Does high salt consumption cause obesity? A recently published study says so, but sometimes research isn't reliable, or reliably interpreted. After giving this a shake, we've found that the results are fairly hard to swallow.
sugar
Now that it's OK to eat fat again, we seem to need another dietary villain. Enter The Sugar Film, one Australian's attempt to blame sugar for his ills after he consumes way too much of the stuff. How convincing is it? Not very.
That is, the body metabolizes sugar from colas the same way it does sugar from orange juice (yes, even organic orange juice). So why add a line to the Nutrition Facts label that specifically cites the amount of added sugars?
To a scientist, sugar is sugar.
To Whole Foods marketing experts, some sugars are superior to others (in the minds of their customers), so if they want to sell people "evaporated cane juice" in a cookie -- crystallized sugar from sugar cane, which is sugar -- well, they can.
Catch the latest in health news: Kids' juices more sugary than soda, misleading headlines don't reflect true improvements in narcotics abuse, & Dr. Ross' latest op-ed in the New Haven Register warning of consequences to strict e-cig regulations
Parents try to provide their children with healthful diets, and thus many avoid full calorie soft drinks because they re concerned about the sugar such beverages contain. Instead, they often turn to fruit drinks because everyone knows that fruits are healthy.
It is fairly standard practice for companies to try to give their customers what they want, even if it makes no sense. Perhaps the most notable recent example was Johnson and Johnson,
Some junk science studies can be difficult to detect. Some, however, require no effort at all. Here we have one shining example of the latter not that you could tell from all the media hype surrounding this nonsense.
The new Nature article, claiming that artificial sweeteners might contribute to obesity, seemed to be so chemically naive, that ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom, after a brief perusal of the authors and their affiliations, saw that the answer was obvious.
As momma used to say, Too much of anything is no good for you. This has been confirmed again, in a new study just published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Julie Gunlock, the director of the Independent Women s Forum Culture of Alarmism Project, has written a new book, From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes
In the no news is no news department, one of the most studied chemicals ever - Aspartame, NutraSweet - has gotten a clean bill of health from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). It s about time. But will it matter?