Illumination 2.0

The videos released by Stonyfield Organic are patently offensive.  They use children to produce false statements about well-understood scientific topics, which misleads the consumer, but also has potential to harm children.   This has drawn the ire of an increasingly large scientifically adept food and farming community, and many have taken to the Stonyfield Facebook page to voice their discontent.  Ten years ago you would have seen Rob Wager, Prakash, Anastasia, Karl, @mem_somerville and a few others weighing in.  The scientific comments would be buried in a sea of shill accusations from a series of facade accounts (and Ena Valikov). It makes my heart happy to see scientific traction catching on. The comments come from hundreds of people -- farmers, moms, students -- all presenting reasoned rebuttals to Stonyfield's bad science campaign.  And it is changing minds. How do we know? Because the soft, accurate and kind comments are being systematical...

Nick Saik set out to produce a full-length documentary about food and farming technology. Food Evolution did it first, and did it well.  So to avoid a redundant effort Nick is transforming those videos into short features.  Check out his work, and listen to him describe his efforts on this week's podcast. 

The language below is provided by the campaign to defend Britt Hermes. You may know that Britt Hermes, who is an international skeptical campaigner about naturopathy, is currently being sued for defamation. Britt used to be a naturopath herself, but she now spends a lot of time and effort exposing naturopathic practices, including on her blog “Naturopathic Diaries”. She’s been taken to court in Germany by US-based naturopath ‘Dr’ Colleen Huber, who is claiming that Britt has defamed her on her blog. Huber is a critic of chemotherapy and radiation therapy in cancer treatment. Instead, she uses ‘natural’ therapies that include intravenous infusions of vitamin C and baking soda. The international skeptical community is concerned that the case against Britt may have the effect of silencing a major campaigner against unproven and disproven ‘medical’ practices, through the imposition of considerable legal costs. For this reason, the Australian Skeptics have set up...

Do the attack articles really help a cause?  When a scientist is paid by the state and does their vast majority of research from State, Federal and small fruit industry funds, why foment hate against them?  Here's a love letter I got today, and my response.  Do you really hurt your causes by tarnishing the people that work for you, that are paid with your dollars and are working for the greater good? 

Aflatoxin is a potent carcinogen.  It is produced by a fungus that grows readily on corn and peanuts, known in the Developing World as 'groundnuts' (which makes more sense IMHO).  Billions of people suffer from chronic exposure. Dr. Dilip Shah was part of a team at the Danforth Center that created solutions to solve this problem.  On this week's podcast we talk about those solutions, and how they may lead to better health around the world.   

The story of canola oil causing dementia and memory issues seems like old news.  But I received an email that it has popped up again in the wacky press, another alleged expert weighing in on this obvious relationship that actually is not even remotely supported by the data in the paper.  These cases are especially egregious because these health-oriented websites get huge traffic, and lousy information is consumed rapidly and shared widely.  The claim emerges again, but this time with a new twist!  The author, Michelle Schoffro Cook didn't even read the paper, but is happy to lend her opinions that further advance this misinformation, along with a dandy of a tangential spin.  How do I know she didn't read it?  She notes in her analysis that it was published in the journal Nature .  It was not.  Nature wouldn't touch this paper with a 10 impact factor pole.  It is not a bad paper.  It is not a good paper.   I wo...

This is an article that appeared in Real Clear Science , and details the emotional hardship of seeing a problem and a solution separated by a barbed-wire fence.