Happy Festivus – Here I Air My Anti-Science Grievances
December 23rd is 'Festivus', a not-real holiday invented by the father of George Costanza on the hit television show "Seinfeld", involving an aluminum pole, feats of strength, and, most fun, an airing of grievances.(1)
It's the airing of grievances I want to address.
Are Trace Chemicals In Shiny Hair Products Killing You?
The dose makes the poison, except in academic epidemiology, where H-Index and citations necessitate writing papers claiming any dose is toxic.This is why EXPLORATORY claims aren't actually science itself. When your only method is to ask people what products they use, if they feel sad, angry, or have a disease, and then correlating the product you wanted to target to the malady, it is easy to understand why during COVID-19 disease epidemiologists had a difficult time getting traction - they had never stood up to the cranks at Harvard School of Public Health and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences using food surveys to try and scare people about everything.
What Does ChatGPT Say About Holiday Eating Health?
Data tools like ChatGPT, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence (if you think a fancy autocomplete is actual AI), have the promise to do a lot of good. There are some concerns about human content 'creators' being replaced but we don't miss the 150,000 fewer bank tellers we had before the rise of ATMs and a lot of writing done by humans is pretty generic.Murder, Chemicals In Organic Food – Two Ways Thanksgiving Is Hazardous To Your Health
It's that time of year when activists, academics, and social media mavens hoping for media coverage begin to promote worry about Thanksgiving.Some risks are real, even if relatively slight; a lot more people driving mean more accidents and if you have a family member who is an International Agency for Research on Cancer epidemiologist, they will ignore the greater amount of driving and just tell you that Thanksgiving is deadly.(1) Food safety matters. Turkey should be 165 degrees Fahrenheit and ham 145, but anyone telling you that in a press release might as well be taking the bold stand of endorsing clean water.
Is Flossing A Waste Of Time?
Like the CDC manufacturing a prediabetes epidemic and pregnant women getting a scarlet letter if they have a glass of wine while pregnant, flossing seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. Are we right? The British are famous for bad teeth, for example, and fiscal conservatives will say that's because dental care is not free under their socialized medicine. They must not floss, right?Well, they don't, but it may not matter. Most people in Europe who have great teeth don't floss. They think it is humorous that we pull string through our teeth the same way European women wonder why their babies don't have more birth defects if a glass of wine causes fetal alcohol syndrome.
Dating A Vampire Hunter? Here Is How To Get Rid Of That Garlic Breath
Halloween is the time of year when you are most likely to find out your significant other is a vampire - or vampire hunter. Sure, vampires can't be real and never have been, there can't really be hunters for those any more than there are ghost hunters, but History Channel is stuffed with people hunting ghosts, so let's light a science candle rather than curse your supernatural darkness and tell you how to get rid of your partner's garlic breath after they return from a night of slaying.
The Toxic Chemicals In Your Organic Pumpkin: Happy Halloween!
Halloween is just a few days away so prior to worrying about razor blades in candy or kids getting run down in the streets you may want to think about pumpkins.They are full of toxic chemicals. Even organic pumpkins.
Andy Brunning, of the Compound Interest site, made this graphic for Chemical & Engineering News, but they have nothing to do with this article about the dangers of pumpkin chemicals. Theirs is informational, the snark is all mine.
Harvard – Meat Causes Diabetes! Science – Harvard, Please Stick To Anti-Semitism
Harvard University, and its anti-science allies like The Guardian(1) paper in England, are again claiming that meat causes diabetes.Halloween Science: The Sugar Rush Is Fake But The Sugar Crash Hits Hard
If you are a parent, or know a parent, you have had someone claim that if their kid eats sugar they get 'hyperactive' - that may happen, but only because a child has been told they get hyperactive and act that they, the same way if you tell a child rum cake has rum they may act drunk.Biologically, it doesn't work that way. Sugar can certainly help you if you are diabetic(1) and "anti-sugar rhetoric is simply diet-centric disease-mongering engendered by physiologic illiteracy,” according to Edward Archer, PhD.(2)
Halloween Science: What Elastic Response In Chewing Gum May Mean For Bioactive Ingredients
A new study sought to analyze the chewing nature of four types of gum bases and along the way determine bubbling capacity also. Gums are generally oils, resins, and elastomers generally held in pleasant form by the gum base.So gum base is important to manufacturers. Chewing gum is a $25 billion per year business, 1,740,000,000,000 sticks. If humans chew each stick for 10 minutes, that is over 33,000,000 years we spend at it - annually.