A new exploratory paper links sleeping pills to dementia but while the press release uses the term risk frequently, it minimizes a giant confounder; older people sleep less and people who have not yet received a dementia diagnosis may go on sleeping medication to try and mitigate restlessness.

Another confounder is that they only find a higher correlation in white people. Science does not work that way, but epidemiology and statistics can do anything.

Thanks to the fall armyworm, nearly all of Africa's maize crop is in jeopardy, finds a new study. 

The new projection was made using 3,175 geo-tagged occurrences and factoring in physiological and climatological requirements to geographically assess its range. They showed that almost 92 percent of Africa’s maize growing areas can mean year-round growth of fall armyworm while 95 percent are suitable for that plus pests like the maize stalk borer, Western corn rootworm and Asiatic witchweed.

Despite apparent beliefs on social media today, the modern anti-vaccine movement did not begin with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. For decades prior to that, wealthy elites who believed that supplements and organic food were medicine led the world in denying their children vaccines.

IN 1994, President Bill Clinton and Senator Tom Harkin set off a supplement boom - by decreeing that supplements could be exempt from real FDA oversight as long as they didn't claim to cure cancer or kill anyone (which companies in that market continued to do anyway) and placed in small print that their supernatural claims were not validated by FDA.

That, plus wasting taxpayer money at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(1) that could have gone to real research created a boom, to where woo and mysticism that claims it is sticking it to Big Pharma is a $40 billion per year industry.

Do you believe bacon causes diabetes? Cancer? If not, you may be an apostate in 2023, when we've just exited a period during which any skepticism of epidemiology(1) is met with the 2020s equivalent of 'Do you even Science, Bro?'

There is just one problem. Epidemiology isn't science. It is instead, in the best circumstance, a statistical effort to point scientists in the right direction. That is not the same thing, and in the worst circumstance it can be a weapon for social engineering, as epidemiologists placed within the International Agency for Research on Cancer to get classifications on products for trial lawyers showed.

Coffee of any kind requires beans and those beans contain caffeine. If you don't want caffeine your choice to remove it is a chemical or...a chemical. Yes, I know some companies claim they use only water but they really use water and “supercritical carbon dioxide”, which is like claiming the chemical that creates banana flavor is different if it's grown in nature or in a building, despite being identical.