Public Health

Dietary guidelines used to be a relatively easy process. They were considered authoritative, mainstream media dutifully portrayed them as such because they had government backing, and people obeyed. But since 1980, when people began to obey them, obesity has skyrocketed. With public education being freed from the shackles of corporate journalists, the public had access to information outside hand-picked nutrition scholars chosen for their beliefs.  And skepticism reigns. 2016 is a much different scenario. Before the guidelines were even out, nutrition academics like Dr. Marion Nestle…

http://www.cdph.ca.gov/certlic/drinkingwater/Pages/MTBE.aspx http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/05/BPA-Replacement-Permeates-Pa… http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/08/BUEF10J8ST… http://www.epa.gov/mtbe/faq.htm In the 'something else is better than what we are hysterical about' world of environmental crackpottery, there is no better example than DDT, Alar, MTBE, BPA irrationality.  But it isn't the first.  California, with its zeal to raise octane and cause fossil fuels to burn 'cleaner' gave us MTBE, methyl tertiary butyl ether - (CH3)3COCH3.…

2 percent of America has celiac disease but over 20 percent of Americans say they are concerned about buying gluten-free foods - and marketing departments are happy to charge 230 percent more to make them feel better. Across the spectrum, the price gap between "healthy" and less healthy foods has grown since 1992. Organic food is, unsurprisingly, the store of choice for wealthy elites, and prices have grown far more than they have for regular supermarket fare, where margins remain razor thin. In the UK, a hotbed of anti-science beliefs about food, the trend is the same. More healthy…

In the United Kingdom's National Health Service, 50 percent of health care workers do not get flu vaccines. Obviously they are not anti-vaccine, they work in health care, so what explains their behavior? It isn't as simple as science denial. In the United States, vaccine denial is easier to predict: Go to a political map of California or Oregon and find the counties that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama and you are going to find an anti-vaccine hotbed.  Still, though that tells us where it does not tell us why and we need to know why in order to know how to solve the problem. It…

The Supreme Court is set to consider Whole Woman's Health v. Cole, which addresses two Texas laws related to abortion clinics. A group has filed an amicus brief arguing that this law violates the 'undue burden' test established by the Court in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a decision on the legality of the  the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982 signed by Democratic Governor Bob Casey - the last time Democrats allowed anyone not pro-abortion to attain national prominence. The Supreme Court ruled then that abortion clinics had to obtain informed consent, had to provide…

I couldn't help but laugh — one has to, or cry: the headline read, "EPA looks to build on 2015 wins this year," in The Hill, January 4th. Wins? For whom? Like Charlie Sheen? Not for the USA, not even for General Gina McCarthy, ruler of all she surveys from her throne atop the EPA, having been so designated by the capo di tutti frutti, El Presidente Obama. Not by any objective measure, anyway. Let's review the evidence: Here's one win: she has not (yet) been found to have a doppelganger identity and email system, like (no, not Hillary) her predecessor, Lisa Jackson, who masqueraded…

The New York Times continues its grand tradition of always letting its ideology trump sound science and journalism at every opportunity. In a 25-page opus last weekend, they published a piece seeming to portray an evil corporate entity callously and recklessly poisoning the water in an Ohio river watershed home to 100,000 innocent people. They published this now to further their crusade to "reform" the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which was enacted in 1976, and has been the cornerstone of chemical regulation, up till now. A few days thereafter, the Times published an…

Atherosclerotic Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) is responsible for one in every six deaths in the United States as well as being the leading cause of death throughout the developed world.  The theory of dietary saturated fats as the principal promoter of elevated serum cholesterol and heart disease stems from research beginning in the 1950's by an American scientist Ancel Keys. It was this hypothesis which was embraced by the American Heart Association and the US federal government in the 1960s and until recently. However, at the same time of Keys research, a British physiologist named John…

Pre-test Q: What in blue blazes does he mean by that? (Answer at the end)**A commenter pointed out to me the apparent insensitivity of the juxtaposition of "Watermelon" and Obama. I am sorry — that thought never crossed my mind. IF you'd be so kind as to either read till the end OR skip to it now, you'll see that no such disrespect was intended! I do apologize if anyone was offended--the furthest thing from my mind.  GR This week, President Obama gets the podium to harangue us with his final retrospective, and prospective: the State of the Union address. Rumor has it that he’s just…

Wikipedia may be wildly inaccurate but at least it isn't dangerous. For really dangerous advice, the assumption has been to go on Internet health forums.  Faint praise, but a new analysis suggests that medical advice given on Internet health forums may be of better quality than people tend to assume. They focused on three popular online discussion forum websites - reddit, mumsnet and Patient. The researchers, graduate student Jennifer Cole, Dr. Chris Watkins and Dr. Dorothea Kleine, from Royal Holloway, asked doctors and members of the public to rate information which had been given…