Friends of the Earth, the kooky offshoot of Sierra Club that hates science even more, is dumping its advertising budget into a claim it commissioned from a Maharishi Institute scholar who runs what is apparently an uncredentialed lab claiming they were able to detect a weedkiller in common food. And journalists have repeated it everywhere.

Any scientist could have told them that and saved their money.

A recent paper in JAMA Internal Medicine had all of the ingredients mainstream media love in food stories; a cosmic sounding number of participants (44,551), which sounds like it adds statistical power, and a provocative conclusion about the perils of the modern world - in this case that eating "ultra-processed food" is lowering life expectancy.

Love is a complex topic. You love your dog differently than you love chocolate. There are times when you might put your dog, or a loved one, ahead of yourself, but you would never jump in front of a moving car to save chocolate.

United States Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., has been in the private sector and in government, he has been care provider and patient, he has used supplements and watched as a $40 billion supplements industry duped the gullible and often engaged in outright deception, all using an exemption granted by the U.S. government.
But a recent statement by him, coupled with a raft of warning letters to supplement companies, signals that might change.

A product like Zicam, which claims it can make colds shorter, shields itself from truth in advertising claims by admitting on the label its product is not actual medicine, it is homeopathy, a pretend drug for people who want to believe.

If they were required to show it works, the way pharmaceutical products must, they'd be out of business. If they could pass a double-blind clinical trial, or any homeopathic product could, they'd spend the money in a second, because every supplement that wants to be legitimized yearns for U.S. Food and Drug Administration legitimacy. FDA may have flaws, like all groups do, but it is the gold standard for the world. 

Friends of the Earth, social justice warriors, 1960s-era anti-science activists, occasional lobbyists, and current Political Action Committee (PAC) for Democrats (including Green New Deal darling Rep.