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The guidelines were born of good intentions; created to make Americans healthier. However, they were not inscribed on stone tablets and handed to mankind. Instead, the guidelines are the result of a bureaucratic process and, as such, are susceptible to dubious conclusions and adverse influence by activist groups.

Your education dollars at work

What if I told you that the EPA, to push more stringent air pollution limits, would use bad air pollution research to claim current air pollution kills? What if I told you the research was published by the most prestigious American medical journals without any comment about whether it was funded by the EPA or organizations the EPA sponsors such as the Health Effects Institute and American Lung Association?

As I learned one day at an alternative medicine expo, pseudo-scientific health remedies come in all forms: animal, vegetable, and mineral literally. Let's take them in reverse order.
Mineral: Healing with Crystals

Last year, a paper about CRISPR's potential off-target mutations that called CRISPR's safety into question received a lot of attention. The CRISPR field swiftly became defensive and publicly questioned the research. Turns out that authors of the paper also saw the flaws because they have recently published a "do-over" paper that discounts the original findings. 
 

In part one of this series, we looked at some of the hallmarks of sloppy pesticide reporting. We round out our analysis here with a breakdown of three more themes common to this species of junk journalism.

A recent JAMA paper which concluded that opioid drugs are ineffective for long-term pain relief is flawed, perhaps intentionally so. American Council advisor Richard "Red" Lawhern explains.

1. Washington Times used our work debunking claims about phthalates in macaroni and cheese to show how New York Senator Chuck Schumer is going to chase any environmental fad - especially if it makes science and technology look bad. It appeals to his base. The "analysis" was hand-picked by a group co-founded by a guy who thinks food is "spiritual". 

At American Thinker, Dr. John Dunn lauds American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisor Dr. Frank Schnell, former toxicologist for the U.S. government, and his concern that the EPA long ago ran out of problems to solve, so they have been manufacturing new ones by redefining hazards until they cover something.

We were all over media last week, including in not-so-flattering ways, thanks to a cabal of anti-science activists.

Sometimes we write in other places, sometimes our work is featured in other places, and sometimes other places use us for their conspiracy stories about science. Last week, we completed the trifecta!

Coke does not think that doling out 1/1,000,000th of their annual revenue is causing any group to go from hating soda to promoting it. Yet simplistic conspiracy theorists often insist it must be so.

Traditionally, science has been a refuge from this hyperbolic nonsense. But no longer. More and more scientific journals are wading into partisan politics. Current Biology, in its most recent issue, has published a feature article that is every bit as ghastly as it is incoherent.

A malevolent troll named Paul Thacker has made a living smearing and harassing scientists on Twitter. With the blessing of editors Nikhil Swaminathan and Jennifer Block, the website Grist has now given him a platform to spread his lies.

There are two ways that the media get meta-analysis claims wrong. And here's how to spot them.

A group of leading scientists in England is making headlines for writing a scathing letter attacking one of England's leading medical journals, the Lancet, for promoting unfounded health scares.

A short while ago, despite two hurricanes and a shooting in Las Vegas, advocacy journalists in North Carolina were spending time attempting to Gerrymander the word "conservationist" in order to make sure an expert in favor of natural gas could be excluded from a committee. Mostly because he lacked their key criterion, a donation to Sierra Club.

In a confusing study from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers compared 71 women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal disorder affecting up to ten percent of women of reproductive age, to 100 healthy women of the same age and weight and found that women with PCOS had higher levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in their blood.

Pop quiz: What do The New York Times, Jeffrey "the yogic flying instructor" Smith, and the National Resources Defense Council have in common? Answer: They all shamelessly lie about glyphosate to make money. (And you get extra credit if you answered "They are all bad sources of science information.")

Your donations at work: We were at the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, as well as Congress. And that's only when we weren't getting hate mail from anti-science activists, who simply can't accept that they're slowly losing ground in popular culture.

That a person with such a hostile view toward industry-funded science serves on the editorial board of a major scientific journal is disturbing. That she possesses no academic qualifications to justify her position as "senior editor" is a scandal.

The 2021 annual conference of U.S. Mayors adopted a resolution to create community “Blue Zones,” as part of the Well-Being Initiative to Combat Disease and Comorbidities. The Blue Zones program is derived from the work of Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, who identifies regions around the world where people purportedly live extraordinarily long and happy lives.

Until a few moments ago, I, too, had been a victim of "tl,dr." In fact, I had the disease but did not know its name. Tl,dr is an acronym to “Too long, didn’t read.” Admit it, you have suffered from the same malady, but help is on the way.

The Trump administration is considering a proposal to require all published research that has received federal funding to be made immediately available to the public at no cost. You would think that making our published science available for free would garner applause, but you would be wrong.

Stanford University harbors a profound paradox. It boasts superb research in academic departments but often uncritically embraces politically correct trends that contradict its reputation as a cutting-edge, science-grounded institution.