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“Just got the following email from KinderFarms, a "natural" kid's medicine company that objects to all the "unnatural" things found in children's OTC medications. Damn, they picked the wrong person to spam with this.”

 -  Dr. Josh Bloom, ACSH’s Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

As our Dr. Josh Bloom reports, KinderFarms Pain and Fever reliever contains the generic form of Tylenol, a well-known liver toxin in high doses. But it is the removal of the GMOs and other “inactive” ingredients that Biel claims makes her product warm, cozy, non-toxic, and “safe...

In 2020, I published the college secondary text The Myths About Nutrition Science, outlining the seven most prominent reasons for unreliable health news. One of the principal reasons is that most journalists rely on institutional press releases, which often overstate the study’s findings instead of examining the actual published study itself. A 2015 study published in PLOS/One identified 312 worldwide news reports related to the same press release. Of those 312 reports, “85.6% of all the stories were derived wholly or largely from a secondary source.” In other words, 85.6% of the reporters...

Some of the most iconic over-the-counter name-brand medicines recently took a hit. The FDA’s Nonprescription Drug Advisory Committee (NDAC) unanimously voted that phenylephrine, the nation’s most popular oral nasal decongestant, is ineffective in tablet form

Used for the temporary relief of stuffy nose, sinus, and ear symptoms caused by the common cold, flu, and allergies, phenylephrine is the active ingredient in Sudafed PE and some versions of Mucinex, Dayquil, Tylenol Sinus, and Advil Sinus Congestion, as well as...

Today's data comes from an online survey of vegans found on Facebook over two months. The vegan diet was assessed using, as always, a food frequency questionnaire. Additional demographic data and the motivation behind choosing a vegan diet were collected, as well as participants' daily physical activity and participation in yoga. There were 516 respondents, all 18 or older. Vegetarians eating eggs or dairy (lacto-ovo-vegetarians) were excluded.

The data from the food frequency questionnaires were “collapsed into 18 food groups” that were characterized in two ways. First, a traditional diet “quality” measure modified from a plant-based diet index. Second, as following a “convenience” or “health-conscious” pattern. Let’s take a moment to unpack these characterizations.

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Caffeine, cinnamon, or licorice are all foods or substances considered GRAS. Helium, hydrogen peroxide, or propane - all are considered GRAS substances when directly added to food.  

What is “general recognition” of safety? The FDA Commissioner, in the 1958 hearings for the Food Additives Amendment, explained it in this homespun way:

“Proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

This is a very different regulatory mindset from today’s regulatory environment. 

Background

Food manufacturing is a huge industry, with an estimated revenue of $764.5 billion in the U.S. in 2022. The GRAS rule is an example of old regulation (1958), which allows the private sector to self-regulate; i.e., the food industry is...

Detecting sepsis early to initiate therapy and heightened surveillance saves lives. One of the core CMS quality measures is how quickly a patient is started on antibiotics, with hospitals penalized for acting too slowly. Algorithms that search hospital electronic health records (EHR) have been developed to speed the identification of these patients, and the one created by Epic Systems Corporation, one of the world’s largest EHR software vendors, has been widely deployed. The algorithm is based on 405,000 patient encounters across three hospital systems between 2013-2015. It was internally validated by EPIC but

“owing to the proprietary nature of the ESM [Epic Sepsis Model], only limited information is publicly available about the...

“For many people, regardless of size, stepping on the scale at the doctor’s office can be a triggering, harmful experience,” SELF magazine reported late last month. “'Please don’t weigh me' cards may offer a solution.” If you're not familiar with these cards, they're sold by More-Love.org as part of an effort to change how health care providers think about the relationship between weight and health. The organization maintains that we live in “a fatphobic society” and thus

being weighed and talking about weight causes feelings of stress and shame for many people. Many...

For those of you, a bit late to the party, I recently wrote on the push by the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges to guide the formal speech of healthcare workers. This most recent study examines the most ubiquitous words of our written speech, the short narrative that is our admission notes for a hospitalized patient. These notes summarize the circumstances leading to the patient’s admission and serve as a means of communication between clinicians.

The researchers in the current study used natural language algorithms to search for stigmatizing language in all inpatient admission notes of an academic medical center and three subgroups: patients with...

There's really no delicate way to say this. If you dust off a turd, it's still a turd. 

Keeping with the scatological motif for a moment, Genexa, a company formed to "[make] clean medicines that you can trust, brags about bringing a revolution in OTC drugs by '"making clean medicine available to all," by educating people about what they are putting in their bodies. What a crock of ####.

Most people with a pulse should know by now that the "back to nature" movement is little more than a manipulative attempt to convince consumers that they are poisoning themselves with all kinds of artificial, rather than...

If you have more money than sense, how about spending $129.99 every 18 days on fresh celery juice delivered to your door?

As mad as it sounds, some people are willingly handing over this amount of cash to invest in an unpleasant tasting juice that, truth be told, isn’t especially nutritious.

Marketeers know that being more expensive than the competition can give you the upper hand (because people assume  your product must be superior), but celery juice companies are taking this concept to a whole new level.

What’s more, many of the claims being made for celery juice are off-the-scale bonkers, not to mention in contravention of every food advertising regulation going.

On...