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When I wrote a skeptical article about the alleged benefits of the fruit juice POM earlier in the year, some people thought I was being pretty radical. After all, it was one of the most popular beverages of 2005 -- and it's full of antioxidants.

Recent research from the Harvard School of Public Health and Sweden's Karolinska Institute found no link between consumption of acrylamide from foods and the occurrence of colon, bladder or kidney cancers. These results are in line with expectations of physicians and scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) (see Acrylamide in Food: Is It a Real Threat to Public Health?).

The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) carries a lead article and accompanying editorial that are long on advocacy, short on data. The topic: alcohol consumption in America, who is drinking how much and how much is too much.

Judge Robert Sweet of the U.S. District Court in New York dismissed a lawsuit against the McDonald's Corporation that accused the fast food giant of causing the obesity of two New York teens. Perhaps the plaintiff's supporters are outraged that McDonald's doesn't query customers about their caloric needs before selling them burgers and fries.

A grim reminder that almost anything, not just synthetic chemicals, can be toxic in extraordinarily large amounts:
A Florida baby sitter was charged with murdering a 3-year-old girl by forcing her to drink so much water that she died of "acute water intoxication," police said on Monday...the child, Rosita Gonzalez, died of hyponatremia, which occurs when the body contains so much water that sodium levels are dangerously diluted, causing cells to malfunction.
Reuters, March 10

Executive Summary

The authors also show that concern about some risk factors, such as saccharine, reserpine, coffee, dietary fat, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and dichlorodiphenyltrichloro-ethane (DDT), has fallen by the wayside.
A brief quote that speaks volumes about the anti-chemical movement's misguided priorities, from a May 15 New England Journal of Medicine review of Oxford University Press's Textbook of Cancer Epidemiology

Australian researchers note the immense cost to society of smoking compared to illegal drugs...

Today's topic: natural pesticides.
At Nutrition News Focus, we were recently questioned about a statement in NNF that 99.99 percent of the pesticides we eat are natural. This has been known by scientists for many years, but some activists try to give the impression that man-made chemicals must be bad while natural ones must be good. Well, chemicals are chemicals. In fact, all of us are just big bags of chemicals held in by skin.

French scientists, writing in the February 8, 2003 issue of The Lancet, claim success in treating a heart attack victim with muscle stem-cells transplanted from his thigh to his heart. Though the seventy-two-year-old patient died eighteen months later, examination of his heart showed that the grafted stem cells had taken root and were differentiating into myotubes and contractile tissue.

Testimony to the New York City Council on the question of whether to tighten lead regulations, given June 23, 2003:
The ACSH is a public-health consumer-education organization, advised by a panel of 350 scientists and physicians. All of our work is peer-reviewed internally and published in independent, peer-reviewed scientific journals. We are about to celebrate our twenty-fifth year of promoting public health, here in New York and around the U.S.

If you vaguely recall hearing that smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco, etc.) is about as dangerous as cigarettes, you're hardly alone but it isn't true.
Smokeless tobacco is only about one sixtieth as likely to kill mainly through oral cancers as cigarettes. Cigarettes cause the premature death of about one third of their users and have a host of other ill effects. See ACSH's newly-revised book, Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn't Tell You for more on the risks.

Introduction

A trip to the supermarket should be a simple task, but nowadays it seems that you need a science degree to figure out which foods should be on your shopping list. Due to revised Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules regarding health claims on products, it is about to become even more difficult. The new health claims will allow food packages to communicate possible health benefits as opposed to proven benefits. The new food label guidelines will allow scientifically supported health claims to be made on food packages, but this refers to scientific support of almost any strength.

"No Smoking," the ubiquitous sign in public buildings, should also be present in another building your home. According to the August issue of the British Medical Journal, University of Warwick researchers recommend banning all smoking in parents' homes in order to decrease the potential harm of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) to babies.

SHOW: Today (7:00 AM ET) - NBC
June 12, 2003 Thursday
HEADLINE: New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz and Dr. Elizabeth Whelan discuss a proposed tax on junk food as a way to control the obesity crisis
ANCHORS: LESTER HOLT
LESTER HOLT, co-host:
Felix Ortiz is the New York state lawmaker who will introduce the fat tax tomorrow. Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health.

An October 15 New York Times piece by Marian Burros contained misleading information about the safety of irradiated foods. Ms. Burros must have been convinced about the toxic effects of irradiated foods, since she quoted and echoed the views of Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety, well known for their stances against food irradiation technology.
The facts, contrary to Burros' article, are:

Most people know that a diet high in saturated fat can increase blood cholesterol and thus increase risk of heart disease. What they don't know is that so-called "banned foods," foods high in fat or cholesterol, including red meat, high fat dairy products, nuts, and eggs have wrongly been indicted as culprits in increased risk for stroke. While a diet high in saturated and trans-unsaturated fatty acids has been shown to be a predictor for heart disease, scientific support is lacking for extrapolating this finding to stroke. New findings from a major study released in the Oct.

[Editor's note: We don't wish to make light of the suffering of ebola victims, but we're pleased that guest poet Jenny Foreit has found some humor in the most dire of situations. TS]
a fever hemorrhagic with consequences tragic liquefying tummy internal organs runny skin with gooey bubbles and other icky troubles

To the editor:
"Pressing Concern: Nearly 50% of N.Y. School Children are Overweight" (July 9, 2003) raises legitimate concerns about the obesity epidemic, however some of the remedies suggested are off base.

This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the first time the U.S. government declared smoking a serious danger to health, the Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, published January 11, 1964. With evidence of over 7,000 biomedical research articles on the topic, the committee of the Surgeon General declared, "Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action."

It's no surprise when an activist group trots out a lone, non-peer-reviewed study in an effort to bolster its case, but you would think that government regulations rest on a stronger scientific foundation. Guess again.

Summarized by: William D. Evers, Ph.D., R.D. Department of Foods and Nutrition Purdue University West Lafayette IN

Today the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released data on the acrylamide content of a variety of new foods (see http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/2004/NEW01040.html). The new data expand the database to an additional 750 foods. Acrylamide, for those who have forgotten, is the substance formed in high-carbohydrate foods that are baked or fried at high temperatures.