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Following his bogus claims that apple juice contains levels of arsenic that are dangerous to humans, the infamous Dr. Oz is at it again and this time, he s peddling the latest weight-loss supplement fad: raspberry ketones. In a recent episode of The Dr. Oz Show, personal trainer and fitness expert Lisa Lynn explained to audience members that ingesting raspberry ketone supplements will help melt away excess pounds. How does it work, you might ask?

By Elizabeth Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H.
Quit or die.
That's the message cigarette smokers get from the public health community.
But in fact, smokers who have trouble quitting have some rarely mentioned alternatives to total abstinence from tobacco: it s a method of intervention called tobacco harm reduction.
Some 450,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they smoke. Yet if cigarette smokers would just switch to safer products, we could cut the yearly number of tobacco-related deaths to 10,000 or less.

In recent years, abuse of prescription painkillers has reached staggering heights, with oxycodone and hydrocodone overdose claiming over 14,000 lives in 2008 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even more alarming still, the toll of these drugs may be rising, as popular opioid pain relievers like OxyContin, Percocet (oxycodone), and Vicodin (hydrocodone) have seen sales increase by as much as sixteen-fold in some states between 2000 and 2010.

Although not nearly as well-known as AIDS, hepatitis C affects about 200 million people worldwide about four times the number of HIV cases. In the U.S. alone, about 4 million people are infected. Hepatitis C, which is usually transmitted through contact with infected blood, causes a slow but progressive deterioration of liver function, leading to cirrhosis and sometimes liver cancer. There were no satisfactory therapies for the infection until last year, when Merck and Vertex each launched a protease inhibitor-type drug an anti-viral analogous to those used successfully in taming HIV.

Following the FDA s recent decision not to ban bisphenol A (BPA), this week another governmental agency has made another scientifically sound decision in the face of unfounded claims that a given chemical poses dangers to the American public. On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a petition from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to withdraw federal approval of the widely used herbicide 2,4-D.

Last December, we were pleased to announce that childhood obesity rates in New York City and other areas were declining. Now, according to recent research, the same is true for kids under the age of six in eastern Massachusetts.

According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while only about 10 percent of Americans suffer from any nutritional deficiency, nearly one in ten women between the ages of 12 and 50 have low iron levels, and many others have such low iodine levels that they border on deficiency.

While we ve long advised that moderate alcohol consumption provides a protective benefit against heart disease, a recent study has found that having one to two drinks daily may also decrease mortality rates among heart attack survivors.

For over a decade, the American consumer has been bombarded with ads lauding the supposed beneficial health effects of dozens of antioxidants. A typical claim is that these compounds protect against free radicals that may be responsible for causing cancer or that they prevent cellular damage and thereby slow the aging process. Many of these claims have become popularly accepted without question. And as ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava notes, Since many of these supposed miracle compounds are vitamins, people assume that loading up on them won t hurt even if they re not effective antioxidants.

There are a lot of substances we may think of as toxic. Bleach, paint thinner, or gasoline might come to mind the image of a child ingesting one of these products immediately strikes fear. Yet some purveyors of junk science want to add a new substance to the list of toxic products: sugar.

In its tenth anniversary edition, the latest Tobacco Atlas report by the World Lung Foundation (WLF) had some bad news to share: Tobacco-related deaths have nearly tripled in the past decade. If current trends continue, tobacco use and exposure will be responsible for the death of one person every six seconds which adds up to a billion deaths this century.

ACSH is happy to note, yet again, that both U.S. cancer incidence and death rates continue to fall. The latest report, issued annually since 1998 and published in the journal Cancer, is compiled by various health agencies including the CDC and the American Cancer Society and includes nearly every cancer case reported through 2008.

Further evidence that, even if you can t quit smoking, you should try your damnedest not to smoke around your kids: A new study has found that children exposed to second-hand smoke had almost double the risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as adults, compared to those who were not exposed. The findings come from a Norwegian study just published in the journal Respirology.

Doctors consider it their responsibility to encourage their patients to follow their recommendations; now they have to convince insurance providers to follow their orders as well. Dr. Stewart Segal is all too familiar with such scenarios, which he recounts in an op-ed for MedPage Today.

For the same reason that he doesn t write about Ming Dynasty pottery, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof should not write about toxicology, says ACSH's Dr. Josh Bloom in a post on Medical Progress Today. We all have our own areas of expertise, and for Kristof, these include politics, foreign affairs, and economics. But readers have come to trust Kristof s opinions, and when he writes about a topic in which he has no expertise such as chemicals and pharmacology readers tend to continue to trust his conclusions.

From the UK: Clive Bates, Director General of Sustainable Futures in the Welsh Government, makes some observations on the European Union's ban on snus (low-risk oral tobacco) that we wish someone at the European Commission would listen to. Why? Well, for one thing, as Bates points out:

It s been a long, hard road, but after a few years of rejections, Arena Pharmaceuticals weight-loss drug lorcaserin finally won over an FDA advisory panel: They voted 18-to-4 last week in favor of approving the drug. Though the panel s decision is not final, the FDA which will rule on the matter by June 27 usually follows the advisory committee s recommendations.

Millions of women with low bone density take bisphosphonates, a class of drugs used to prevent osteoporosis. But a new analysis by the FDA may lead some of these women, and their doctors, to rethink their treatment plans: The review suggests that certain women may be better off taking these drugs for a shorter period of time, instead of on a long-term basis and some should stop taking them altogether.

So-called me-too drugs are iterations of existing medications that are similar in structure with only minor differences. Such medications typically result from pharmaceutical companies tweaking existing drugs to develop newer and usually more effective therapies. Alhough this mode of research sounds like a great idea, me-too drugs commonly get a bad rap for being non-innovative, especially from critics like Marcia Angell of the Harvard School of Public Health.

A recent prospective study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that exposure to perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) chemicals commonly found in non-stick pans and food packaging reduces immune responses to tetanus and diphtheria vaccinations among children aged 5 to 7 years old. But before you start worrying about protecting your children from these supposedly dangerous chemicals, it s important to note that the research, led by Dr.

The debate continues within the medical community over how beneficial breast cancer screening is for most women. While the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women aged 50 to 74 need a mammogram no more than every two years, two new studies suggest that women at increased risk for breast cancer should begin those biennial screenings at age 40.

A November 21, 2006 entry on the Nictotine News blog mentions an observation from ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross:
From the American Council on Science and Health:
Although almost half of all smokers had a routine medical checkup in 2003, only 63.6% of those were counseled by a physician to stop smoking -- and this is an improvement from 2000's rate of 57%!

What's a normal blood pressure for a 15-year-old boy? How about for an eight-year-old girl? Many physician's couldn't tell you taking children's blood pressure has never been standard practice.

The latest study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) reports on the prevalence of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug use among pregnant women ages 15 to 44 years. Overall, Hispanic women had the lowest rates of substance abuse in all categories, while white and black pregnant women were slightly more likely to engage in drinking and illicit drug use.

For those who dread hitting the treadmill or going outside for a run, the latest findings from researchers presenting a study at the European Society of Cardiology may compel some laggards to, literally, run for their lives: Jogging, even for as little as one hour (total) a week can increase a man s life expectancy by 6.2 years and a woman s by 5.6 years.