Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an avowedly anti-nuclear group, created the Doomsday Clock as a publicity stunt to oppose nuclear energy and weapons. Journalists loved it, and so it has stuck around, with a committee picking some new arbitrary hysterical point of no-return annually.

Last year it was at two minutes until midnight - when the world will end, presumably out of 1,440 possible minutes, which meant we were .0014 away from, well, something. A vague Armageddon caused by whatever is popular in media accounts of how the modern world is killing us. 

Are you more likely to buy salt if the label on it notes it is "Free of Nuclear Waste"? 

Don't deny it if you are one of the people who buys any of the 65,000 products that Non-GMO Project has sold stickers for, like salt. Not only can't GMOs be harmful, only a handful of foods are even made using that process, and yet it adorns tens of thousands of labels.

But awareness and truth are not their goals.

Like a "free of nuclear waste" sticker, Non-GMO Project wants you to think the food sold by their non-clients is harmful using the "nocebo" tactic - they want to convince the public the lack of something makes you healthier. Like nuclear waste, or unicorns, or GMOs, or ghosts. 

Guidelines for increased vegetable consumption asa way to improve to improve outcomes for prostate cancer survivors are based on expert opinion, inference, and statistical correlation, but a recent randomized clinical trial that included 478 patients found no difference in prostate cancer progression over two years among men with early-stage disease.

Breast milk has become popular due to both well-meaning (statistical correlation to everything from higher income to higher IQ) and mommy-shaming (if you use formula, you are a bad parent) groups that it may actually be putting more kids at risk.

If you simply can't express enough milk, or don't want the hassle, you may be tempted to buy breast milk online. Obviously the hope is you get a reputable source but if you do run into problems, Aoife Finnerty, adjunct at the University College Cork, outlines the legal situation.

A recent article in NPR applauds Anaheim for using goats to keep grasses mowed. While there is nothing really wrong with that as fire prevention, any more than it's wrong for Michael Pollan to cultivate his garden in Berkeley while preaching about organic food, it is very much the kind of gimmick only wealthy elites engage in, because it sounds "natural" - which also sounds like Michael Pollan. 

In 2019, 23-year-old Emily Goss was a like a lot of people. She believed in supplements because they are a $35 billion industry exempt from FDA oversight since 1994, when President Clinton signed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act for his constituents, because, let's face it, they believe in alternatives to medicine and science a lot more than that other political party.

Wealthy elites used to just want to have alternatives to vaccines and conventional food and natural gas. Some took it even farther and got their kids diagnosed with autism to avoid lines to Disney World but those were outliers.

More worrisome is the new fad for rich people; HGH treatments to make their kids taller. 

As Ross Pomeroy notes for Real Clear Science, kids with growth hormone deficiency have been getting HGH since 1985 and since 2003, children with "Idiopathic Short Stature" (ISS) -no clear cause - have gotten it too.

Numerous human studies of dietary cholesterol target recommendations and cardiovascular disease have found no association, but the American Heart Association had been stuck in the past, when lots of confounders related to heart health allowed dietary cholesterol to be targeted using questionable statistical methodologies.

Though some studies associate intakes of cholesterol that exceed current average levels with elevated total or low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations, it could be spurious correlation.
By having a modest diet - American Heart Association is now promoting specifics like the Mediterranean and DASH diets - the same reduction in cholesterol happens anyway. 

I am not going to alarm you by stating plainly that the New York Times is the go-to source for wealthy elites who are often out-of-touch with the real world but sometimes they are so tone-deaf that it makes the veins in your neck stick out.

Case in point is this article correlating opera attendance to better health outcomes. It was so bas I scoured the BMJ paper to see if it was part of their annual Christmas spoof pices and they got duped, the way we assumed Atlantic was duped when writing about how sexist scientists are, because "men are more likely than women to deem their own work new and profound."