Despite another year of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hyperventilating weeks after a foodborne illness occurs (devastating lettuce farmers while showing how they little they know when exaggerating what they do know), the more evidence-based bodies at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture made 2018 safe to go into the pantry again.

Because few people are all that panicked about lettuce, but everyone wants to know about pesticides.

In 2013, the Windsor city council voted 8-3 to remove fluoride from water. This was not the work of right-wing John Birch Society members, who were against fluoride in the 1950s because it was government interference in water, this was the result of left-wing anti-science activists. A few have wrapped themselves in the flag of personal choice about consumption, but most are honest in claiming they link negative health effects to fluoridation.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of five years of death certificates (2011-2016) found that among drug overdose deaths 29 percent were due to fentanyl by 2016, a huge leap from 4 percent in 2011, when oxycodone was most dangerous at 13 percent.

Two weeks ago, CNN shocked some in the science community by having Vani Hari, who styles herself as "The Food Babe"(1), tell us that the bacterial problem on romaine lettuce was caused by modern medicine.  It was no great surprise to most of us, if there is a hyperbolic claim about science CNN is an always reliable platform to create a story or at least tweet about it.

Organic Consumers Association has opened a new front in their culture war against science - now they say organic food itself is too science-y.

Don't they represent organic farmers? No. Unlike Organic Trade Association, the mainstream trade group created to help organic corporations gain market share, Organic Consumers Association is a fringe group that was created to tear down science they oppose on ideological grounds. They just wrap themselves in the flag of the burgeoning organic movement. They are not for anything, they are instead against any science a client will pay them to be against.

They don't just attack regular farming, they are weirdly opposed to vaccines, affordable energy, and any chemical that magic soap companies pay them to oppose.

As many as three million Americans, an alarming one percent of the U.S. population, get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder each year. That is a fantastic amount, bordering on unbelievable, 12,000X as many gun murders that will occur. 

If being "bipolar" is over-diagnosed then it may well be that something as simple as yogurt will fix it. And that is the claim of a pilot study unveiled today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting - people who suffer damaging shifts in moods, from mania to depression, may not need expensive, antipsychotics, depressants or even therapy, they may just need a half a cup of Activia.