The imagery of the ideal housewife was just what it reads like, a convention fabricated by male-dominated urban advertising executives to sell stuff.

Because it was an ideal, some women adopted it, and some men wanted it, and therefore it grew, but it largely faded away as culture wised up to claims about organic food and alternative medicine in the early 2000s.

A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease.

The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males.  

The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis.

Google News was awash in suggestive headlines last week following the publication of a new paper purporting to show a link between occupational pesticide exposure and increased cardiovascular disease risk.

The organic food industry, even large players like Whole Foods, created a disturbing trend; lying to customers about whether or not organic food uses pesticides or chemicals.

In reality, organic food is covered in pesticides. If they were not, instead of only being an average of 13 percent more expensive than regular food (thanks to Amazon squeezing efficiency, it was 20 percent and higher when Whole Foods was a separate company) it would be 80 percent. Pests and other natural blights would devastate their crops.

Though prebiotics are a fad outside the chemotherapy sector, there is little evidence they do anything positive or negative in humans. Except in horses, where they seem to do something negative.

Before they can reach the intestines, commercially available supplements partially break down in the animals' stomachs, which can lead to inflammation of the stomach lining. So if you really feel the need to give a horse prebiotics, preparing  food supplements so that they don't take effect until they reach the large intestine. 

Political events can take a serious toll on mental health - at least in one case. A man with a brief episode of acute psychosis convinced a doctor it was triggered by the 2016 Referendum on Brexit--the process of the UK leaving the European Union (EU), which it joined in 1993.

The doctor describes the case of a middle aged man, brought to hospital by paramedics in an acute psychotic state, three weeks after the June 2016 Referendum result on the UK's departure from the EU.  The patient was confused and very agitated, with disordered thoughts and speech. He heard voices and was delusional. And he was paranoid, believing people were spying on him and planning to kill him, and that radio/TV discussions were targeted at him.

Placebo controls are a gold standard against which new treatments are often measured. If a new treatment consistently proves to be better than a placebo and safe, it can be marketed, sold and prescribed. Otherwise, it can’t – or at least shouldn’t. The problem is that, as our latest study reveals, researchers don’t report what placebos contain. Different placebos have different effects, and the choice of what’s in a placebo can lead to mistaken inferences about a new treatment’s benefits or harms.

A few years ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer, a United Nations body with a checkered scientific and ethical history, used statistics to suggest that red meat was bad for health.

It was easy. All they had to do was gather together studies that used rows of foods to meet columns of diseases and create a statistical link. Since they didn't have to do any actual science, they were able to declare that bacon was just as dangerous as plutonium or World War I mustard gas.

To IARC, it's safer to drink glyphosate than to eat a hot dog

In 2006, a tiny brown pebble, equivalent to a raisin, sold at auction for $25,000. This inconsequential artifact was, in fact, William Shatner’s kidney stone. The US actor had persuaded doctors to return the grisly relic to him following surgery, so he could auction it for charity. It was bought by an online casino that added it to its collection of oddities, which include a grilled cheese sandwich graced with an image of the Virgin Mary. Stranger still, this extraordinary interest in curiosa is not an uncommon occurrence, neither today nor throughout history.

Union of Concerned Scientists is only really in top form when a Republican is in the White House because when the GOP is in control, they can be angry outsiders, but when a Democrat is in control, a bunch of their employees leave and join the administration. After the Obama election, they even lost their President to Department of Energy - ironic, because they hate energy, but preventing nuclear and natural gas was a cornerstone of their work so it made sense to officially engage in that effort.