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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease.

The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males.  

The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis.
The organic food industry, even large players like Whole Foods, created a disturbing trend; lying to customers about whether or not organic food uses pesticides or chemicals.

In reality, organic food is covered in pesticides. If they were not, instead of only being an average of 13 percent more expensive than regular food (thanks to Amazon squeezing efficiency, it was 20 percent and higher when Whole Foods was a separate company) it would be 80 percent. Pests and other natural blights would devastate their crops.
A few years ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer, a United Nations body with a checkered scientific and ethical history, used statistics to suggest that red meat was bad for health.

It was easy. All they had to do was gather together studies that used rows of foods to meet columns of diseases and create a statistical link. Since they didn't have to do any actual science, they were able to declare that bacon was just as dangerous as plutonium or World War I mustard gas.

To IARC, it's safer to drink glyphosate than to eat a hot dog
Union of Concerned Scientists is only really in top form when a Republican is in the White House because when the GOP is in control, they can be angry outsiders, but when a Democrat is in control, a bunch of their employees leave and join the administration. After the Obama election, they even lost their President to Department of Energy - ironic, because they hate energy, but preventing nuclear and natural gas was a cornerstone of their work so it made sense to officially engage in that effort.
A new paper looked at farm workers in Hawaii and found that before 1999 some of them had more heart attacks than non-farm workers and concluded the reason must be safe levels of pesticide exposure creating "subtle effects" over time.

Epidemiology can achieve anything, like show that autism is linked to organic food, if the correlates are tortured enough. 

The confounders are obvious, like that the level of exposure to pesticides made no difference, but the authors declare their correlation is probably valid because a similar link was created in Taiwanese men who were exposed to high levels of pesticides.
Though age is the big risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, an analysis of Swedish twins has led some to believe that half of individual differences in Alzheimer's disease risk may be environmental.

Chemists, toxicologists, and biologists note that we would have gone extinct long ago if our bodies had not been able to absorb, metabolize, ignore, or excrete trace substances but since 2005, when a new salvo against public trust in the modern world was opened, there has been talk that an "exposome" can cause all kinds of diseases.