman with high blood pressure supplements that were meant to enhance her performance but instead caused a stroke (one of several cases prompting recent regulatory action against ephedra)...

A state assemblyman from San Francisco has proposed perhaps the most unscientific law in American history: making the California Building Standards Commission impose the principles of feng-shui on new construction.

I won't pretend to be objective about ABC News anchor John Stossel. I worked for him from 1995-2001, as an associate producer on one-hour specials very much like the one airing tonight (10pm Eastern), called Lies, Myths, and Downright Stupidity.

New Jersey recently announced its intention to become a stem-cell-friendly state. It will be subsidizing this groundbreaking research into how to use people's existing cells to make batches of pliable new ones, from which would be made new tissue in order to treat disease.

How in the world did so many people get so fearful of the very science and technology that have lifted humanity out of malaria and mud huts? That's the fundamental question asked and discussed at length in the new book by ACSH's Thomas DeGregori, Origins of The Organic Agriculture Debate.

Editor's note: What follows is a speech delivered to attendees of the Hayek Lecture Series in Brussels earlier this month.
The title of today's discussion is "Did the EU Get the Chemicals Regulation Right?" A title like that makes the job of a panelist pretty easy, when you can clearly and unequivocally answer the question with a one-word answer: NO!

Tremendous publicity was given recently to a new study that found farmed salmon has significantly more pollutants than wild caught salmon. However, the impact of the findings is less than clear.

Hey, have you heard the claim that childhood vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella may cause autism? It's not true, but the myth has nonetheless contributed to the decline in vaccination rates around the world. Well-meaning but superstitious parents seek to "protect" their children from minuscule or non-existent risks from vaccine side effects. Instead, anti-vaccine parents expose their kids and others' to the very real risk of being victims in new outbreaks of old diseases we thought were nearly vanquished.

Because the government's first regulator of food products and patent medicines, Harvey Washington Wiley, lacked the statutory authority needed to impose the controls he believed necessary for the public's welfare, he established his indelible imprint on Congress and the people by sheer force of will. Yet, when he wielded that power in the early decades of the twentieth century, he often collided with the federal judiciary. The original pure food and drug law was flawed by its ambivalent language.