Bullies would call people sissies for being afraid of swing sets, but some of those same bullies probably grow up to complain about chemicals in their environment, which are far less dangerous than swing sets. Take the case of pressure-treated wood.
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One of the nice side effects of last month's elections was the defeat of a proposal in Berkeley that would have sentenced people to jail for selling non-organic coffee beans.
Today brought another reminder that people writing for the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the reporters responsible for the rest of the paper aren't necessarily on the same wavelength:
We're pleased to see the esteemed British journal The Lancet noting the American Council on Science and Health in the conclusion of its February 1 article on the tumultuous debate over acrylamide in food. The Lancet emphasizes the unknown but at least recognizes that there's no evidence of harm:
As one might have expected, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is taking a wrong-headed approach to solving the problem of the increasing obesity of American youth. According to their latest press release, CSPI thinks that "Replacing soda and junk foods with healthful drinks and snacks...can help combat the skyrocketing rates of obesity in children and teens." Would that it were true.
Suppose your gracious new neighbor took you aside one day and quietly warned that serving non-organic fruits and vegetables to your family was endangering your kids' health. Suppose she offered a professional-looking "index of danger" showing your supermarket's peaches, apples, spinach, celery, and potatoes were all too dangerous to eat. You'd probably be devastated.
Editor's note: We just received this letter, a reminder that weighing long-term risks and benefits is often hardest for the young, which is what makes them such an important market for cigarette manufacturers. To help kids get a better handle on the risks, we'll soon publish a teen version of our book Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You, and for smokers of all ages interested in knowing some of the quit-assist options, there's our book Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century.
The specter of contagious disease often engenders a primal reaction based on fear, with resultant irrational behavior. SARS is no exception. Only a few weeks ago, New York's bustling Chinatown became a ghost town as a result.
Over 50 years of scientific research have established that the irradiation of foods to minimize food-borne illness and decrease waste is both safe and effective. Physicians and scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) endorse the use of irradiation to enhance safety and supplement other food protection methods.
[Editor's note: We admire Sandy Szwarc for pointing out some of the excesses in America's war on obesity, such as lawsuits now brewing against fast food chains. But our nutrition director, Dr. Ruth Kava, objects to Szwarc's promotion of an odd, revisionist theory about obesity: that we are neither consuming more nor exercising less but are getting fat precisely because dieting causes metabolic changes that induce obesity. TS]
During scenes from the movie The Secret Lives of Dentists, Dana and David Hurst are seen undergoing an unholy combination of adultery and viral gastroenteritis. While Dana (Hope Davis) and their three kids are all feverish and vomiting, David (Campbell Scott) responds to the illness and betrayal in his family by . . . pulling out a pack of smokes.
In a newly updated report, Traces of Environmental Chemicals in the Human Body: Are They a Risk to Health?, the physicians and scientists of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) conclude that the mere ability to measure small amounts of environmental chemicals in human blood and other tissue is not an indication of the presence of a health hazard.
One of the most hotly contested issues in the popular nutrition press of late has been cutting carbs: that is, whether or not the much-touted low-carbohydrate, high protein, high fat diet espoused by such diet gurus as Dr. Atkins is better at helping people lose weight than a balanced, moderately high carbohydrate diet. Most mainstream nutrition experts have been leery of the rather extreme Atkins diet, partly out of concern that its high complement of total and saturated fats might cause or exacerbate heart-damaging blood lipid levels.
The refiling of the lawsuit for two obese teen-agers against McDonald's Pelman v. McDonald's brings to mind an old Bill Cosby joke.
Cosby is awakened one morning by his tired wife, who tells him to go down and feed the children breakfast. He eventually does, grumpily, and spies a chocolate cake. His mind goes to the recipe for chocolate cake. There are eggs in chocolate cake. And flour. And milk. There's nutrition in chocolate cake!
The July 1 Health Journal article "Getting Screened for Colon Cancer Isn't Just for the 50-and-Over Set" by Tara Parker-Pope was important. Colorectal cancer is both a major cancer killer and largely preventable with appropriate screening. Deciding who should and should not be screened is crucial, as it would be prohibitively expensive to screen everyone over age 40, instead of the currently recommended age cut-off of 50.
Re: "Health groups' donor ties questioned":
In light of the distortions promoted by the anti-consumer-choice, left-wing funded, advocacy group, Center For The Science in the Public Interest, below are some facts about the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). We are disappointed that your reporter did not contact us before publishing misleading information about our work.
In light of the ongoing controversy over fast food lawsuits, the media has called upon ACSH to deliver scientific information regarding obesity and fast food. John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University is the proponent of the fast food lawsuits, which seek to shift the blame for obesity from individuals to restaurants.
This summer saw the comic book character the Incredible Hulk turned into a so-so movie. It strikes me that the beloved gamma-irradiated behemoth combines two common but false fears about biology: (1) that radiation causes completely unpredictable, bizarre transformations and (2) that extra body mass can somehow materialize without any extra mass being consumed by the body.
That's the finding of the recently-completed study "Electromagnetic Fields and Breast Cancer on Long Island: A Case Control Study," published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. The study, part of the ten-year Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP), is the latest study to come from the project that fails to show a correlation between a perceived environmental risk factor and an actual increased risk for breast cancer. Previous studies discovered no significant association between breast cancer development and exposure to PCBs or to organochlorines found in pesticide.
A new publication by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), Kicking Butts in the Twenty-First Century: What Modern Science Has Learned About Smoking Cessation, summarizes the spectrum of methods that have been proven to help smokers quit. The report also describes smoking cessation techniques currently in development and evaluates alternative methods that have been advocated as aids to smoking cessation.
Relatively little is known about perfluorinated acids where they are coming from, how they travel, how they get in the human body, or their long-term health effects. "We don't have the data to do more at this point than than to worry," said Dr. Gina Solomon, a physician with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
An apt summary of the default NRDC position on chemicals, in the New York Times, April 15, 2003, in an article with a title that could run in every issue: "EPA Orders Companies to Examine Effects of Chemicals"
Robert Palmer died suddenly of a heart attack last week at the age of fifty-four, which is a bit young to die of a heart attack -- at least for non-smokers. But Palmer, who performed "Addicted to Love" and other hit songs of the 1980s, was a smoker.
It is difficult for a group like ACSH to present "hard data" on the impact ACSH's publications have on improving public knowledge on topics related to chemicals, nutrition, the environment, lifestyle and public health. But one possible measure for evaluation is the extent of coverage ACSH receives in major Internet search engines such as Google, the top-ranked Internet search engine, which accounts for over a third of all Internet searches performed.
Jury selection began last week in California in a case where employees will argue that IBM knowingly exposed them to chemicals used in the manufacturing of chips and disc drives that caused a variety of cancers, birth defects and other ailments. If found liable, IBM faces hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
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