Far be it from me to consider anything designated by Oprah Winfrey as, perhaps, maybe, not always evidence-based, but I had always hoped some skepticism was in order yet consistently instead found Oprah viewers were not only ready to believe, they were willing to migrate to other shows and believe there also.

Some are immune. The FDA, for example, finally seems to have had enough of Dr. Mehmet Oz, maybe because Oprah's show has ended its run and therefore her Jedi mind spell is broken.  If you don't know the latest, Dr. Oz said Wednesday that a lab found troubling levels of arsenic in many brands of juice.  By Thursday the evidence-based world was making goat noises at him, something we have long done (Dear Oprah - however, next year, should you like to make the forthcoming book I am co-authoring your Book of the Month or whatever that is called, I'll happily stop clobbering Oz and even vow to make all future bowel movements 'S-shaped' and indulge in some chromium polynicotinate), including the FDA, who ran tests on the same batches and found nothing of concern.

"Good Morning America" even trotted out Oz's old medical school classmate, Dr. Richard Besser, who said Oz was "extremely irresponsible"

Whatever.  Jealous much, Dr. Besser?  Dr. Oz is on TV and selling books about s-shaped poop and chromium polynicotinate, what are you doing?  Oh wait, you were head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, actual evidence-based work.



Where, oh where, did Dr. Oz and his lab go so very wrong?  Well, arsenic is everywhere.  It's in food, it's in the soil, it's in water, it passes right through us in those normal quantities.  Synthetic arsenic, though, which is not the kind you might find a tomato plant leaf, does not pass through the body as readily as the natural kind.  It's a heavy metal and has been implicated in cancer.

But there is a big difference between the two types, which any competent lab should know. And isn't he a doctor?  I'm not a doctor, a chemist or an internist of any kind but if someone told me their test showed 6X the level of arsenic everyone else says is in apple juice, I would ask how such a thing was possible, do a search on Science 2.0 and recognize that the arsenic types were different, and ask the awkward questions that needed to be asked before implying evil Nestlé company was foisting off Chinese-made arsenic-ridden juice on American children.

Dr. Oz's representative said Oz does not believe organic arsenic is as harmless (but...but...it's organic)  as the Obama administration's FDA contends it is.  Maybe he thinks lobbyists for Big Apple are secretly controlling all that medical science.  Better watch out, FDA, he'll sic the other Four Horsemen of the Alternative (Chopra, Weil, et al) on you.

And why are apples always getting picked on?   Remember the Alar scare, when anti-science hippies created their own brand of hysteria regarding delicious fruit?  Oh wait, that was a while ago, so long ago it was a time when conservatives were the ones siding with science and progressives were insisting science was out to kill us.