On Sept. 6, 1958, the “natural” food movement and chemophobia as we know it were born. On that day, the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, which modified the U.S. Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, came into force.

Also known as the Delaney Clause, it stated if a synthetic chemical could be shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals, the chemical must be banned. It also suggested if the exact same chemical was natural, it was safe. While this was immediately attacked as a baffling and unscientific approach to carcinogenicity, many lawyers were looking forward to decades of litigation.

Anti-science activists who make money promoting alternatives to medicine have succeeded so well that 47 percent of those aged 18 to 37 think they can cure cancer with food or supplements or ancient Chinese wisdom.

That alarming bubble of woo brings the average up to 40 percent overall, which must embarrass Baby Boomers, who elected the President that put folk medicine on the same stage as science at the National Institutes of Health.

America is the most science literate country in the world, we are dominant in Nobel prizes and science output, and we are thankful we are not France, but a new survey by Harris shows that we still have a long way to go.

The results of the new survey reveal that 47 percent of people ages 18 to 37, our future leaders, have become convinced by efforts to promote alternatives to medicine and think they can cure cancer with food or supplements or ancient Chinese wisdom - 40 percent overall.

How did we get here?

Three ways.

In California, we have warning labels on trees, because they will give us cancer. And that is not even the strangest of California's warnings about nearly 1,000 chemicals on hundreds of thousands of products.

We call it "leadership" to put warning labels on the things activists are not yet allowed to ban. "Leadership" is a dog whistle for the kind of social authoritarian mentality that is the enemy of science and progress.  And we are very much the enemy of science and therefore progress. 

A recent analysis of fake images titled WHO Cures Cancer In Photoshop shows that the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) may need more than just a new leader, because they remain stuck with an old problem; credibility.

During the Obama administration, James Clapper, America's Director of National Intelligence exposed Russian efforts to undermine U.S. natural gas ("fracking") by supporting environmental groups using "donor advised" funds (large pools of money where individual participants can anonymously decide where to send the cash) in order to keep Europe, which has thrown the energy baby out with the political water by shutting down nuclear, suckling at the teat of Kremlin fossil fuels.

They didn't want America exporting energy, the top export of Russia, and the way to do that was to pay activists to make fracking controversial at home so legislators would come down along predictable party lines.