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Vegetarianism has taken on a "political correctness" comparable to the respectability it had in the last century, when many social and scientific progressives advocated it. Today, crusaders extol meatless eating not only as healthful but also as a solution to world hunger and as a safeguard of "Mother Earth." The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) aggressively attacks the use of animal foods and has proposed its own food-groups model, which excludes all animal products.

I disclaimed vegetarianism after many years of observance. Although the arguments in favor of it appear compelling, I have learned to be suspicious, and to search for hidden agendas, when I evaluate claims of the benefits of vegetarianism. Vegetarianism is riddled with delusional thinking from...

For people living with celiac disease, everything that goes into the body has to be assessed for gluten. Even tiny amounts (trace amounts) of gluten can cause illness in some people with celiac disease. In order to do that, people need to know what they are putting into their bodies. 

One very effective way that this has been handled for the celiac community is the mandatory labeling of gluten free foods set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Those efforts were mostly focused on food. But, because the concern extends to everything that is ingested - including medications - so too should the labeling says FDA. 

Until now, there was no way to know if a medication contained gluten or not. And, although it is highly unlikely that an oral medication does contain enough...

For some, an all-natural lifestyle means eating foods that are as unprocessed as possible, and if you can grow it yourself or collect it from the wild yourself, your natural creds go way up. But there can be a problem with that — as we've reiterated many times, natural doesn't necessarily mean safe — and we're not talking about pesticides here.

A news report recently listed 87 cases of poisoning ascribed to eating mushrooms gathered in the wild in France. Two French agencies, the Agency for Food Environmental and Occupational Food and Safety and the...

In 2014, Vermont passed a law requiring that food offered for sale by a retailer has to be labeled if it had been entirely or partly produced by genetic engineering. This law will go  into effect this week, on July 1 — unless a preemptive federal law is passed before then.

Well, it's too late for that to happen. The U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill that would have prevented the states from enacting individual labeling laws.

 

shutterstock_366202571 Possible Label via Shutterstock

Realizing what a patchwork of state laws might...

153697219We ve heard of useless laws before, but one pushed by the Los Angeles City Council ranks right up there in terms of political boot-licking. According to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, the Council has agreed to vote on whether or not to draft an ordinance banning the growth of genetically engineered (GMO) crops.

Why is this useless? Well, to start with, as one might expect there are no crops now grown in LA county GMO or otherwise unless you want to include the...

Ebola_Virus_TEM_PHIL_1832_loresIn an opinion piece published in today s Wall Street Journal, Dr. Henry I. Miller, Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford s Hoover Institution and former ACSH trustee, discusses the significant benefit that biopharming can provide for the development of medicines if only regulators can become more tolerant.

In the op-ed, titled Genetic Engineering and the Fight Against Ebola, Dr. Miller references ZMapp, the...

As one ACSH staffer has remarked, Dr. Keith Ayoob s nutrition articles in USA Today are a breath of fresh air. Dr. Ayoob is a dietitian and associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. In his most recent column, he addresses what has become a common concern among parents: whether the breakfast cereals their children eat contain too much sugar. But this is one thing that a parent needn t worry about, says Dr. Ayoob, noting that the sugar content of these products has actually decreased significantly over the years. An average serving...

Readers who turn to ABC as their source of news will get a very skewed impression of distinguished professor Dr. David Allison, head of the Section on Statistical Genetics at the University of Alabama and director of the National Institutes of Health-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center. An ABC News article by Dan Harris and Maggy Patrick which was apparently pulled from the national TV newscast at the last moment accuses Dr. Allison of accepting money from the food and beverage industry in order to poke holes in the scientific consensus on whether soda consumption significantly contributes to the obesity epidemic. Basing his conclusions on sound science, Dr. Allison has...

This is the second part of a two-part series. Read part one here.

What is the magnitude of the data fraud polluting scientific research, and what are its sources?

When dozens, hundreds, or thousands of studies address a scientific question or controversy, there will invariably be differing conclusions, if for no other reason than chance or the use of conflicting data. So, how are such research controversies adjudicated and resolved? An approach favored by the scientific establishment is to conduct what’s called a meta-analysis, a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple...

The head of the World Health Organization claims that trans fats - which are in things like margarine and donuts - are responsible for 500,000 deaths each year and WHO wants them eliminated from the global food supply by 2023. This is a dramatic flip-flop from the time when partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil in margarine was saving us from butter and meat fat, which were also linked to cardiovascular disease.

What changed? Not much, which makes their new REPLACE initiative (an acronym with six action items; leave it to the UN to make a seven letter acronym from six things) directed at elimination of "industrially-...