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On E-Cigarette Regulation, the Government Asked ACSH For Advice ... and Listened

In late 2015, the American Council on Science and Health was asked to testify at the White House on the impact of the Food and Drug Administration's "deeming regulations," granted to it by the 2009 Tobacco Control Act, to cover all tobacco products.

This was after numerous other times that state, local and federal officials had asked for guidance on this complex subject. We made those recommendations, and it looks more and more like our advice will win the day, at least based on a committee vote today.

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If you joke that whatever product is being touted as a miracle for you this week will be killing you next year, you are not alone. It's become such a recurring meme that the public has very little confidence in nutritional claims.

A generation ago, bacon was bad for you because of saturated fats, then saturated fats were okay, now an International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) committee...

IARC Reverses Course on Coffee, Which Should Worry People Who Care About Science

The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says it doesn't know if coffee causes cancer or not, a switch from 1991 when the agency said it did.

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That is bad for people who want to trust IARC's recommendations -- because its reasons to reverse course on coffee ...

Anti-Science From 'Whine' Country

BACKWARDS Here's a fact you need to know: California ranks 47th out of 50 states in science education.

I cannot think of any other way to explain the 2+ decades of bungling by a number of counties in wine country in the northern part of the state. It's about plants, and it's mind-boggling. It would seem that the people there seem to want weeds, but not food.

The circus began in 2004 when Mendocino County wrote a law to "prohibit the propagation, cultivation, raising or...

Real Truth In Labeling: Why Organic Groups Object

Earlier this month I was invited to appear on Michael Olson's Food Chain radio program with Kelly Damewood, Policy Director at California Certified Organic Farmers, to talk about Campbell Soup Co. and its desire to put GMO labels on its cans.

(I wrote about that here and about the organic process versus the conventional process in general. You can listen while you read, if you like.)

While things generally went fine, there were a few times...

New Dietary Guidelines: A Health and Nutrition Community Roundup

The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines have officially been released and therefore so has commentary from around the nation.

Because it is the work of the federal 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a government effort, it will invariably be political, right down to who is chosen to be on various panels and what studies they pick for their systematic reviews. And when politics enters the fray, people who like the ways it aligns with their pet beliefs will extol it...

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Mediterranean, Low-fat, paleo - if modern diet advice sounds to you like a jumble of special interests competing to advance sales of their diet book rather than inform public health, you are not alone. No one takes diet advice any more seriously than they take any food advice - in a modern culture where an organization calls sausage the...

Will Chipotle Remove Meat From Its Ingredient List Next?

In April, the organic food lobbyists behind groups like U.S. Right To Know got Chipotle to claim they were removing foods which consisted of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) - by using a different soybean oil.

Activists had previously bragged that they moved the stock market and Chipotle products and management had nothing to do with the fast food company's success, before bragging that they moved partisan food writers like Michael Pollan and Tom Philpott of the left-wing magazine Mother Jones.

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ACSH's Top 5 Quacks of 2015

It's been a banner year here at The American Council on Science and Health and with every snake oil peddler and pseudoscience pusher that appeared, we were there to offer expert analysis and serve as a check on junk science and health claims.

Here are our top 5 quacks from this year.

5. CVS Tries To Take Credit For Smoking Reduction

We put another one in the win column as smoking rates in...

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You may have seen renewed recent media claims that alcohol is linked to cancer, based on a new commentary in Addiction. While overuse of alcohol can certainly cause something like fatty liver disease and then cirrhosis, so can too many cheeseburgers. Lots of things can be harmful when misused, that is why the American Council on Science and Health talks about dose-response when environmentalists only want to talk about hazard. (1)

It has...