Author: ConsumerFreedom.com Headlines

We’ve pointed out many times that Americans’ hysteria over trace levels of mercury in fish is just that—hysteria. The health risks from mercury (some of which is all-natural) are vanishingly small compared to the well-documented health benefits of eating fish. And now here’s some good news: Cornell University professor Tom Brenna and London Metropolitan University professor Michael Crawford have written an open letter to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, calling on her agency to update its 2004 fish consumption advisory to reflect health research that has since become available.

The FDA’s 2004 advisory states that women who are or may become pregnant should limit their consumption of fish due to concerns about the effects of mercury on fetuses and young children. The open letter informs Hamburg that it’s not realistic to continue to use this advisory:

The core problem is that the benefits of fish could not be appropriately considered in 2004.  Current science has advanced to the point where it is no longer consistent with the recommendation to limit consumption of all fish to a maximum of 12 ounces per week for pregnant and lactating women and women who may become pregnant.   There is persuasive new evidence that consumption of more than 12 ounces per week of most marketplace species will actually improve fetal neurodevelopment.  This improvement occurs in spite of methyl-mercury in most, if not all fish.       

The adverse consequences of inadequate fish consumption could be significant.  According to the research published since 2004, fish consumption during pregnancy can raise neurodevelopmental performance including IQ from fractions of an IQ point to as much as five points depending on the amounts and types of fish consumed.  It appears that maximizing this beneficial effect can often involve consumption beyond 12 ounces per week, again depending upon the species.   

Professors Brenna and Crawford note that the FDA already developed a Draft Risk & Benefit Assessment last year to help weigh the pros and cons of eating certain kinds of fish. And they urge Hamburg to “complete work on this assessment on a priority basis.” Hear, hear.

For those looking for a user-friendly tool in the mean-time, we recommend our HowMuchFish.com website. It provides realistic estimates of, well—how much of certain fish species Americans can safely eat, as well as a breakdown of the nutrients they provide.

Pass it around, and be sure to stay tuned—we’ll be expanding HowMuchFish.com in the coming weeks. As for the open letter to the FDA, it’s open to additional signatories—and it appears the list is already growing.

With the recent release of a new review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it now seems pretty well established that organic foods aren’t any nutritionally better than regular, conventional foods. But one of the comebacks we often hear from skeptical consumers (mostly parents of small children) goes something like this: “Well, maybe that’s true, but going organic helps American farmers abandon the use of harmful pesticides.” Really? Let’s take a closer look and see if organic myths match up with reality.

First, can Certified Organic farmers use pesticides on their Certified Organic crops? Absolutely. Organic production doesn’t allow synthetic pesticides, but they can use “natural” pesticides. What’s a natural pesticide? Common examples include pyrethrins (an extract from the chrysanthemum flower), rotenone (found in roots and stems of several plants), and Bacillus thuringiensis (a nasty bacterium found in soil). Guatemalan farmers have even used fermented urine. So if you think that organic apple doesn't need to be washed, think again.

And are organic pesticides safer and better for us than synthetic pesticides? Not really: Pyrethrins have been linked to tumors in rats. Rotenone has as well (although evidence is somewhat limited),and it’s also been found to cause damage to cells and DNA.

It’s also worth noting that organic pesticides aren’t as efficient as their more modern counterparts. National Review writer John Miller noted back in 2004:

Organic food products also suffer from more than eight times as many recalls as conventional ones. Some of this problem would go away if organic farmers used synthetic sprays — but this, too, is off limits. Conventional wisdom says that we should avoid food that's been drenched in herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Half a century ago, there was some truth in this: Sprays were primitive and left behind chemical deposits that often survived all the way to the dinner table. Today's sprays, however, are largely biodegradable. They do their job in the field and quickly break down into harmless molecules.

What’s the end result of using less-efficient “natural”pesticides? There are still going to be pests, so organic farmers have to apply more of these chemicals. “[T]he typical organic farmer has to douse his crops with it as many as seven times to have the same effect as one or two applications of a synthetic compound based on the same ingredients,” wrote Miller.

Should we be worried about exposure to these or other organic pesticides? Or synthetic pesticides, for that matter? Let’s add a little context.

Dr. Bruce Ames, who invented a test bearing his name that screens for potential carcinogens, threw cold water on chemical/cancer scaremongering back in 2000. In a paper co-authored with the director of the Carcinogenic Potency Project at UC-Berkeley, Ames wrote that we take in plenty of chemicals that we don’t realize are even there:

About 99.9 percent of the chemicals humans ingest are natural. The amounts of synthetic pesticide residues in plant food are insignificant compared to the amount of natural pesticides produced by plants themselves. Of all dietary pesticides that humans eat, 99.99 percent are natural: they are chemicals produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other animal predators….

Americans eat about 1,500 mg of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than the 0.09 mg they consume of synthetic pesticide residues.

So repeat this three times: “It’s the dose that makes the poison.” Many of these pesticides (both synthetic and organic) are pumped into rats in abnormally large doses to determine their lethality and toxicity—in other words, at levels far, far higher than how consumers usually encounter them.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with buying organic. But since the supposed health benefits don’t measure up, it’s hard to say whether consumers should believe that a warm, fuzzy feeling is worth the extra cost in a $5 tomato.

It seems like it’s been a while since the nutritional purists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest last pulled a hyperbolic snack-hating stunt. But we knew we wouldn’t have to wait too long. Yesterday CSPI unveiled the latest edition of its “Xtreme Eating Awards” for high-calorie restaurant dishes. It’s an annual media stunt for the food police whose puritanism excludes nearly any concept of moderation. Eating a 2,500-calorie meal every day isn’t generally a healthy choice for people (Michael Phelps excluded), but there’s nothing wrong with an occasional splurge. Can someone tell CSPI?

CSPI’s spin this year, Reuters reports, is its unhappiness because the menu-labeling laws it pushed through a variety of legislatures haven’t caused restaurants to replace all their offerings with carrot sticks and wheat germ.  As we’ve noted before, the record is mixed for the effects of menu labeling laws on consumer behavior, which is really what’s driving the content of restaurant meals. (If consumers didn’t want triple bacon cheeseburgers, no one would offer them.) And given CSPI’s love of frivolous restaurant lawsuits—like last year’s (now dismissed) complaint over the saltiness of dishes at Denny’s—we have to wonder if the group’s nags will sue over calorie content next if consumers continue to ignore menu labeling.

But CSPI’s calorie-count seething provides a good opportunity to point out that food is just one part of the larger health and obesity picture. Coincidentally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report yesterday about physical activity in the United States. More than one-quarter of American adults get absolutely no physical activity in their free time. Things weren’t looking great for the next generation, either: Just 30 percent of high school students have daily phys-ed class, and even fewer are regularly physically active.

And by some CDC measures, our local environments don’t encourage us to move our bodies very much. Just one-fifth of kids have easy access to parks, for example. Why is this important? Because it’s hard for children to exercise if their surroundings aren’t built for play. As one Indiana University-Purdue University study discovered last year, kids’ proximity to recreational facilities has an effect on their body size.

CSPI can bluster about restaurant dishes all it wants. But its finger-wagging misses the forest for the trees.

Another study, another dose of reality for organic-only foodies. A review published this month in the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds that the evidence from previous studies (after tossing out many whose scientific rigor was found lacking) indicates that organic food isn’t any healthier than ordinary, conventionally grown food. This follows on the heels of, and supports, a similar review last summer from the same team. That review, released by Britain’s Food Standards Agency, came to the same conclusion after the authors sifted through 162 peer-reviewed research articles from the previous five decades.

As you might expect, the review last summer came under instant criticism from groups that promote organic foods by making health claims. So who’s to say who’s right? Writing in the Institute of Food Technologists’ journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety this spring, Rutgers University professor Joseph Rosen analyzed the marketing and health claims made by organic proponents. After noting that experts at the Mayo Clinic and American Dietetic Association don’t find any real benefits in organic food, Rosen concludes:

Much of the proof advanced by both the Soil Association and the Organic Center are based on research articles that have not been reviewed by independent scientists and data that are not statistically significant. Nonexistent or incomplete data are nevertheless “published” in the media. In some cases, organic food proponents omit data that do not support their views… Consumers who buy organic food because they believe that it contains more healthful nutrients than conventional food are wasting their money.

And while we’re at it, let’s just dispose of the ridiculous idea that the whole world could go organic if we all agreed to do it. Limited crop yields mean organic agriculture simply can’t feed the world. University of Manitoba agronomist Vaclav Smil calculated that in order to replace synthetic nitrogen (widely used today) with organic nitrogen, the U.S. alone would need an additional 1 billion livestock (for manure) and 2 billion acres of forage crops (for the livestock). That’s the size of the lower 48 states.

In other words, the organic niche is just that—a niche, and a feel-good boutique system for those who can afford it. But the idea that its widespread use would bring widespread benefits to humanity belongs in the compost.

The Associated Press reports today (as though it were “news”) on an old tactic used by the animal rights extremists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In addition to sending half-nude performers to “shower” with an anti-meat message, PETA is trying a more fully clothed tactic: buying stock in meat and restaurant companies and introducing shareholder resolutions to drive their costs up.

By simply holding $2,000 worth of stock for one year, PETA earns the right to introduce whatever resolutions it wants at a company’s Annual General Meeting. The obvious appeal of this tactic has led to its spread: The so-called “Humane Society” of the United States has recently co-opted the same PETA strategy — as well as PETA's chief strategist. HSUS’s corporate outreach director, Matthew Prescott, used to be in charge of these campaigns for PETA until he moved to the animal-rights mother ship last year.

Prescott told The Boston Globe in 2008 how it all works: “When we come up with a shareholder resolution, the company has to print up our message and send it to every investor. So everybody reads what we've written — usually a statement about the graphic ways that the company is abusing animals.”

So how has shareholder democracy been treating confrontational animal rights groups? Poorly. Not a single shareholder resolution introduced by PETA or HSUS has ever come close to passing. Not one that we can find has even attracted more than six-percent support. HSUS’s resolution at last week’s McDonald’s shareholder meeting got a 4.4 percent “yes” vote, for one typical example.

The results speak for themselves. Shareholders of restaurants that serve meat, eggs, and milk don’t want to be told what to do by animal rights activists who really just want to veganize the whole menu. But we’re left to wonder what HSUS does with all its profits from these so-called “animal abusing” industries. Not that we’re about to stop buying cheeseburgers and chicken wings just to spite them.

As the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee considers its options before releasing its official nutritional recommendations this year, it’s clear that the latest push is against salt. Backed by activist groups such as the self-anointed food police at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, New York City is leading the charge against sodium. And in April the Institute of Medicine released a report calling for the FDA to set limits on salt in processed foods.

We’re pushing back. As readers of the Boston Herald discovered yesterday, despite all of the blustering the effects of a national salt reduction aren’t known. Like many reckless activist campaigns against food and ingredients, there could be unintended consequences:

The editor of the American Journal of Hypertension last year recounted nine observational studies of salt intake and heart attacks and strokes. Four found no association between salt and health. That’s one reason he called attempts to tinker with salt intake as amounting to “an experiment on a whole population.”

And let’s not forget that salt reduction can lead to an increase in blood pressure in some people. Because of the variance of how people deal with salt, then, there’s no one-size-fits-all amount the government can mandate….

The IOM report recommends determining the “appropriate” amount of salt to allow in different kinds of food. It’s hard to imagine the government creating a regulation for how much salt can be in every single thing we eat. At that point, the feds might as well publish their own “government-approved” recipe book.

Read the whole piece here.

Phil Vettel, the Chicago Tribune’s food critic, notes a certain whiff of hypocrisy in First Lady Michelle Obama’s food-focused campaign to solve Americans’ weight woes. While she’s preaching about access to fresh veggies, her husband goes on the road and happily noshes on wings, burgers, and fries.

Vettel writes of the presidential palate:

I mean, the cheeseburger with fries at Peggy Sue's Cafe in Monroe City, Mo., in late April? Yikes. And then, a few days ago, a stop at Duff's for buffalo wings? Double yikes. Buffalo wings are so loaded with fat they make cheeseburger fans feel better about themselves.  

I realize that, as a man of the people, you have to dig into what the locals eat. When in Buffalo, N.Y., as you were this month, delivering a speech on the troublesome economy to a particularly hard-hit city, you're not going to be grabbing a steaming mound of quinoa at the local veggie restaurant. …

Mr. President, you're a gym rat, and from what I can tell, you're exercising away all those calories and then some.

And that’s the heart of the matter: President Obama is as fit as a fiddle, known for his dedicated gym routine six days a week. We’d argue that he makes a great advocate for the benefits of regular physical activity, but not such a perfect spokesman for a fanatically restricted diet that only MeMe Roth would love.

While activists are fighting to push treats off our tables, scores of studies have shown that Americans are most seriously lacking in the physical activity department. Only eight percent of elementary schools and six percent of middle and high schools require students to take phys ed. These are habits that have lifelong consequences: On a state-by-state basis, the leanest areas of the country are also the places with the most active people.

The link between inactivity and obesity is unambiguous. And President Obama is living proof that regular exercise compensates for cheeseburgers and the occasional DC visit to Ben’s Chili Bowl.

Television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz doesn’t claim to be a “supermarket guru” when he slams high fructose corn syrup, but he does have an M.D. That’s why it’s concerning when he puts out a column advising his fans to avoid products with high fructose corn syrup. He raises a scarecrow and warns that high fructose corn syrup could be linked to “metabolic syndrome,” while failing to mention that the study that he appears to be referencing didn’t even look at high fructose corn syrup! Published in March, the researchers gave excessively high (i.e. unrealistic) doses of pure fructose to subjects and monitored the results. This is a common misconception, but a doctor should know better. Pure fructose is just what you think—100 percent fructose. No one eats or drinks pure fructose, let alone in the quantities given in the study. High fructose corn syrup, on the other hand, is roughly half fructose and half glucose—just like table sugar. 

Dr. Oz. cleverly brushes off the wealth of research and nutritionists saying that high fructose corn syrup is nutritionally the same as refined (table) sugar. It looks like we’re not in reality anymore, Toto.

Dr. Oz’s obesity “advice” (read: scaremongering) completely misses the forest for the trees (or the road for bricks, if you will). Demonizing one ingredient isn’t going to make anybody healthier.

The American Dietetic Association—you know, the real nutrition experts—rejects the overly simplistic “good” food/“bad” food approach to diets. The ADA writes: “[T]he total diet or overall pattern of food eaten is the most important focus of a healthful eating style. All foods can fit within this pattern, if consumed in moderation with appropriate portion size and combined with regular physical activity.”

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware of our 3-month-old, revitalized HumaneWatch campaign that’s exposing the deceptive “Humane Society” of the United States (HSUS) as the PETA-esque animal rights group that it is. Judging from the reaction of HSUS (and its head honcho “Humane Wayne” Pacelle) to our new efforts to keep the group honest, we’re having a serious, nationwide impact that threatens HSUS’s attempts to continue to masquerade as a pet-shelter umbrella group. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, after all.

Yesterday we upped the ante with full-page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to make sure our message reached millions of Americans. And today we’re targeting Hollywood celebrities who lend their star power to this faux humane society with a full-page ad in Tinseltown’s must-read magazine, Variety.

You may not know it, but more than 100 celebrities, from Carrie Underwood to Harrison Ford, have aligned themselves in serious ways with HSUS. These stars (and their agents) may not know that HSUS is simply PETA in a suit-and-tie, so we’re happy to set the record straight:

You can see all of our HumaneWatch ads here.

We have reported how the “Humane Society” of the United States (HSUS) uses misleading advertising to make donors believe that contributions to the organization will go to local hands-on pet shelters. On the contrary, HSUS seems more interested in cows and pigs than dogs and cats. The group funnels much of its $100 million annual budget to push a radical anti-farmer agenda. In the meantime, the local pet shelters that actually take care of animals are strapped for cash – and HSUS is at least partly to blame.

Case in point is the Halifax Humane Society (HHS) in Daytona Beach, Florida. In a recent op-ed, the HHS community relations director Michelle Pari discussed the difficulty of trying to raise money in competition with groups like HSUS. Although Pari didn’t specifically cite HSUS, it’s clear that’s who she has in mind.

“One of the biggest problems HHS faces, as a local private non-profit organization, is public misperception about where donations made to large national groups actually go,” writes Pari. “It is difficult to compete with multimillion-dollar organizations that have the financial means to solicit money through television, newsprint, radio and Internet advertising worldwide.” She goes on to add that people are “shocked” to learn that not a penny of the donation they send to the “national organization” ever reaches the local animals in need.

In a speech before the Animal Agriculture Alliance this week, the editor of HumaneWatch.org pointed out that that less than one-half of 1 percent of the HSUS budget goes to pet shelters: “They have about a $100 million budget, $24 million goes into fundraising, $37 million goes to salaries, with more than 30 lawyers on staff.” In addition to funding activism, HSUS believes in taking care of its own. The HSUS pension contributions of $2.5 million are five times greater than the meager grants to pet shelters.

We strongly agree with Pari’s recommendation that if you really want to help those dogs and cats in your community, give to the local shelter directly – or else they will likely never see a penny of your good intentions.

A national poll released by Rasmussen Reports on Monday reveals that a majority of Americans oppose an FDA takeover of how much salt restaurants and food makers can put in food. As we put it to The Wall Street Journal this week, bureaucratic meddling in salt is “an illegitimate form of government intervention” parading as paternalism “run amok.” And as a front-page USA Today story notes yesterday, Americans’ tastes make it difficult to simply slash sodium from dishes. Salt also serves important culinary functions, integral in curing and preserving bacon, olives, and fish and is crucial for making bread, said one pharmacology professor at the University of Southern California.

We elaborated on some of the less savory aspects of the salt assault at The Daily Caller, telling readers that not only is salt science far from crystallized, but mandating a population-wide sodium reduction could have unintended consequences for our health:

[T]he health effects of a countrywide sodium reduction are far from crystallized. “It is unclear what effects a low sodium diet has on cardiovascular events and mortality,” concluded a 2002 review in the British Medical Journal… Because of the variance of how people deal with salt, then, there’s no one-size-fits-all amount that the government can mandate….

And from the ever-reliable law of unintended consequences, New York Times science columnist John Tierney notes that a salt reduction could conceivably make Americans fatter. How? Because we’d eat larger amounts of low-sodium food to try to get back to the old levels of salt intake that our bodies are used to.

As Tierney jokes: “Never bet against the expansion of Americans’ waistlines, especially not when public health experts get involved.”

Read the whole piece here.

Santa Clara County’s board of supervisors despondently voted 3-2 yesterday to ban toys in Californian restaurant meals marketed to kids that exceed a certain amount of calories. The purpose, said the measure’s sponsor, is to fight obesity. Get it?  They’re banning toys for kids…for the children. Given the twisted logic of obesity crusaders, perhaps it was only a matter of time.

Of course, it’s hard to see how this directly fights obesity. As our senior research analyst points out on Fox Philadelphia last night, it’s not as if your 6-year-old drives to a fast-food joint to buy a kids’ meal.

In essence, this county measure is a slap in the face to parents. It accuses moms and dads of being unable to responsibly buy food for their kids.

But guess who appears happy at the depressing move by Santa Clara County? You got it—master manipulator MeMe Roth and the killjoys at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). When this proposal was first floated last month, a spokeswoman from CSPI said that a toy ban was “on our list of promising policy options” and also claims today that CSPI's research says most kids’ meals are “unhealthy.” (“Unhealthy” is a label CSPI seems to give to anything but steamed kale, Brussels sprouts, and sweet potatoes. Not exactly the happiest of meals.)

Most residents of Santa Clara County think this is bogus as well. A poll reveals that 80 percent of residents think that banning toys in kids’ meals isn’t an important issue. Who knows—maybe the next county proposal will be to force kids to finish their vegetables before they're allowed dessert.

It's a bad week to be an anti-soda activist. In New York, a Big Apple physician penned an editorial against the Governor’s proposed soft drink tax, writing that there’s no authoritative science to back up its promised health benefits (something we’ve been saying for a good long while).  Elsewhere in the Empire State, a soda “buyback” in the Bronx patterned after a similar firearm-reduction initiative netted just one bottle of soda—and it was a zero-calorie drink, which wouldn’t fall under the scope of the tax, anyway. Likely, most people who aren't anti-soda crusaders understand that the implicit comparison of sugary drinks to guns doesn’t hold any water.

Farther south, city councilmen in Philadelphia have soured on the mayor’s proposed 2-cents-per-ounce drink tax. “It's fair to say it's dead,” says Councilman Frank Rizzo, a sentiment that five other sources also confirmed for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

All of this left “Twinkie tax” inventor and soda tax shill Kelly Brownell to beg Philly politicians to impose some kind of tax. “There is room to compromise and still get considerable health benefits,” he pleaded.

It seems to us that these two local governments have caught onto the fact that soft drink taxes aren’t about health—they’re about filling bureaucrats’ coffers while “public health” activists like Brownell use Americans as experimental guinea pigs. Their prospects for succeeding? Pretty flat.

“Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it,” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) co-founder Ingrid Newkirk has famously said. With abolition in mind, PETA has long waged its crusade against using animals for (human) life-saving medical research, even protesting the military’s use of pigs to allow soldiers to practice combat medical training. And PETA’s lab-coated allies at the phony “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine are also dedicated to beating the “liberate the lab animals” drum.

Thankfully, there are two sides to this debate, even if PETA pretends otherwise. Nancy Haigwood, a scientist who uses animals in her research, takes to the page of The Oregonian today to clarify why she does what she does. She highlights the medical progress gained by animal research in just the last three weeks alone—including advances in the medical understanding of Parkinson’s disease, cancer tumors, the flu virus, and Down syndrome. But as Haigwood also writes, even this won’t satisfy the abolitionists:

Animal activists often reject these kinds of discoveries, claiming that animal studies are outdated and that all of these breakthroughs could be made in test tubes or with computer models. But in reality, no test tube can simulate the complex immune response of an animal, and no computer can mimic a real, breathing lung. Before we can try therapies in real human patients, we must study a similar living system first.

Regardless of the benefits to people, the medical profession’s needs, and the nonsense of its own claims, PETA will continue its jihad against critical medical research. Here’s one example: Last week the USDA and NIH investigated the University of Utah’s animal research program following PETA’s allegationsof animal abuse. The inspectors found the program to be “in good order,” in stark contrast with PETA’s gloomy claims.

Of course, it’s always ironic when PETA makes claims of animal cruelty, considering its own track record of killing nearly 30,000 animals. And according to this entertaining infographic about PETA’s hypocrisy, PETA spends less than 1 percent of its budget actually helping animals. (Which also sounds an awful lot like another animal rights group we know.)

Yesterday was Earth Day, and we felt it was an apt time to clear the air over at The Daily Caller about the PETA-fueled myth that eating meat causes ecological destruction. But more importantly, Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) penned his own piece on the animal-rights “Humane Society” of the United States in The Baltimore Sun. Citing our research and our website HumaneWatch.org, Rep. King points out that despite the “humane society” in its name, HSUS earmarks less than one percent of its budget as grants to local, hands-on pet shelters. Coming from a farm state, he also knows that HSUS is a threat to honest livestock farmers everywhere:

Farmers and ranchers across the country have long known what many Americans are just now learning. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a political machine masquerading as an umbrella organization for local humane societies.

HSUS solicits money from well-intentioned but often uninformed animal lovers and uses these donations to lobby Congress for an anti-meat, anti-animal-agriculture agenda….

Leaders of this organization have made statements indicating they would like to see animal agriculture end. John "J.P." Goodwin, the manager of Animal Fighting Issues at HSUS, told AR-Views, an animal rights Internet discussion group, that his "goal is the abolition of all animal agriculture."…  Paul Shapiro, senior director of HSUS' factory farming campaign, told a Colorado audience in 2003 that "eating meat causes animal cruelty." HSUS has given funding to the notorious anti-meat organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Read the whole piece here.

The big news this week is that salt is officially the latest target in the national fight to control the American diet. The Washington Post originally reported on Tuesday that the FDA is moving to seek mandatory restrictions on how much salt can be in foods. The FDA denied this strategy in a statement. But judging from what public health activists are saying, it’s likely that the Post story will prove prophetic.

Yesterday the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report titled “Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake in the United States.” Among many recommendations, the report states that the FDA should target salt’s “GRAS” (Generally Recognized As Safe) status and limit how much can be in certain foods, before lowering it as part of a “step-down” process. In other words, government-mandated blandness may not be so far off.

There’s no doubt that the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is pleased. CSPI has fought against salt for 30 years in an attempt to get the FDA to revoke its “GRAS” status, calling salt “the deadly white powder you already snort” and the “single most dangerous ingredient in the food supply.”

CSPI even sued the Denny’s restaurant chain last year over the salt content of its dishes. And once the FDA no longer considers salt “generally recognized as safe,” can a stampede of trial lawyers looking to sue over canned soup and deli meat be far behind?

Lawsuits aren’t the only thing we have to look forward to. The IOM report recommends research to determine the “appropriate” amount of salt to allow in different kinds of food. Of course, it’s hard to imagine the government creating a regulation for how much salt (or other ingredients) can be in every single thing we eat. At that point, the feds might as well publish their own “approved” recipe book. (We’re sure CSPI already has one prepared).

There may actually be no need for such a determination. Research from UC-Davis last fall found that our bodies naturally regulate the amount of salt we take in, making government intervention ultimately pointless. And let’s not forget that attempts to tinker with salt intake were challenged by the editor of the American Journal of Hypertension this year as amounting to “an experiment on a whole population.”

It’s one thing for the government to make dietary recommendations, such as daily intake guidelines for different nutrients. But when Big Brother crosses the line between suggestions and demands, that’s another thing entirely.

If the FDA sets limits on salt, what's next? We’re waiting for FDA “strike teams” to bust sushi bars for providing too much soy sauce.

Today the American Museum of Natural History and researchers at Rutgers University with longstanding ties to seafood scare campaigns are reporting the results of some tuna sushi analysis in the journal Biology Letters. Analyzing the trace mercury levels of fish samples from restaurants and supermarkets, they warn that these tiny mercury concentrations “approach or exceed” safety guidelines set by the federal government. This is just the latest ride on the merry-go-round of mercury scaremongering—and quite similar, in fact, to a deeply flawed 2008 New York Times report.

The Food and Drug Administration’s methyl mercury “Action Level” (that 1 part per million safety guideline the Museum’s press release refers to) already includes a generous ten-fold safety cushion. And the FDA has written that the Action Level “was established to limit consumers’ methyl mercury exposure to levels 10 times lower than the lowest levels associated with adverse effects.” (Emphasis added.)

In contrast, the Rutgers researchers only found one kind of tuna (out of the five species tested) in which the average mercury content surpassed the FDA’s safety-cushioned Action Level. And the highest mercury content reported in any of the samples was less than a quarter of what might be a legitimate cause for human health concern.

That’s right—might. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that “finding a measurable amount of mercury in blood or urine does not mean that levels of mercury cause an adverse health effect.” Today’s Japanese eat 8 times as much fish as Americans and show no health consequences. Simply, the well-documented health benefits of consuming fish far outweigh any supposed health risks.

You’d think scientists would know better than to exploit fears of mercury in food. But all this press coverage is really about showcasing a new DNA testing technology, so the public health impact is apparently taking a backseat.

As we’re explaining to the media today, there’s really no reason to toss the toro or avoid the akami:

All tuna should be considered a health food, since none of the tuna that sushi lovers crave contains harmful mercury levels. The American Museum of Natural History is raising an unjustified alarm. The entire body of medical literature contains zero American cases of mercury poisoning from the consumption of commercially caught fish. But evidence of fish’s health benefits is plentiful.

According to scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the benefits of a nutrient-packed diet of seafood far outweigh any hypothetical risk from trace levels of naturally-occurring toxins.

Visit our HowMuchFish.com seafood calculator to learn, well … how much fish you can actually eat without the slightest hypothetical worry.

Thursday is Earth Day, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is using the opportunity to push its animal-rights agenda. Yesterday, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk penned an op-ed claiming that whenever we “consume meat, eggs or dairy foods, we contribute to ecological devastation.” (Not true.) And today in Birmingham, Alabama, scantily-dressed PETA fem-bots will hold an outdoor shower protest to allege that one pound of beef requires the same amount of water as six months’ worth of showers. (Also not true.)

These animal-rights eco-talking points are like non-eroding garbage— they won’t go away, and they stink like crazy. One of Newkirk’s complaints is that meat contributes significantly to global warming. Not so in the United States. The EPA’s 2008 inventory of greenhouse gases found that the entire U.S. livestock industry accounts for less than 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. And in February a British study found that “going veg” could actually hurt the environment by forcing more land into cultivation and raising the risk of forests being bulldozed.

As for PETA’s shower claim, this loony logic is water soluble. PETA used to claim that one pound of beef took a whole year’s worth of shower water—before quietly changing its claim to “six months.” But even this revised figure is still a gross miscalculation. According to a 1999 estimate from the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, a group made up of actual agriculture scientists, it would take fewer than 18 ten-minute showers to consume the amount of water required to produce a pound of lean American beef. (That includes all the water consumed by cattle, and the water used to irrigate feed crops and process the meat.)

We couldn’t resist raining on PETA’s parade, so we’re telling the media today that PETA’s Earth Day antics are all wet. Here’s what our Director of Research said in a press release:

If these PETA protesters are only showering 18 times every 6 months, I guess a Birmingham intersection is as good a place as any to catch up. We've always said that PETA stinks, but now we know why.

One good way to protect the planet this Earth Day is to encourage meat producers across the globe to catch up to American efficiency standards. Another way is to stop buying what PETA is selling.

On Friday, ABC's The View invited Phil Lempert, the self-anointed supermarket “guru,” to talk about high fructose corn syrup. Sound like a recipe for disaster? We thought so. We pointed out a few months ago that Lempert, despite his apparent expertise, completely botched a video by telling consumers that a candy wafer was reformulated to remove high fructose corn syrup — even though it never contained the corn sugar in the first place.

So with that in mind, we tuned in. Challenged off the bat by his hosts about whether high fructose corn syrup is more fattening than sugar, Lempert said bluntly, “No.” So far, so good. But then Whoopie broke out this whopper:

Goldberg: But when [high fructose corn syrup] took hold here, did we not see an increase in size in people?

Lempert: No question. If you look at the obesity rates before this, it was about 15 percent. Now 66 percent of us are either overweight or obese.

Phil is trying to play both sides, but this is an old game. The theory that high fructose corn syrup is more fattening than table sugar originates from an editorial (not peer-reviewed research) in the 2004 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. One of its co-authors has since fully recanted, saying “we were wrong in our speculations about high fructose corn syrup about their link to weight.” In fact, high fructose corn syrup is just like table sugar, which comes from sugar beet or sugarcane. The two sugars are nutritionally identical and have the same sweetness.

Lempert also cites a recent Princeton study as one piece among the “lots of research on both sides.” The “guru” ought to get caught up on his reading. Even calorie maven Marion Nestle (among others) has been openly skeptical of that research’s conclusions which, once again, speculate about high fructose corn syrup and weight gain.

On the whole, there’s far more solid research showing that high fructose corn syrup is nutritionally the same as table sugar than there is showing the opposite. (The American Medical Association has taken the all-sugars-are-created-equal position since 2008.)

For show, “guru” Phil gave the View ladies several taste-tests of products that use high fructose corn syrup and those that don’t. But right before one cookie taste-test, he revealed which one was the “bad” cookie. Predictably, Joy Behar reacted in melodramatic disgust.

That’s not exactly a scientific method—in fact, the technical name for it is “farce.” We don’t expect professional chatterboxes to look at the science, but Phil Lempert ought to know better. When food companies remove it and start using table sugar, it’s just a marketing ploy. Let’s hope the guru eventually ditches his dunce cap.

On Friday, ABC's The View invited Phil Lempert, the self-anointed supermarket “guru,” to talk about high fructose corn syrup. Sound like a recipe for disaster? We thought so. We pointed out a few months ago that Lempert, despite his apparent expertise, completely botched a video by telling consumers that a candy wafer was reformulated to remove high fructose corn syrup — even though it never contained corn sugar in the first place.

So with that in mind, we tuned in. Challenged off the bat by his hosts about whether high fructose corn syrup is more fattening than sugar, Lempert said bluntly, “No.” So far, so good. But then Whoopie broke out this whopper:

Goldberg: But when [high fructose corn syrup] took hold here, did we not see an increase in size in people?

Lempert: No question. If you look at the obesity rates before this, it was about 15 percent. Now 66 of us are either overweight or obese.

Phil is trying to play both sides, but this is an old game. The theory that high fructose corn syrup is more fattening than table sugar originates from an editorial (not peer-reviewed research) in the 2004 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. One of its co-authors has since fully recanted, saying “we were wrong in our speculations about high fructose corn syrup about their link to weight.” In fact, high fructose corn syrup is just like table sugar, which comes from sugar beet or sugarcane. The two sugars are nutritionally identical and have the same sweetness.

Lempert also cites a recent Princeton study as one piece among the “lots of research on both sides.” The “guru” ought to get caught up on his reading. Even calorie maven Marion Nestle (among others) has been openly skeptical of that research’s conclusions which, once again, speculate about high fructose corn syrup and weight gain.

On the whole, there’s far more solid research showing that high fructose corn syrup is nutritionally the same as table sugar than there is showing the opposite. (The American Medical Association has taken the all-sugars-are-created-equal position since 2008.)

For show, “guru” Phil gave the View ladies several taste-tests of products that use high fructose corn syrup and those that don’t. But right before one cookie taste-test, he revealed which one was the “bad” cookie. Predictably, Joy Behar reacted in melodramatic disgust.

That’s not exactly a scientific method—in fact, the technical name for it is “farce.” We don’t expect professional chatterboxes to look at the science, but Phil Lempert ought to know better. When food companies remove it and start using table sugar, it’s just a marketing ploy. Let’s hope the guru eventually ditches his dunce cap.