At a time when sue-and-settle activist groups like Center for Food Safety continue to claim scientists - across the private sector, non-profits, and government agencies - are colluding to poison us by allowing safe pesticide use, their messaging is being ignored by more consumers than in decades.

More than 18 percent of U.S. adults claim they do not have access to adequate food from day to day, according to a new paper, which more than doubled between 1999 and 2016. The result: Higher obesity.

People got fat from not enough food?

There are obvious confounders, namely recall bias - and it's hard to reconcile an obese person stating on surveys they don't get enough to eat with biological reality. Scientists know that the only diet that really works is fewer calories. In 100 percent of studies people who consume fewer calories than they burn lose weight. They don't gain it eating less food. 

Do you believe that COVID-19 was created by Bill Gates so he and his Big Pharma pals could get rich selling a cure? Do you believe career government employees are exaggerating COVID-19 to sway the election to their side?

When e-cigarettes - vaping - began to gain in popularity in the early part of this decade, critics like Dr. Stan Glantz at UC San Francisco claimed they were only going to be used in addition to cigarettes, so risk reduction and smoking cessation would not happen.

Former smokers dismissed both him and his Johnson  & Johnson funding - they make nicotine patches that compete with vaping - as a little too convenient, and data since has shown his claims were unfounded. 

With COVID-19 and worries about the SARS-CoV-2 virus keeping millions of people at home, activists and lawyers are hoping to resurrect worry about a problem dismissed by scientists as a money grab; third-hand smoke.

A new estimate says that of 378 metropolitan areas, many could actually exist on locally grown food - if the local area is up to 200 miles away, which means New York City could claim farms in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are local to New York. 

Even then, diets would have to change, because progress has meant having diversity and choice, and if locally-grown were really necessary, the population would starve along the Eastern Seaboard and the Southwest of the U.S. And meat would only be for the rich.