Posted on 12/28/2006 10:03:01 PM PST by neverdem
10. California’s Not-so-deadly Air. Bill Clinton and Julia Roberts stumped for California’s Proposition 87 which would tax oil to fund alternative energy research. Mr. Clinton and Ms. Roberts claimed that California’s air is the “worst in the nation” and that it was linked with more asthma, bronchitis, lung cancer, heart disease, lung disease and premature death. But data (as opposed to political rhetoric) indicate that California’s public health is generally better than that of states which fully meet federal air quality standards. Maybe that’s one reason why voters rejected Proposition 87.
9. Food police indict SpongeBob Squarepants. Several anti-fun food activist groups sued Nickelodeon and Kellogg for using cartoon characters to advertise food products to children. “Nickelodeon and Kellogg engage in business practices that literally sicken our children,” the groups claimed. Though the activists attempted to exploit a widely publicized report from the Institute of Medicine concluding that advertising to kids is effective, the IOM report did not examine and, therefore, did not link advertising to kids’ health problems.
8. Woodpecker Racket. The 2005 reported sighting of the thought-to-be-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas raised hopes of bird-watchers everywhere. But a prominent bird expert cast serious doubt on the report in 2006, characterizing it as “faith-based” ornithology and “a disservice to science.” But the debunking may not matter. Environmental groups used the dubious sighting to convince a federal judge in July 2006 to stop a nearby $320 million Army Corps of Engineers irrigation project. Given that the anti-development Nature Conservancy funded the “search” for the woodpecker in the first place, the supposed “sighting” turned out to be quite convenient.
7. Low-fat diet myth busted. The widely-held 30-year old notion that low-fat diets are good for your health went “poof” this year. They didn’t reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease or cancer, according to three large studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Sadly, the lesson of low-fat diet myth seems lost on the media which looked the other way as public health nannies fomented the scientifically dubious trans fat scare.
6. Stem cell fraud and futility. Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi plans to introduce legislation lifting the limits on federal funding of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. But she ought to pay attention to what did, and what did not happen, in ESC research during 2006. What did happen was the indictment of prominent South Korean ESC researcher Hwang Woo-suk for faking his research. What didn’t happen was any meaningful advance in ESC research. One alleged ESC research advance hyped in the journal Nature (harvesting of ESCs without destroying the embryos) had to be corrected to note that none of the embryos in question actually survived the procedure -- oops.
5. Cosmic ray study fails to penetrate lead-lined media. Swedish researchers provided experimental evidence that cosmic rays may be a major factor in climate change. They calculated that just 5 years of cosmic ray activity can have 85 percent of the effect on the Earth’s climate as 200 years of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Though the study was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A, the findings went largely unreported by the Al Gore-smitten media.
4. Day of Reckoning for DDT Foes? It only took 30 years, tens of millions of lives lost, billions sickened and trillions of dollars of economic growth foregone, but the World Health Organization finally ended its ban on use of the insecticide DDT to kill malaria-bearing mosquitoes. It’s great news for developing nations that want to employ the most affordable and effective anti-malarial tool. So what should happen to those environmental activists and government regulators who used junk science to have DDT banned in the first place?
3. What Hurricane Season? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction for the 2006 hurricane season was about as wrong as wrong can be. NOAA predicted only a 5 percent chance of a below-normal hurricane season -- but a below-normal season is precisely what happened. If NOAA’s experts can be so wrong about an imminent hurricane season, why have any confidence in far more complex predictions of climate change 100 years into the future?
2. Board of Health or Bored of Science? New York City’s Board of Health banned restaurants from serving foods cooked with vegetable oils containing trans fats. It apparently mattered little to the Board that the Food and Drug Administration classifies trans fats as “generally recognized as safe” and that the sort of “science” the Board relied on could also be used to ban potatoes, peas, meat, dairy products and many other food items from restaurants.
1. Some Real Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore whipped the world into a global warming frenzy with his doomsday documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Milloy personally asked Mr. Gore to help arrange a debate between scientists about the purported climate catastrophe. He declined (twice) without explanation -- leaving me to wonder why global warming alarmists are unwilling to explain why they believe in non-validated and always-wrong computer guess-timations of future climate change rather than actual temperature measurements and greenhouse-effect physics that indicate manmade emissions of greenhouse gases are not a problem.
View the complete “Top Ten Junk Science Moments for 2006” report here.
I think they used to call it "Oleo" yuk
"It's not fat per se. It's the kind of fat."
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Who can tell, when the "experts" keep changing their story? Are trans-fats just the new Alar? According to the "latest" studies, even reduction in trans-fats had no effect cardiac health. Some people just believe that if they take all the joy out of life, they can live forever. I say, you may not live forever by living joylessly, but it'll sure seem like it.
I cooked a steak the other night in the old crock pot, and have never seen so much fat as when I had to clean the thing the next day. That said, I work out pretty hard and don't mind at all some animal fat over the course of a week. I sneak in a few cans of tuna and sardines, some hard boiled eggs, a bit of elk and venison...but one must fine tune one's eating habits. The steak, by the way, was a treat for my rat terriers, who handle animal fat a lot better than I.
DITTO!!!!!!
This is NOT the same as a "low-fat diet". Different subject entirely.
That's true in Wisconsin, I remember my parents "smuggling" colored oleo in from Illinois.
Unfortunately there isn't one liberal who will ever read or believe any of the debunked junk science myths perpetrated on the population over the past 30 years or so.
These people will continue to believe that the only way to "save the Earth" is to rid it of humans.
It's true, when margarine first came out the Dairy lobby was very strong and their people kept the laws so that margarine was white and nasty looking. Many manufacturers sold it packaged with a small gelatin capsule of yellow dye. I remember my parents having us kids knead it into a big lump of what looked like Crisco until it was uniform in color and resembled butter. And they didn't call it margarine either, marketing guys came up with that PC name later; back then, it was called OLEO.
Irresistible-pun-bump-to-the-top.
bttt
Thanks for the bump and links.
When the H2 blockers went over the counter, I was sure we'd see Vibrio and other rare infections. The Calcium loss is logical.
I remember when oleo first became available. It was in a kneadable plastic bad with a little yellow dye capsule in the middle which you had to squeeze to release the dye and then knead the bag until the white oleo was colored the color of butter. Fun.
And that's NOT what #2 says--it talks about a "low fat diet", which also means low in saturated fats (aka "animal fat")---NOT a "low TRANS-FAT diet", which is what your statement is actually about.
They are NOT equivalent statements. Two completely different dietary regimens. You can drop "margarine" completely, and go back to butter, and you will still be on a "high fat diet" according to "myth 2".
Huh?
This is Darwin's plan to reduce the surplus population. The libs shouldn't be so sad. Zero Population Growth is a good thing....
I got the job of mixing the yellow coloring when we used margarine. It was a major undertaking.
Margarine without coloring looked like sticks of wax - extremely unappetizing looking. I understood the law was pushed by the dairy industry so margarine would be less competitive with butter.
Fortunately, we mostly used butter from my grandparent's cows. I also got the job of churning the butter.
It was all cooked in LARD too.
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