Chipotle, which has promised to remove GMOs (from soybean oil anyway - the meat, cheese and soda remained evidence-based) and claimed it was going to be more ethical than anyone else by only sourcing local ingredients and produce now has a much bigger problem on its hands - its stores are a ghost town because they have caused not different types of foodborne illnesses in different parts of the country.

There once was a time when the use of thin models was deemed as promoting an unrealistic body image for women - odd at a time when obesity was rising and there were fewer and fewer thin women to blame.Now "plus-size" models are taking some heat for promoting poor health choices and obesity. A paper in the Journal of Public Policy&Marketing says advertising campaigns that lean towards using ‘plus-size’ models are having a “detrimental” effect on the public’s lifestyle and eating behavior because they claim being fat is ‘real’ and ‘normal’ . 

The Obama administration really wanted the Environmental Protection Agency's legally suspect Waters of the United States rule (the fuzzy-wuzzy named Clean Water Rule) to get a groundswell of public approval - so they used government employees and taxpayer money to blitz social media endorsing it.That's called lobbying, and it is illegal for the government to lobby for the rule it bypassed lawmakers to enact. Not only did they break the law, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found, they engaged in “covert propaganda” because they did not disclose that the messages they were promoting across social media were written and foisted off by the same group engaging in the unprecedented power grab over state and city government. 

The organic food process has been a miracle of clever marketing that will be taught in business schools for generations to come: They managed to convince the public to pay more for food using reasoning that mostly involved self-identification as being more ethical people and better parents if they did so.Nothing special about that, except this is food; an organic tomato is no different than any other tomato. Both are grown using pesticides and fertilizers, both have been genetically modified for thousands of years.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's $300 million Akatsuki ("Dawn") probe fired its small attitude-control thrusters for 20 minutes Sunday evening at 6:51 p.m. EST in a second (and final) attempt to enter Venus orbit. The first attempt was exactly five years ago, on Dec. 6, 2010, but it failed when the probe's main engine conked out during the orbit-insertion burn, sending the spacecraft sailing off into deep space.However, this time they had a win. Let's do some science!Image: Akihiro Ikeshita/JAXA

Sugar is sugar, to scientists. But Big Sugar, which promoted the notion that its bleached white product was somehow superior to corn syrup, suddenly found itself fighting a second front, against nutritionists, food bloggers and outright crackpots like Joe Mercola and the lunatic that runs that Natural News site.

Want to be made to feel like you are a bad mother? Defend ordinary food among a crowd of people who buy organic. They self-identify as not only being more educated than ordinary shoppers, but more ethical people as well. Especially if it is for the children.Why don't men get the same social and gender pressure as women? Men may be less easy to manipulate with the 'you are a bad parent' marketing techniques used by organic marketing groups and the pressure groups like SourceWatch and U.S. Right To Know that they fund.

In 1959, the public were told not to eat cranberries because they might contain a cancer-causing carcinogen.Ha ha.Today, we know everything is a cancer-causing carcinogen. Your 100 percent organic Thanksgiving dinner is stuffed full of carcinogens that cause cancer in rats, yet people will eat it anyway.

As Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders watches his Presidential hopes fade, supporters are rushing to defend him. Though he has never campaigned as a Democrat in his entire career, he expected Democrats to embrace him because he always caucused with them in Congress; instead, he is a Democrat-Socialist campaigning for the nomination in the same party as a guy who got a standing ovation for killing Osama Bin Laden and will leave office with America in three wars and who let the AquAdvantage salmon get approved. That is going to be a struggle for acceptance in mainstream America when they see a guy coming from a state that says GMOs must have warning labels and has actively campaigned against the very thing the sitting President is taking credit for improving - the economy.

On November 19th, the American Council on Science and Health met with officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs group to discuss sensible regulations related to the FDA's new authority over tobacco products like cigars, pipes and also tobacco substitutes like e-cigarettes, which are also deemed to be in the group though they are not tobacco (it's a nuanced point - there is no commercially viable way to create nicotine without tobacco.)