Chemical Controversies Archives - Genetic Literacy Project: Recent Episodes
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An ambitious cohort of cities across the US and Canada has moved ever closer to legalizing drug use—with tragic results. Towns once recognized as safe places to raise a family are now characterized by homeless encampments and “open-air” drug markets. Overdoses and crime rates, both supposed to decline in the wake of liberalized drug laws, have increased in many jurisdictions. Residents in a lot of these communities have been left to deal with the fallout alone as their leaders remain committed to so-called harm-reduction policies intended to make illicit drug use safer. “Harm reduction isn’t just a problem for addicts,” Atlantic staff writer Michael Powell noted recently. “In many cities, the autonomy of drug users has taken precedence over nearly everything and everyone else, not least working-class families …who must live alongside addicts and accept dystopian decay.”
Seattle and similar cities illustrate the pattern. Public fentanyl use, addicts collapsed on sidewalks and schoolchildren observing drug deals have become routine where policies prioritize “meeting users where they are.” Distributing clean needles can reduce HIV and hepatitis transmission among participants, yet this narrow benefit has been overshadowed by increasing disorder and the normalization of addiction in residential neighborhoods.
Portugal’s more structured harm-reduction approach is often cited as a model for the US to follow, yet their strategy retained police involvement and treatment pressure. Perhaps more importantly, drug distribution is still a crime. The policies put in place by state and local officials in the US lack these defining features, usually intentionally. Oregon’s Measure 110 decriminalized possession of small quantities of drugs and produced sharp rises in overdoses and public use before a rapid public backlash and partial reversal. The arrival of fentanyl intensified the death toll, but the policy’s removal of consequences and enforcement made open-air markets and visible addiction far worse.
The reality is that widespread drug use is not inevitable. Heroin-addicted Vietnam veterans largely quit upon returning home, after being removed from a drug-saturated environment, and smoking rates fell dramatically in the US after sustained stigma and restrictions. These examples are strong evidence that norms, consequences and limited supply—all variables harm reduction excludes as “judgemental”—shape demand.
“Safe supply” experiments, in which addicts are given a taxpayer-funded ration of opioids, and the elevation of active users’ autonomy above the interests of children and working families have delivered measurable social decay rather than the promised reductions in harm. Two decades of expanding harm-reduction show the same result: the welfare of families and functioning neighborhoods has been subordinated to enabling public addiction.
Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they critique the case for drug legalization.
Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
During the American heat dome or Europe’s summer swelter and the hottest June days on record, we no longer have to endure the media hyperbole or the activist misanthropy, blaming man (industry, capitalism, consumers…) for the planetary destruction. Now we are sometimes reminded, in a deadpan tone, that these warm days are in keeping with climate models, but it is often greeted with a reaction similar to when my doctor tells me my excess weight gain is related to my eating habits.
After two decades of well-choreographed campaigns and narrative control that merged all environmental health issues into a centralized campaign against consumption, trade, capitalism and industry, with billions in foundation funding flowing in to enrich the activist movements, within a year, the tap was literally turned off. Everything just stopped. Why?
- The activist groups did not run out of money (foundation donations often stretch from three to five years).
- They did not run out of issues (none of the policies they demanded was actually delivered).
- These forever campaigners simply ran out of legitimacy.
The elections of 2024-25 across Europe and North America delivered a blow to the environmental left with economic, social and border issues taking priority in the political shift to the right. Over the last two years, policies, procedures and funding have migrated towards more economic, industrial and jobs development and away from the intangible feel-good fluff that the activists had pushed to the center of the policy arena. Buzzwords like simplification, deregulation, rationalization quickly replaced the environmental totems of circularity, decarbonization and degrowth. The electorate’s clear message was received in the policy halls of Brussels, Berlin and Washington.
Turning the Crisis InwardThe NGOs reacted as they have always done, not by reflecting and seeking a good compromise, but by declaring an imminent crisis. But the fabricated crisis was no longer a catastrophic climate collapse or a mass ecological extinction, but rather the threat to their own existence. Ever polarizing, the activists ran a campaign claiming the far-right was on a mission to silence NGOs (and free speech). Maybe it was the perpetual polarizing and lack of reflection or compromise that had turned so many off of their issues. The Firebreak published an article how their portrayal of the good activist fighting the “bad guys” was not setting the right tone and was not even singing the right hymn to their choir.
More recently, the activists have resorted to triage to try to make it through the lean years. Two weeks ago, the smarmy Good Lobby published their recent sales pitch called: “An Advocacy Survival Guide for Civil Society” claiming that the nature of the game had changed. Correction: the audience decided to watch other more important games. Of course, Alberto has been getting too fat living high off the foundation funding hog as the hypocrite blindly attacks other forms of advocacy (lobbying) funding so maybe he should follow his own advice.
Last week, a group of 60 activist NGOs, including the ever-opportunistic Good Lobby, published an Open Letter to the European Commission. The letter was quite remarkable in that their demands for better regulation were what these same groups had been condemning only three years earlier. The NGOs were demanding to be allowed to engage in dialogue while it was not too long ago that they were gleefully kicking their industry enemies out of the European Parliament and Commission. They demanded transparency, but the NGOs are the ones who do not reveal the billionaires and other interest groups behind their foundation funding. They demanded impact assessments. Good, so does that mean Europe will revise regulations like the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive where the NGOs got their way by rejecting the need for any impact assessments?
The NGO activist groups do face a crisis situation, but the crisis is coming from within.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPLooking to the Post-NGO WorldThis is not the first decline in NGO influence, and they will be back, probably stronger and even more vengeful. What is dangerous is for other stakeholders to consider the recent shifting sands as the end of the uncomfortable decades of activist interference and use it as a chance to go back to business as usual. Rather, this is an opportunity to reshape the post-NGO world to redefine how stakeholders engage in the policy process. Here are four key changes to ensure a rational policy process in future.
- Clarify the role of foundations. With the professionalization of philanthropy (consultants creating networks of fiscal sponsorships and dark donor-advised funds), foundations have become billionaire-led activist NGOs. These groups pose as campaign organizations but as they don’t legally exist, they don’t have to declare their funding or be held accountable. The rules need to change so these groups follow the same rules of transparency and accountability as every other stakeholder group.
- Differentiate NGOs from activist lobby groups (APEs). The Firebreak has argued that most policy activist groups abuse their status as NGOs, pretending to be in the same league as humanitarian organizations or aid charities, claiming tax-free status while spending hundreds of millions on salaries, political donations and lobbying campaigns. They should be classified as Alternative Policy Enterprises (APEs), lobby groups whose millions in funding from special interests should not be tax deductible or classed differently from industry lobbyists. Meanwhile, those genuine NGOs trying to run food banks, shelters and development aid programs have to compete with these non-transparent lobbyists trying to impose their elitist dogma on society.
- Set stricter conditions for evidence in policy processes. For the last 20 years, NGO groups have done a good job discrediting industry research and excluding their evidence from the policy process. But the activist science they put forward is lower quality and designed to generate fear and doubt rather than facts and evidence. Since NGOs are no longer dictating the narrative at the present time, a clear, objective standard of scientific research and data should be established that would encompass the best available research and lab practices, regardless of its source.
- Consider environmental activist campaigns as marketing and PR activities rather than policy actions. The NGOs are communications organizations trying to shape the public narrative to enhance business opportunities (donations, funding, alternative products…). Their evidence is neither scientific nor economic but designed to persuade via the emotional triggers of fear and outrage. Some examples:
– The anti-pesticide campaigns intend to push frightened consumers into buying organic food. Organic is nothing more than a high-priced marketing concept for the affluent elite to impose on struggling consumers.
– The catastrophic climate agenda is woven into the promotion of renewables and promoting a post-capitalist neo-Marxist ideology.
– The plastics fear campaigns (microplastics, waste, endocrine disruption…) work in tandem with alternative industries like copper, steel, glass and paper manufacturers.
– The litigation industry is profiting nicely from the activist PR work in all of these fear business centers.
We need to consider the activist APEs campaigns and lobbying, not as policy engagement, but as marketing and PR for other interest groups.
The big problem for the environmental NGOs is that their marketing campaigns continue as usual, but not many people are buying them. It is time to change the business model.
David Zaruk is the Firebreak editor, and also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. David is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Firebreak and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Firebreak on X @the_firebreak
“Our job here at Psy Ops is to panic the enemy, to blunt his will to fight. A Psy Operator must know the customs and habits of the enemy, the current dissensions, anxieties, and fears to determine vulnerability. To engage the enemy, you must know the enemy inside out. You must fill him with fear, and not just fear of dying.”
—Quote from: The General’s Daughter (Movie, 1999)
Influencers use the same tactics as the Army’s Psyops. They learn people’s anxieties and fears to know consumer’s vulnerability. One thing most people (75%) fear is losing control. Components of packaged food, such as pesticide residues, that people aren’t in control of fits this definition. In fact, a Reuters poll this year found that 78% of people are concerned. You’re in large company if you feel that pesticides—killers of insects, weeds, fungus, rodents, worms, and bacteria—are unsafe.
The “cide” in pesticide is a suffix that means “to kill” and it’s used in suicide, homicide, and genocide. It’s just common sense that people are concerned about the use of pesticides on food they consume every day.
But are pesticides safe?Why would any scientist say they are safe? It’s certainly true that they kill weeds and bugs—so why would they be safe for us to consume? First, the amount of pesticide we consume is extremely tiny, just residues. Second, the pesticides we spray aren’t the only pesticides that are killing bugs. Plants wouldn’t be with us today if they hadn’t evolved to be able to repel or kill bugs themselves. Over millions of years of natural selection, plants developed chemicals that either taste horrible or actually kill insects, emit odors that attract bodyguards like wasps to kill the insects, or produce toxic glue. Some plants even eat the bugs that try to eat them—like Venus flytraps.
But evolution is a competitive process and insects, like caterpillars and aphids, have been evolving right alongside plants to defeat their defenses.
They’ve done a pretty good job: without the pesticides we spray to help plants out, insects would claim about 30% of crops. One estimate puts potential losses at 78% for fruit, 54% for vegetables, and 32% for cereal. For example, pesticides kill spider mites, which lay shiny, round, white or pale-yellow eggs—too small to see—attached by a sticky substance on plants, then spin fine webbing around them.
The Food Quality Protection Act requires the EPA to ensure that each pesticide used on food is safe for children, with a ten-fold safety factor (meaning the amount used is ten times less than the amount considered safe for children). Children are like the canary in the coal mine— they’re more sensitive than adults.
But still, they are poisons, and four out of five people are concerned about that. There is an option: organic produce. After all, Pew Research has found that nearly one in two (45%) Americans think that eating organic produce is healthier. Of course, some people believe all kinds of things—like eating eggs raises your cholesterol (it won’t, dietary cholesterol isn’t the same thing as blood cholesterol).
Most research has shown that organic produce (fruits and vegetables) isn’t healthier than conventional produce. Conventional and organic foods have the same amount of nutrients—fats, carbohydrates, and fiber. In fact, some organic foods may contain more heavy metals than their conventional counterparts. And organic is not pesticide-free. Even in the famously cautious EU, 134 active pesticides, such as pyrethrins, are allowed on organic produce.
A systematic review found that the belief in organic food’s superiority over conventional food is largely subjective, based mainly on fear. Playing on those fears is the same thing the Army does with enemies: psychological operations.
But still, are pesticides in fact unsafe?If, by “safe”, you mean that no one ever will ever be harmed in any way by pesticides, the answer is no. The U.S. EPA has estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 farmworkers are poisoned annually from exposure, leading to nausea, seizures, and even chronic conditions—largely due to misuse of personal protective equipment and lack of training on how to use it.
As for consumers, most issues arise from people misusing pesticides in their own gardens. What about the rest of us?
Just like pesticides, you can find articles linking water, vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, and highly processed foods to chronic disease. “Linked” means that there is a possibility of harm, but actual causation has not been proven. Even so, just like pesticides, we can’t say any food is safe for everyone, all of the time, and under all conditions.
It’s not just the military and their psyops. Marketers know what you are afraid of—and how to keep it aroused.
Richard Williams is a Senior Affiliated Scholar, the former Director of the Regulatory Studies Program, and the former Vice President of Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also the author of Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and the Solutions. Follow Richard on Substack
A version of this article was originally posted at the Public Health Without Politics Blog and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.
Long-debunked myths about organic farming and food safety are surging again on social media, fueled by selective studies and fear-driven algorithms. On this crossover episode of Talking Biotech and Facts & Fallacies, Cam English is joined by geneticist and farmer Dr. Kevin Folta to explain why these claims—e.g., switching to organic food reduces disease risk—keep returning and why they harm consumers and farmers.
Even experts who should know better amplify these false narratives about organic food’s superiority, often chasing virality rather than sticking to the evidence. The result is a familiar cycle in which weak observational data and out-of-context abstracts are presented as proof that conventional produce carries serious downsides.
These messages gain traction because most people struggle to evaluate risk accurately. Air travel, for instance, terrifies many people—up to 40 percent of travelers experience some degree of flight anxiety—even though it remains one of the safest forms of transportation. Yet many of the same people drive to the airport without a second thought, despite the fact that driving is far riskier on a per-mile basis: recent U.S. data show roughly 177 times higher fatality risk for passenger vehicles than for commercial flights. Statistical safety, however, often fails to override the visceral sensation of sitting in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe same gap appears when consumers confront pesticide residues measured in parts per billion. The residues are real, yet they sit far below levels that regulatory science deems harmful. Organic production uses its own approved pesticides, some with higher toxicity profiles than modern synthetics, while both systems operate under strict residue limits designed to protect public health.
The practical consequences are clear. Myths shape shopping habits, prompting many households to pay premiums for organic labels that deliver no meaningful safety or nutritional advantage on pesticide exposure. That added cost falls hardest on families already stretched thin. At the same time, the messaging harms American farmers—particularly the contract growers and family operations who produce the bulk of conventional fruit and vegetables on razor-thin margins. When fear reduces demand for safe, nutritious produce, those farmers absorb the economic hit.
Clearer communication remains the most effective response: placing residues in proper context, distinguishing genuine hazards from trace exposures, and refusing to let long-settled science be displaced by viral anxiety. Join Kevin Folta and Cam English as they break down the resurgence of some of the most persistent food-safety myths.
Kevin M. Folta is a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida and host of the Talking Biotech podcast. Follow Professor Folta on X @kevinfolta
Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
Ten years ago, when I started writing SlimeGate, many in the activist NGO world felt uncomfortable about getting into bed with these slimeball tort lawyers. While the “enemy of my enemy may be my friend”, some activists were having misgivings about cooperating with a faction of the legal profession that would use NGOs to help them extort companies, not for justice for plaintiffs, but for massive wealth accumulation, private jets and personal excess. How far were these idealists willing to look the other way in order to score a victory against industry, raise funding and enforce positive change for the environment? In the last decade, the answer became clear: Very far!
I have watched the evolution in the activist-Predatort nexus, particularly during the glyphosate saga.
- Early on, groups like Corporate Europe Observatory were using activist scientists like Chris Portier to write reports for them on the risks of glyphosate, knowing full well his services were paid for by the law firms suing then Monsanto and later Bayer.
- Then NGOs like Friends of the Earth started coordinating their glyphosate lobbying efforts with key beneficiary law firms like Wisner Baum.
- It didn’t take too long after for the US litigation industry to start paying off NGOs, reporters and filmmakers to do their bidding, via non-transparent donor-advised funds, as in the funding behind the Into the Weeds campaign.
- Funding activist scientists like Philip Landrigan and Chuck Benbrook to produce court-ready evidence was seen in the financial malfeasance of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, a non-profit set up by the US litigation industry to channel millions into fabricating research to be used in NGO campaigns and further lawsuits.
At this point no one in the civil society movement had any qualms about receiving Predatort millions via foundations functioning as pass-throughs. The passion for the planet was taken over by the passion to win, and these modern-day Machiavellians were wickedly efficient. The money was too good for any ethical introspection and without transparency or public scrutiny, activists found they could say and do whatever they liked.
But if it had only stopped there…
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPStrategic LitigationTwo years ago, the deepest moral decline of the environmental activist profession was put in evidence, and next week we will be witnessing the instigators boasting about it. The Lighthouse Reports affair showed law firms working directly with journalists, NGOs and foundations to put one of their political adversaries out of business in the hopes of advancing a lawsuit on paraquat. This is an example of strategic litigation, and one of the perpetrators is presenting it as a case study at a webinar next week to train other activists.
Strategic litigation (also called “impact litigation”) is the weaponization of the litigation industry to effect change on industries, governments and public perceptions. Born from a La Jolla conference in 2012, the brainchild of Naomi Oreskes’ tormented mind, the strategy was to circumvent the regulatory process (seen as poisoned by lobbyists) with their alternative, later referred to as adversarial regulation. This approach was built around a litigation-led campaign attacking a targeted industry or product. The goal is to use relentless lawfare assaults to effectively tobacconize other industries, destroying their reputation, market and business model (suing them out of business or into submission). There was no need to engage in the messy (albeit democratic) business of regulatory change. Some people call this extortion; Naomi referred to it as “progress” (and personally lucrative).
Fourteen years after La Jolla, it is no longer a convenient coincidence when activists, foundations and law firms have the same goals. Now these campaigns are coordinated with clear strategies and gameplans from the outset. Imagine an activist consultant working for a foundation (or developing a dark fiscal sponsorship organization from a group of foundations), coordinating a multi-pronged attack on a company or regulatory body via a group of NGOs and law firms.
The collusion can take many forms.
Dark subterfugeThese campaigns would usually go under the radar as none of these groups feel the need to be transparent or accountable. Consultants who have worked their way onto foundation boards can act like generals stealthly commanding a flotilla of NGOs. A good example was when the provincial government in Alberta, Canada had to conduct an inquiry with a forensic accounting expert to learn how far these dark forces had gone to obstruct economic affairs in the province (NGOs spent at least 1.28 billion CAD in foundation funding that had “lost its character”). The media, mostly funded by these same foundations, ignored the government’s findings.
Fiscal sponsorsThe fiscal sponsor may create its own NGO-like organization to spearhead the campaign (ensuring that the campaign group is not filed as a legal entity to avoid transparency and accountability requirements). The law firms will share their network of scientists, serving as highly-paid litigation consultants, to publish papers to raise doubt about the issue at hand. This was Glyphosate 101. These papers as well as the overall campaign are then amplified by foundation-funded media groups and investigative reporters.
Dark, donor-advised fundsDepending on the potential for payouts, law firms may fund the campaign via dark donor-advised foundation funds (as in the Heartland Health Research Alliance) or the foundations may fund multiple dead-end lawfare assaults on targeted industries, not to win but to merely extract reputational damage to feed into a larger campaign (as seen with Sher Edling or Earthjustice).
Global, transnational reachAs an added touch, this unholy alliance can foster its influence (scientists or foundation funding) into UN bodies to drive another regulatory angle (seen with IARC, the FAO, UNEP and the WHO). The UN conference mill is now captured by the foundations, activist scientists, NGOs and specialty media groups.
Strategic litigation has delivered dividends for a wide range of activist campaigns like those against glyphosate, plastics and microplastics, fossil fuels, salmon farming but the playbook is rarely openly discussed by its perpetrators. That is why next week’s webinar on Strategic Litigation will be interesting.
The Lighthouse Laser BeamThe Lighthouse Reports’ Poison PR investigation is a case study of the backhanded dealings of the NGO, media and foundation special interests covertly working with the US litigation industry in a coordinated assault on a small communications firm. It was driven by law firms attempting to create public outrage of corporate malfeasance as they launched a large number of paraquat lawsuits.
This jury priming tactic (creating anti-industry outrage) was used successfully with the release and promotion of the Monsanto Papers during the glyphosate lawsuits and attempted with Oreskes’ Exxon Knew campaign to link the fossil fuel industry with the consequences of climate change. But this story has an ethical taint that makes the perpetration of the Poison PR campaign even more repugnant.
The Lighthouse-Predatort alliance started when a group of US tort law firms, including the Miller Firm, obtained a series of documents in discovery from Syngenta related to their paraquat activities. They leaked the confidential documents to the Environmental Working Group activist and self-proclaimed “journalist”, Carey Gillam, who claimed she woke up one morning and discovered 10,000 files in boxes outside of her front door.
The Miller Firm has had a longstanding relationship with Gillam, using her to amplify the release of the Monsanto Papers during the bellwether glyphosate case, to which both parties profited handsomely. She also orchestrated a character assassination of Tim Litzenburg when he was challenging their glyphosate evidence (as not actually the main cause of the plaintiff’s cancers) so she has proven to be very efficient at hiding the knives. Gillam promptly published the leaked documents on the EWG website, calling them the “Paraquat Papers” (evidence enough that Carey had exhausted any remaining creative inspiration).
The documents themselves had limited value for the class action suits being gathered against Syngenta, but they revealed a relationship between the company and a small communications firm, v-Fluence. The firm, with 28 employees, was known for its daily Bonus Eventus newsletters that documented activist strategies and campaign events, offering ag-tech and food industry actors a window on their tactics and advice on how to manage the issues.
The story from the leaked documents was not about paraquat (the evidence of a link to Parkinson’s was very weak) nor about Syngenta (who had followed their ethical codes of conduct), but instead focused on how v-Fluence had been internally sharing some of the negative published media about activists, including Ms Gillam.
Gillam took the confidential discovery documents to Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch non-profit mercenary group producing investigative reports at the behest of any special interests that would fund the NGO’s publications. (They call it “collaborative journalism”.) In other words, Lighthouse Reports is another one of those “Reporters for Hire” groups feeding off of foundation funding to publish bespoke investigative journalism attack pieces. For their Poison PR investigation, they assembled a group of reporters from across the globe (essentially eight freelance journalists who had been sharing each others’ anti-industry hit-pieces).
Lighthouse secured funding from the Oak Foundation for this campaign, totalling at least €800,000. Oak has a clear strategy of funding campaigns against industry, promoting agroecology and attacking conventional agricultural practices. The foundation also provides a dark donor-advised funding mechanism (a funding pass-through) so we really cannot say which special interests were behind this report. Needless to say, Lighthouse Reports activists were drunk with cash as both Carey Gillam and Margo Gibbs (based in Amsterdam) had offered to fly to St Louis to personally interview the v-Fluence managing director (see mail below). They even hacked into the closed Bonus Eventus website.
Drunk with unlimited foundation funding and no accountability. Also, Carey Gillam is not employed by the Guardian but she never corrected this claim.The Lighthouse Reports investigation into this small communications firm was merely the first step in this strategic litigation exercise. Law firms from the US and Europe then started to file lawsuits against v-Fluence, demanding disclosure of all correspondence and documents. Cases were then filed against their clients, ensuring an exodus that would bankrupt the firm. The efficiency of these relentless attacks on a small firm like v-Fluence was brutal, vicious and vindictive.
Meanwhile, the network of journalists amplified the investigation for several months, hoping to snowball the claims against this small organization into a mass global outrage event as the paraquat bellwether lawsuits were being heard in the US. Domiciled in Brussels, I was on Le Monde activist, Stéphane Content’s dance card (but I ignored his correspondence as he had broken at least eight of Le Monde’s ten ethical codes of conduct).
Celebrating FailureThis was definitely not a Monsanto Papers success story. The Lighthouse Report investigation did not reveal any large exposé of corporate corruption. They spent a lot of money and made a lot of noise, but the then ongoing paraquat bellwether cases were thrown out on the basis of bad science. The judge not only dismissed the poor research, she referred to how the litigation consultant “required several methodological contortions and outright violations of the scientific standards he professed to apply”.
Unlike glyphosate, the law firms could not use outrage as a substitute for scientific evidence. The only thing the law firms, working in tandem with the reporters, activists and foundations, had achieved was bankrupting a small communications company (and a reminder, if we needed one, of how weak and cowardly industry trade associations like CropLife America have become).
Despite its failure and evidence of a tired gameplan, the Lighthouse Reports’ tactics show the dark underbelly of activist collusion with the litigation industry. See my critical analysis of the Lighthouse Reports investigation here. There was no transparency (essential for reporters) but rather a concerted effort by law firms, foundations and the journalists to hide their sources, funding and evidence. They hacked, lied and cheated to get their story out.
But their story was a nothing burger.
The intention of creating another ExxonKnew or Monsanto Papers campaign to cultivate jury outrage to augment court payouts and increase the chance of settlements (extortion) in tens of thousands of paraquat lawsuits were weak when the only case they had was a communications firm that was sharing published documents of activist tactics. If vengeance is a measure for success, then Carey should be proud.
Strategic litigation is one more weapon in the activist arsenal to spread distrust, outrage and disinformation against industry. When law firms hire activist zealots to do their dirty work, they are getting value for money. When NGOs get in bed with these slimeball Predatorts, they surrender all integrity and self-respect. It is a toxic activist tool that should only be exercised out of desperation. But now NGOs and foundations seem to use it as their main campaign strategy.
[On July 28, 20226], one of the authors of the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR publication, Thin Lei Win, will proudly present this case study at a webinar on strategic litigation. I’m looking forward to learning how she sleeps at night.
You can register for the strategic litigation webinar here.
David Zaruk is the Firebreak editor, and also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. David is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Firebreak and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Firebreak on X @the_firebreak
Even credentialed scientists are susceptible to the pressures of social media virality, sometimes venturing well beyond their expertise to promote popular but misleading health narratives. Last week, Dr. Rhonda Patrick of FoundMyFitness, typically a reliable source of science-backed info on nutrition, urged the public to switch to organic food to cut their pesticide exposure. With over 1.4 million followers, Patrick’s message amplified a widespread fear but ignored critical scientific context.
The simple, oft-overlooked truth is that pesticide residues in both conventional and organic foods occur at trace levels that regulatory science deems safe. Maximum residue limits (MRLs) and allowable daily intakes (ADIs) incorporate large safety factors—often 10- to 1,000-fold—below doses showing no adverse effects in rigorous toxicology testing. Consumers quite literally can’t ingest enough produce to approach these strict thresholds.
Organic production also uses pesticides, including some with higher toxicity profiles than their modern synthetic counterparts—which also help prevent far more dangerous natural contaminants like aflatoxin-producing molds, a major global cause of liver cancer.
Like many influencers before her, Patrick relied on observational studies and high-dose animal experiments to bolster her advice. These papers are frequently cited in anti-pesticide discussions, though they bear little relevance to typical dietary exposures. Likewise, detection of pesticide metabolites in urine reflects normal liver and kidney function, not toxicity.
Even among professional applicators exposed at much higher levels under strict protocols and personal protective equipment, cancer rates are often lower than the public’s very low risk—likely due to healthier lifestyles and greater fruit and vegetable consumption.
The problem with Patrick’s well-meaning but misinformed messaging is that it risks discouraging intake of nutritious produce, an actual public health priority. While organic food serves as a valid personal or local choice for those who prefer it, the evidence does not demonstrate meaningful safety advantages against conventionally grown food.
Modern agricultural tools enable abundant, affordable food supplies that have dramatically improved food security compared to historical organic practices. That’s a critical message more people need to hear.
Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they take on a pesticide myth even some scientists fall for:
Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
For over a decade, Dr. Netha Hussain has been part of the last line of defense against public health disinformation on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.
Hussain started editing on Wikipedia when she was about 19 years old. At that time, she was a first-year medical student at Calicut Medical College in Kerala, India. Now a medical doctor and researcher based in Sweden, Hussain’s efforts to bust COVID-19-related myths led her to the 2020 Women in Open Source Award, a shoutout from the United Nations, and a Wikimedian of the Year Honourable Mention in 2021. In January, as part of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary celebrations, Hussain was one of eight people featured in a video docuseries sharing a behind-the-scenes look at the lives and stories of Wikipedia volunteer editors around the world.
In the past year, global public health has faced unprecedented institutional threats, which Hussain primarily attributed to the deluge of disinformation spread by U.S. President Donald Trump through his global platform, as well as the drastic public health funding cuts his administration has carried out, some of which were previously reported by The Xylom.
In an exclusive interview with The Xylom, Hussain discusses the cultural nuances of misinformation as she straddles the English-speaking and non-English-speaking worlds; how power, privilege, AI, and media consolidation fuel the spread of propaganda; and the next frontier of healing public health divides.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Laasya Shekhar: How have you changed since you became an active Wikipedian? Did you learn something unexpected in this process?
Netha Hussain: On Wikipedia, everything is open: the discussions are open, everything you write is open, and earlier revisions of your article are open. You have to substantiate everything with references, and you need to have reliable references. So I learned evidence-based medicine in a very good way by writing for Wikipedia.
On Wikipedia, everything is open: the discussions are open, everything you write is open, and earlier revisions of your article are open. You have to substantiate everything with references, and you need to have reliable references.
Before that, as a medical student, I would be confused if this or that source was good, or if they might be giving contradictory information. You get a lot [of sources] online, and to be able to understand what is reliable, what is verifiable, how to write a neutral article, not be biased by anything, but write something neutral [can be difficult].
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPLS: What has been the biggest impact your articles have led to?
NH: During COVID-19, a lot of misinformation circulated online. I saw an article about a family who ate a poisonous fruit thinking that it would prevent them from getting COVID-19, and all of them were hospitalized. I started an article titled List of Unproven Methods Against COVID-19, and then enumerated most of the misinformation circulating online about COVID-19 — treatment methods, diagnostic methods, preventive methods. That was something that gathered a lot of attention and got translated into 18 languages at that time. It also got a lot of media coverage about how Wikipedia was combating misinformation about COVID-19.
Dr Netha Hussain (second from left) with other attendees at the Wikimedia Futures Lab 2026 conference in Frankfurt, Germany, February 2026. (Jason Ekvidi/Wikimedia Commons)In 2018, I also wrote an original article about infection from the Nipah virus, showing how it spreads, what virus is causing it, and the mode of transmission. It is still being read by people because Nipah infection still affects other South Asian countries, like Malaysia, Thailand, south of India, and Sri Lanka. And these infections come in clusters. So it affects an area, causes disease in maybe 20-30 people, then disappears, and then reappears in some part of the world again. So whenever it happens in a part of the world, I see the page views go up.
LS: You are fluent in English, Malayalam, and Swedish. What did you learn from editing Wikipedia articles in various languages? Did you observe any cultural differences in how people view and take action on public health?
NH: Malayalam is a smaller language on Wikipedia with around 70,000 articles. In contrast, the English Wikipedia has 7 million articles. Given this difference in the number of articles, I think there is so much more to be written in the Malayalam Wikipedia about health and different disease conditions.
Also, in Malayalam, the focus of writing the article is mostly on the local context. It’s important to write about what’s happening in Kerala because the audience speaks Malayalam. In English, for example, you have to have a more global perspective, because people from all over the world read it.
In terms of cultural context regarding health-seeking behavior, I think, in India, it’s mostly about immense trust in herbal medicine, particularly Ayurveda. But in the Western world, it’s mostly about skepticism towards big institutions. So when you bust misinformation on Wikipedia, I usually take this perspective: in Malayalam, when you write about treatment, you also say there are certain medications which are claimed to cure cancer, but cannot actually cure cancer. When it comes to English, you write everything, because a lot of people from different parts of the world read it, not just Western people.
In fact, India is the second-largest reader of Wikipedia in the English language. So it’s important that the global perspective is there.
LS: Public health misinformation didn’t end with COVID-19. What forms is it taking globally today?
NH: I think going five years back to COVID-19, misinformation spread very much on social media, particularly in channels like WhatsApp and Telegram, because when it is WhatsApp, it is not traceable online. It’s only visible to people who are in the group, and then it’s forwarded many times, and it goes into these echo chambers where people in that group probably validate it among themselves, and they send it to even more people. To understand the extent of that kind of misinformation was quite impossible, because all of this happened in closed circles.
If there are people or big companies or even governments spreading propaganda, and this propaganda is in large volumes, it can probably infiltrate the content that ChatGPT or Gemini, etc., are trained on, and in the end, they can give you bad information.
With the advent of generative AI, I think the obvious misinformation has decreased because large language models have been trained extensively with content from Wikipedia and other reliable sources. But on the other hand, we should now be wary of people who are building propaganda. If there are people or big companies or even governments spreading propaganda, and this propaganda is in large volumes, it can probably infiltrate the content that ChatGPT or Gemini, etc., are trained on, and in the end, they can give you bad information.
LS: What is dividing us on public health right now?
NH: What is dividing us is the political narrative related to public health. People are moving away from real science, real evidence; they have political views on things, and their healthcare behavior is colored by their political perspectives.
I think the biggest misinformation spreader in the U.S. is the President of the United States himself. When he says something, it gets echoed in different magazines, newspapers, everywhere. And given his power and privilege, his narratives are likely to influence a lot of people. Even if you don’t like him, or you don’t like what he says, even if you know that whatever he says is not true, it’s impossible to avoid seeing his content.
The United States used to be the biggest funder of the World Health Organization, and they have stopped doing that. So, WHO has weakened as a global institution when it comes to helping prevent and handle health crises, and providing guidelines.
Even if you don’t like [U.S. President Donald Trump], or you don’t like what he says, even if you know that whatever he says is not true, it’s impossible to avoid seeing his content.
There are, of course, healthcare agencies in smaller countries. But when the U.S. shifts from evidence-based medicine and goes into more propaganda and misinformation, and because English is one of the global languages and a lot of popular content comes from the U.S., this weakening has a global effect.
LS: Since the start of the second Trump administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has gone from a trusted source of public health research and information to a source of vaccine misinformation. Have you noticed a change in how disinformation actors have operated in the year since Trump’s second term began?
NH: It is giving way for many people to spread misinformation freely online. When you do not have a website from the CDC sharing good content about vaccination, people are going to end up on other blogs or videos or YouTube channels or TikTok, and get their information there. So it’s very important to have good information out there; otherwise, people are very likely to fall into the trap of misinformation.
There is a conference called WikiCredCon hosted by WikiCred, an organization for strengthening the reliability of information on Wikipedia. We think about strategies, tools, policies, and practices for making the content on Wikipedia reliable.
There have also been efforts during periods of elections. For example, when there was an election in the U.S. and when there was an election in India, those were times when a lot of misinformation could propagate. Wikipedia created working groups that closely monitored the situation and ensured that bad information doesn’t propagate through our channels.
LS: Is there any aspect of your work where you feel torn? Why?
NH: I think the most difficult part of the process is to find consensus about different evidence. There can be evidence saying that coffee is good for your health, another saying that coffee is probably good for your health, and another saying that coffee is bad for your health. There is a lot of literature out there. Some of them are meta-analyses and systematic reviews, which are the most reliable ones, because a systematic review takes up evidence from a lot of scientific articles, and then tries to find the good evidence.
A portrait of Dr. Netha Hussain (Bijay Chaurasia/Wikimedia Commons)But what do you do when systematic reviews and meta-analyses don’t exist, and particularly in times of COVID-19 or any other public health emergency, when there is not enough time for somebody to produce a meta-analysis and the information landscape is changing very fast over time, when new articles are coming out every day? And then, how do you present that information to the public?
LS: Ownership of our social media platforms and media outlets is increasingly consolidated by a few corporations. For example, in January, TikTok agreed to a deal to sell its U.S. businesses to a Trump-backed consortium, which acquired CBS (one of the “Big Four” major broadcast TV networks) last year, and immediately ran into censorship controversies. How does that affect access to public health information?
NH: Well, this has happened in the past. The media has always had ties with, or was owned by, people with power and privilege. There have been very few exceptions to this. But now, media outlets are being consolidated under a very small group of people with power. And a handful of these people also own LLMs. Elon Musk, for example, has his own LLM, and owns X [formerly known as Twitter], and now he can use it to push his propaganda.
At this point, Wikipedia becomes very important, because we do not have an editorial model. Anybody could write articles on the platform as long as they substantiate it with verifiable evidence. Many of the LLMs that people use have been trained with content from Wikipedia and from more reliable sources, so we are probably much safer. But I think we have to think more about the neutrality of LLMs at this time, because a lot of people now consume news from AI than directly from media.
LS: What would you like people who use Wikipedia casually to understand about you and your work?
NH: Wikipedia is written by millions of people, so anybody can edit Wikipedia, as long as they have an internet connection, and some time and some knowledge to share with people.
It’s not like a YouTube channel where the creator is important, so you don’t really get any credit. People work as volunteers to do this, so they don’t get any money for doing this work.
Laasya Shekhar is The Xylom’s Managing Editor. Find Laasya on X @plaasya
A version of this article was originally posted at The Xylom and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find The Xylom on X @thexylom
Institutional trust has been in decline since the late 1950s, Stephanie Baker, PhD, professor of sociology at City St George’s, University of London, London, England, told Medscape News Europe. Her research explores the intersection between society, technology, and culture in relation to health and medicine.
“Distrust of experts and elites proliferated among health and wellness influencers in the 21st century due to a series of incidents and scandals that received widespread attention, presenting the scientific and medical establishment as compromised by financial and political incentives. The erosion of trust was further accentuated by the pandemic.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPBaker’s research points to food, health, and industry controversies that contributed to this climate of distrust, including the British government’s initial reassurances over mad cow disease; global food fraud scandals involving fake apple juice, melamine-tainted milk, and horsemeat sold as beef; and concerns about the food industry influence over nutrition science. Such episodes, she has argued, helped reinforce the view that expert institutions could be shaped by commercial and political interests.
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A federal appeals court today revived more than 500 lawsuits alleging that Tylenol maker Kenvue failed to warn consumers that taking the pain reliever during pregnancy could increase the risk of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children, Reuters reported.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York found that a lower court improperly excluded testimony from three expert witnesses offered by parents and guardians pursuing the claims.
In a 64-page decision, Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that the experts’ methodologies reflected approaches used by other scientists and “constitute acceptable interpretations of scientific evidence where scientists may, and in fact do, disagree.”
Calabresi stressed that the appeals court was not deciding whether acetaminophen causes autism or ADHD, or whether elected officials should take additional steps to protect public health. Instead, the ruling found that the testimony should be heard as the litigation moves forward.
Attorney Ray Flores, who has represented families in vaccine and pharmaceutical litigation but is not involved in the Tylenol multidistrict litigation, said the appeals court concluded the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had exceeded its role in evaluating expert evidence.
“The 2nd Circuit ruled that the District Court ‘overstepped its gatekeeping function’ to ‘shield the jury’ from ‘junk science’ by excluding expert testimony,” Flores told The Defender. “The appellate court ruled that these doctors could offer acceptable interpretations of evidence linking Tylenol to autism and ADHD when taken during pregnancy.”
The experts whose testimony was reinstated are Andrea Baccarelli, M.D., Ph.D., faculty dean of Harvard University’s School of Public Health; Dr. Eric Hollander, a psychiatry professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Brandon Pearson, Ph.D., a toxicologist at Columbia University, Reuters reported.
“We are pleased that the panel unanimously found that our key experts reliably applied their scientific methods and principles,” Ashley Keller, an attorney representing the parents, said in an email to Reuters.
The court upheld the exclusion of two other experts, and declined to express “any opinion about the correctness” of a third.
The ruling sends the lawsuits back to U.S. District Judge Denise Cote for further proceedings.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPIn 2024, judge excluded experts’ testimony as unreliable
The lawsuits allege that Kenvue concealed risks associated with prenatal exposure to acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.
Doctors and major medical organizations have long considered acetaminophen the preferred pain reliever during pregnancy, and Kenvue has consistently maintained that the product is safe.
In a statement quoted by the Financial Times, Kenvue said [the ruling] “does not change the fact that credible, independent science shows no proven link between taking acetaminophen and autism or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
Kenvue was spun off from Johnson & Johnson in 2023, after the company had manufactured Tylenol for more than 60 years.
Monday’s decision reverses a December 2024 ruling by Cote, who dismissed the consolidated lawsuits after excluding testimony from the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Cote concluded that the experts’ methodologies were unreliable, leaving plaintiffs without admissible expert testimony to support their claims.
In November 2025, Kleenex and Huggies maker Kimberly-Clark announced plans to acquire Kenvue in a deal valued at more than $40 billion, The Guardian reported. In January 2026, shareholders overwhelmingly approved the acquisition.
The Financial Times reported that Kenvue shares fell about 1% after Monday’s decision. The company’s stock remains down 12% from a year earlier amid ongoing litigation and political scrutiny surrounding Tylenol.
Trump, Kennedy announcements intensified scrutiny
The case drew heightened national attention in September 2025 when President Donald Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that federal health agencies would undertake extensive research into all possible causes of autism, including vaccines.
At the same White House event, officials also announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would add warnings to Tylenol and other acetaminophen-containing products advising pregnant women of a possible link between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and autism.
Officials also said they would advise physicians and the public about the potential risks.
During the announcement, Kennedy said federal officials intended to revisit questions that had not received adequate scientific scrutiny.
“One area that we are closely examining … is vaccines,” Kennedy said. “We will perform the studies that should have been performed 25 years ago. Whatever the answer is, we will tell you what we find.”
Trump pointed to rising autism diagnoses and called for further investigation into potential causes, including the childhood vaccination schedule.
In 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that an estimated 1 in 31 (3.22%) 8-year-old children had an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis in 2022, up from 1 in 36 (2.8%) in 2020 and 1 in 1,000 children in the 1990s.
The White House announcement prompted criticism from legacy media, Kenvue, TikTok influencers and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which maintained that acetaminophen remains safe for use during pregnancy.
Media coverage included a Reuters article, “Tylenol is safe, doctors tell worried pregnant moms” and a BBC report stating that “US doctors face anxious Tylenol conversations after Trump’s autism announcement.”
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Mass tort litigation grows like weeds. Last week, the Supreme Court created the ultimate lawsuit-killer by rejecting state court claims that conflict with federal statutes.
A Litigation Boom Over RoundupImage: ACSHThe Roundup litigation craze has fed roughly 100,000 plaintiffs and their lawyers over $11 billion in settlements and verdicts since claims surrounding the world’s most widely used and highly profitable weed-killer first surfaced. It all began seven years ago with a California jury awarding a $289 million verdict against the manufacturer, Monsanto, and its parent company, Bayer. The plaintiffs suffered their share of defeats as Monsanto’s lawyers became more skillful in exposing the flaws in the causation claims presented by the plaintiffs. Some 65,000 Roundup claims remain, motivating the plaintiffs’ bar to troll for more clients, especially those claiming Roundup exposure caused their Non-Hodgkins Leukemia (NHL).
But no more. Last week, the plaintiff’s litigation tsunami crashed with a monumental Supreme Court ruling.
“There are still other claims against Monsanto that do not involve a warning. But there is no way to spin this. This is awful news.”
– Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Ronald v. Miller Jr.
A primer on the litigation trajectory and defense strategy can be found here. In short, rather than proving a lack of causation on a case-by-case basis (i.e., that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer, the prevailing scientific view embraced by most scientists, governmental agencies, and public health departments around the world), Bayer/Monsanto presented its conundrum to the Supreme Court on legal grounds. They argued that the warning sought by plaintiffs was not only scientifically flawed but also illegal under the statute governing pesticide regulation, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
The Case Behind the RulingThe case concerns John Durnell, who brought a “failure-to-warn suit” under state common law against Monsanto for failing to include a cancer warning on Roundup’s label, which he claims caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). Durnell’s lawyers relied on a “problematic” report from IARC, a World Health Organization agency, which classified Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, as a “probable carcinogen.”
Borrowing from similar legislation governing drugs and medical device regulation [1], which preempts certain lawsuits brought under state common-law tort claims, Monsanto/Bayer claimed that compliance with FIFRA preempts state court failure-to-warn cases, thereby preventing the addition of the sought-after warning, and noted that the EPA and most international health agencies dispute the IARC report.
Why the Label Could Not Simply Be ChangedSeven of the Supremes agreed. Their reasoning was multifaceted.
- The Act requires that all pesticides be registered with the EPA. To do so, the EPA must approve the pesticide’s label, determining that it contains all warnings “necessary and… adequate to protect health and the environment…” and does not include false or misleading statements. After the EPA approves the label, manufacturers are legally required to use it as is. Any changes (including adding the warning the plaintiffs demanded) would be illegal, and the manufacturer might face liability for misbranding.
- FIFRA defines “protect health and the environment” to mean “protection against any unreasonable adverse effects on the environment,” including “any unreasonable risk to man or the environment, taking into account the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of the use of any pesticide.” [2]
- The statute’s purpose is to promote uniformity by conferring on the EPA comprehensive and exclusive authority to register pesticides and approve labels. Allowing each state to impose its own warning requirements would frustrate this objective and thus preempts state failure-to-warn claims because “FIFRA prohibits states from imposing any requirements for labeling or packaging in addition to or different from those required under FIFRA.”
As a result, this requirement prevents the placement of the warning that the plaintiff sought. The majority ruled that “as a matter of federal law, Monsanto must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until the EPA approves or requires a change.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe EPA’s Role Was the Point, Not the ProblemThe court painstakingly noted the extensive review and evaluation the EPA conducts before approving labels, both generally and for Roundup, to ensure that labels do not omit a necessary warning. The court also noted the “slew of tools” the EPA possesses to monitor subsequent scientific developments and determine whether and when to require additional warnings, including the power to suspend or cancel registration “to prevent an imminent hazard.”
Moreover, the opinion recounts the EPA’s history of evaluating glyphosate-based pesticides, beginning in 1974, when it first approved a label without a cancer warning. Again in 1991 and repeatedly in the more than three decades since, we learn that the EPA has “repeatedly re-evaluated glyphosate and has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer.” Even following the IARC classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2017 and 2019, the EPA re-evaluated the issue “but still adhered to its longstanding position on glyphosate,” and reiterated its position in a 2020 interim registration review. Noting that “EPA’s assessment is shared by many other regulatory bodies around the world that have likewise concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic…,” the majority ruled that “as a matter of federal law, Monsanto legally must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until EPA approves or requires a change.”
The Dissent’s Unlikely Duo Writing that the majority relied on a medical device case under FDA law and disregarded a Supreme Court precedent on FIFRA, the dissent vigorously objects to the decision. Authored by the ultra-liberal Justice Ketanji Jackson and joined by arch-conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, the dissent reads, to me, like an apology to the plaintiffs’ bar.
Justice Jackson laments that the decision deprives Mr. Durnell of a remedy for his claim. One wonders whether Justice Jackson forgot first-year law school, where students learn that remedies are available only to address wrongs. Since the majority clearly ruled that no wrong was committed, no remedy exists.
Next, Justice Jackson proposes a solution for the conundrum faced by Bayer/Monsanto. Given they could not augment the label with a cancer warning without running afoul of federal law, she asserts the company could have chosen not to market the product at all.
Uniform Labels, Uniform MarketsThe dissent’s two-dimensionality also fails to account for the policy rationale behind the legislation. FIFRA specifically emphasizes the importance of uniform rulings, a clearly business-based rationale. Different requirements across states create commercial obstacles and uncertainties that would frustrate business development and insurance planning, which underlie the uniformity requirement.
The EPA is charged not only with balancing product development with human health and environmental safety, but also with the product’s overall economics. This additional consideration requires the agency to weigh the agricultural, nutritional, and environmental risks and benefits of glyphosate pesticides, which enable greater cultivation and food production at lower cost.
Further, not only did the majority rule that Monsanto/Bayer had no alternative but to comply with FIFRA’s directive and omit a warning, but they also relied on the EPA’s determination that causality between the product and cancer is unproven and likely doesn’t exist, meaning a warning wasn’t necessary under any decision-making standard.
Hand Wringing over Chevron’s DemiseMany moons ago, much was written, tears were shed, and worry was wasted when the Supreme Court overruled the Chevron case, which held that deference was due to agencies making technical or scientific decisions, thereby vesting those decisions in judges without proper expertise or training. The fear was that we would have wacky judicial decisions on scientific matters.
Under the Loper Bright decision, which overturned Chevron, the court was free to re-evaluate for itself the scientific basis behind EPA’s decision, i.e., that glyphosate was not a likely human carcinogen, and no cancer warning was needed. They didn’t. Indeed, they proudly touted EPA expertise and diligence in rendering its ruling.
The decision is more than a victory for Monsanto. It reaffirms that federal statutory decisions grounded in science cannot be circumvented by artful lawyers invoking favored-state tort law and junk science. It appears that the Roundup litigation boom and the thousands of similar claims that have sprung up may finally have met their weed killer.
[1] The FDA’s Medical Device Amendment of 1976 is nearly identical to FIFRA’s preemption clause.
[2] While changes are permitted to account for new information, any changes must be approved prior to their inclusion.
Dr. Barbara Pfeffer Billauer, JD, MA (Occ. Health) Ph.D, is Professor of Law and Bioethics in the International Program in Bioethics of the University of Porto and Research Professor of Scientific Statecraft at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC.
A version of this article was originally posted at American Council on Science and Health and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find ACSH on X @ACSHorg
Organic food marketing, vaccine denialism, cancer pseudoscience, climate denial, wellness culture, and conspiracy theories may look different, but they’re all built on the same strategy. More importantly, they’re supported by the same organizations, influencers, and commercial interests that profit from spreading disinformation.
Slide from Andrea Love’s 2026 CSICon Talk “Sanitizing Snake Oil Harms Public Health”I used three case studies to illustrate the central theme of my talk: that anti-science and health misinformation follows the same playbook.
First, create fear.
Your food is toxic.
Chemotherapy is poison.
Vaccines contain toxins.
Then undermine trust.
Doctors won’t tell you.
Scientists are captured.
Regulators are compromised.
Next, sell an identity.
You’re asking questions.
You know your body.
You’ve discovered what “they” don’t want you to know.
Then, sell the product.
The supplement.
The detox protocol.
The organic food.
The expensive health test.
The alternative cancer ‘treatment’.
Finally, borrow credibility from perceived experts and trusted institutions. The final step is the least often challenged, but arguably the most damaging, because this is where fringe ideas stop looking fringe and become normalized.
At the center of this is what I call institutional laundering. It’s when medical professional organizations repeat, endorse, and amplify the false marketing premises of anti-science movements. Those ideas gain legitimacy they never earned—not because the evidence changed, but because these messengers give them credibility. The consequence is that institutions whose primary responsibility is to protect public health inadvertently become vehicles for misinformation.
One of the more egregious examples is the American Academy of Pediatrics amplifying anti-GMO and organic product misinformation through its official policies and patient-facing guidance.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe AAP’s policy acknowledges that organic foods don’t provide any clinically meaningful health benefits, yet encourages parents to choose organic foods to “reduce pesticide exposure.” This reinforces the organic industry’s central marketing narrative: that pesticide residues on conventionally grown produce pose a meaningful health risk. They do not. That claim is not supported by toxicology, exposure science, or clinical evidence.
The organic farming and food industry is based on clean-food ideology, chemophobia, and the fantasy that “natural” is a scientific argument. It is born from the same wellness industry that sells detoxes, “clean” eating, supplements, and anti-chemical fearmongering, wrapped in conspiracy-lined distrust of scientific institutions and regulation.
Instead of encouraging the roughly 90% of Americans who don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables to eat more produce—regardless of how it’s grown—the AAP reinforces unfounded fears about pesticide residues. The result is backward: we discourage consumption of safe, affordable produce instead of addressing the real public health problem: that people aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables.
More concerning is the AAP’s patient-facing information about foods containing genetically engineered (GMO) ingredients. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus and the positions of the FDA, EPA, USDA, the National Academies, the World Health Organization, and virtually every scientific body that has evaluated the evidence, the AAP tells parents that “some GMO foods may pose health risks.” It doesn’t say they do. It says they may. That single sentence manufactures uncertainty where the scientific evidence provides none.
Healthy Children explainer on GMOsLet me be unequivocal: there is no credible evidence that foods containing ingredients from approved genetically engineered crops pose a health risk to consumers. None. Suggesting otherwise creates uncertainty where the evidence doesn’t support it. Genetically engineered crops have enabled farming practices that reduce pesticide use while improving crop productivity.
And yet, the leading pediatric medical professional organization in the US has decided to ignore the scientific consensus (pediatricians are not experts in agriculture, molecular biology, toxicology, etc) and foment fear among parents.
The factual, science-based message should be: Organic is a marketing designation, not a health claim. It reinforces health inequity and chemophobia. It doesn’t improve health outcomes, is not pesticide-free, and is not a badge of scientific literacy. We should be encouraging people to eat more produce, not scaring them away from more affordable (and absolutely safe) options.
The multi-billion dollar organic product industry doesn’t simply encourage people to buy a different kind of produce. It tells the public that natural is inherently safer than synthetic and that modern agricultural science cannot be trusted. When organizations like the Environmental Working Group (EWG), Moms Across America, and Children’s Health Defense convince trusted messengers to repeat their marketing narratives, misinformation becomes far easier to normalize.
The pattern doesn’t stop with the AAP. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has directed patients to Environmental Working Group resources and described organic food as being “grown without pesticides”—a statement that is simply false. It also promotes chemophobic messaging about “reducing toxic exposures” during pregnancy—a population the wellness industry aggressively targets. ACOG has an opportunity to educate patients about real risk during pregnancy. Instead, it reinforces narratives that ignore the basic principles of toxicology and risk assessment.
ACOG’s Guidance for PregnancyThese organizations aren’t fringe. They’re leading medical professional organizations that create clinical treatment guidelines and should be educating the public. That’s why this matters.
Pseudoscience doesn’t become mainstream because evidence to support it improves. It becomes mainstream because respected institutions repeat, soften, or legitimize marketing narratives without applying the same evidentiary standards they do in other areas of science and medicine. Once that happens, the public doesn’t perceive those ideas as marketing or advocacy. They view them as medical guidance.
When a wellness influencer questions GMOs, most people recognize they’re hearing an opinion. When one of the most trusted pediatric organizations in the world suggests that genetically engineered foods “may pose health risks,” that statement carries institutional weight. It doesn’t reflect uncertainty—it creates it.
More importantly, scientists become less able to recommend these organizations as trusted sources of health information. This is one of the reasons institutional laundering is so harmful. When organizations like the AAP get vaccines right—and they overwhelmingly do—but simultaneously promote unsupported narratives about organic food or genetically engineered crops, they undermine their own credibility. We shouldn’t have to tell the public, “Trust the AAP on vaccines, but ignore what they say about GMOs.” Credibility doesn’t work that way.
This is how unsupported ideas become respectable. Not because the evidence changed. Because the messenger did.
But this is also the step too many scientists, health professionals, science communicators, and journalists overlook. Misinformation becomes mainstream when trusted institutions soften the distinction between evidence and speculation:
“Buy organic if you can afford it.”
“There’s no harm in trying.”
“More research is needed.”
“Everyone should decide for themselves.”
These statements might come from a place of empathy, diplomacy, or a desire to respect autonomy. But communication research shows us that when experts present unequal evidence as though both sides deserve equal weight, the public doesn’t hear nuance. They hear uncertainty. And uncertainty is where pseudoscience propagates.
Dr. Andrea Love, a microbiologist and immunologist, provides the facts (and the data!) on science and health topics. Follow Andrea on X @dr_andrealove
A version of this article was posted at Immunologic and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.
Political science is a social science that studies the workings of government. Lately it seems to have picked up a second definition: Belief in science advanced by a political party.
From nutrition to climate change, science is increasingly treated by media and political parties as a constituent of political parties. The result is science treated as a political belief and therefore bastardized science—which is not really science at all.
A real scientific hypothesis begins as something testable: it can be proven wrong by evidence.
But if you are only interested in politicized hypotheses, there’s no shortage of material—some three-million peer reviewed science publications are published each year, with many millions more already in existence.
In fact, the number of science papers has grown by half since 2016. Many are poorly done and should be retracted, and even when they are well done, they are often just links—many of which are never cited by anyone.
In fields like nutrition and obesity, most of the papers (three out of four) are links—also known as correlations or associations. Links are things that just happen to occur together; they do not mean causation. For example, the number of movies Nicolas Cage appears in each year is correlated with the number of pool drownings.
Every other week, I report some of these link studies, and try to remember to tell you that they are just links. They might be true causation, but most are not, or are causes for only some people. If you think they might help you, and don’t see any harm in trying, then try them, (but ask a professional first if you are concerned about harm).
Meanwhile, become aware of political, or politicized science, and do not let your beliefs be affected by people who have a vested interest in getting you to believe what they are selling.
One way to think about this is to avoid the extreme claims. Some of what each party says is likely to be true but, the more extreme the claim, the less faith you should place in it.
One party has made a point of trying to believe an extreme claim about global climate change. It rested on a model that assumed that the world would not make any further change in climate-related measures (like going back to coal) causing a global catastrophe. The IPCC was eventually forced to drop it—even though it had already been widely broadcast by a gullible media.
On the other side of the political ledger, the social science claim was made that imposing tariffs on foreign goods will make a country grow and become richer. Two top economists have completely debunked that notion. This side has also offered extreme nutrition advice to eat more meat and saturated fat.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPAvoiding the science extremes on either side of the political ledger, or in most aspects of life, has support in multiple areas. Here are three examples:
- Goldilocks discovered the principle when she entered the house of the three bears while they were out. She tasted Papa Bear’s porridge but found that it was too hot. Mama Bear’s porridge was too cold, but Baby Bear’s porridge was “Just right.”
- Homeostasis is the biological principle for regulating internal systems like temperature and oxygen levels. It keeps them “just right” so your body keeps functioning, and it includes keeping your blood pressure right as well as your fluid balance.
When things get too far outside of what works, the hypothalamus sends either positive or negative feedback to return to the right levels. Inflammation is a perfect example. When you have an infection or an injury in your body your immune system will begin to repair the damage. This causes inflammation that directs the immune cells where to go to help—a good thing. But when your immune system does too much, inflammation attacks either the wrong parts of the body or overdoes it—causing excess inflammation. The result of excess inflammation is chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease. * Sidhartha Gautama (the Buddha) preached that, to create happiness for both you and others one should follow, the “Middle Way,” neither denying yourself everything (severe asceticism) or indulging in everything, (sensual indulgence).
Maybe people will begin to move away from believing politicized “truths” as they move away from the political parties.
- 1952: 22% of voters were independent, i.e., not aligned with either party.
- 2002: 33% of voters were independent and voters were split evenly with about one third (33%) registered to each of the other two parties.
- 2025: 45% of voters were independent with 28% going to each party.
As political parties move to more extreme positions, more voters are abandoning them, doubling the percentage of independents in the last 73 years.
Hopefully, abandoning them politically will also translate into abandoning politicized science and, at a minimum, having a more skeptical view of media’s championing extreme claims made by either side.
Richard Williams is a Senior Affiliated Scholar, the former Director of the Regulatory Studies Program, and the former Vice President of Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also the author of Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and the Solutions. Follow Richard on Substack
A version of this article was originally posted at the Public Health Without Politics Blog and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.
President Trump, facing a backlash from supporters of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for allying himself with the chemical industry, issued an executive order on [June 25, 2026] aimed at reducing pesticides in the food supply and studying the health risks they pose.
The order does not involve new federal funding, and does not call for new regulations or legislation.
…
Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and the maker of the weedkiller Roundup in a case brought by a patient who said the pesticide’s key ingredient, glyphosate, caused his cancer.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe outcome infuriated leaders of Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, who held a rally outside the Supreme Court to protest the administration when the case was heard. They spent the day railing against the Trump administration, and the executive order, released at 7:30 p.m., did little to mollify them.
“This executive order stops short of requiring meaningful action,” said Vani Hari, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy’s who led the protest ….
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
… In epidemiology, causation is usually a population-level inference. Researchers ask whether an exposure reliably changes disease risk across groups of people. That requires replication, statistical association, dose-response evidence, biological plausibility, and efforts to rule out confounding. Even then, conclusions remain probabilistic. A risk factor can increase disease likelihood without proving why one person became ill.
The legal system has a different task. In civil litigation, the plaintiff generally must show that the specific injury would probably not have occurred without the defendant’s conduct. That standard does not exist to produce scientific consensus. It exists to resolve disputes.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPSometimes law and science converge. Sometimes courts assign responsibility in individual disputes while the broader scientific evidence remains mixed, unsettled, or difficult to translate into individual causation.
Public confusion arises when those situations are collapsed into one category.
Large jury awards can make scientific causation appear settled when it is not. Settlements can make legal exposure appear equivalent to admitted causation when it is not.
…
… A hazard classification is not the same thing as proof that a product caused one plaintiff’s injury. A settlement is not the same thing as admitted causation.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Too many mass tort litigations are being resolved based on so-called “expert” testimony that is, in reality, less than reliable. In fact, information provided by plaintiff attorneys can often be what is known as junk science. The presentation of such specious evidence can lead defendants to settle, and juries and judges to reach erroneous decisions.
Mass tort litigations are similar to class action suits in that they involve bundling into one lawsuit a large number of individual plaintiffs. All of which allege injury linked to a defective product, drug, medical device, toxic chemical, etc. However, where class action plaintiffs all receive an equal share of any settlement or court-awarded judgement, mass tort claims are all filed individually. Successful plaintiffs receive different amounts based on the degree of their injuries.
It’s easy to see how the proceedings can become extremely complex. Many mass tort litigations involve thousands of individual plaintiffs. That often works to the advantage of the plaintiffs’ litigators.
As suits drag on for extended periods of time, defendants frequently become worn down. This is especially true for businesses, whose bottom line is harmed by drawn out trials. As such, the lawyers involved can convince them that it would be cheaper and easier for their public image to settle out of court and make the whole thing go away.
The attorneys are more than willing to settle as they, along with any Wall Street investors they might have found to finance their suits, take a significant share of the settlement off the top. This means they get paid before their clients receive anything. Even if individual cases are weak, as can often be the case, the attorneys and financial backers still get paid.
Many tort litigators represent individual plaintiffs who have legitimately suffered harm as the result of exposure to a defective product or service. They ought to — and often do — receive just compensation for their injuries. However, due to aggressive legal advertising, many attorneys are lumping dozens to thousands of cases together to increase the stakes. Once attorneys have corralled as many plaintiffs as possible, they may then broadly assemble arguments based on questionable data that is not supported by sound and settled science.
When sound science is ignored, anything can happen.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPWell-publicized mass tort litigations involving Roundup weed killer, Johnson & Johnson talcum-based baby power, and the blood thinner medication Pradaxa were all able to force settlements totaling billions of dollars. However, the best scientific evidence and research available did not substantiate the plaintiffs’ claims of injury.
Mass tort litigation was originally devised as a way to balance the resources of wealthy corporations with those of individual citizens. However, the process has been misappropriated by profit-motivated litigators and financiers to provide them with a way to extort lucrative cash settlements. Many of these settlements are leveraged based on distorted evidence or unsupported scientific testimony supplied by well-paid, self-anointed expert witnesses.
Judges should be the key to reining in junk science, as they have the responsibility to act as gatekeepers against expert analysis that does not reach a reasonable standard of accuracy. In December of 2023, changes were made to Federal Rule of Evidence 702. Those changes, in part, reinforce the mandate to see that testimony is “based on sufficient facts or data” and “will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue.”
Although the changes to the rule were minimal, they could help remind judges of the crucial role they must play in keeping junk science out of their courtrooms.
David Williams is president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. Find David on X @tpapres
A version of this article was originally posted at The Well News and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find The Well News on X @TheWellNews
A wellness blog called Mamavation had a lab test two containers of Driscoll’s from a single store on a single day, found trace residues of 12 pesticides in the conventional box (and none in the organic one), and framed them as “PFAS pesticides.” That one shopping trip became worldwide headlines claiming strawberries cause cancer. People were tossing fruit. So, we sat down with a toxicologist (the amazing Dr. Joe Zagorski) and ran the actual numbers.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPTake indoxacarb, one of the residues on that list, as an example. To reach its safety threshold, which already bakes in a 100-fold buffer, a 154-pound adult would have to eat 123 pounds of strawberries every single day for the rest of their life. The “PFAS pesticide” label doing all the scaring isn’t a recognized scientific category, and even the blog’s own reviewer conceded the EPA disputes that classification. The organic box showing nothing wasn’t the damning contrast it looked like either. Organic farms use their own approved pesticides, which a synthetic-focused residue panel can miss, so a non-detect there says less than it seems.
The fear underneath most of this is also the most reasonable one, that even trace amounts add up over the years and never leave your body. It’s a fair thing to wonder. The “forever” in “forever chemicals” is about how slowly these break down in the environment, not about your body being unable to clear them. Even PFOA and PFOS, the legacy chemicals that started the whole worry, are eliminated by the body over time, and population blood levels have dropped by something like 80% since they were phased out. Pesticides like the ones found here are metabolized and cleared faster still. And the safety thresholds toxicologists use already assume a lifetime of daily exposure, so the “it adds up over decades” part is built into the number. Joe’s take on the bigger version of this, the whole cocktail of residues over time, is honest and measured. It’s a real and active area of research, but the trace levels on food are unlikely to rise to a level of concern.
The part that actually worries us isn’t the trace residue. It’s that a scare like this pushes people to eat less produce, a genuine health cost, in exchange for a risk the numbers don’t support. And USDA’s pesticide monitoring finds residues across produce sitting well below safety limits year after year.
Strawberries get this treatment on a schedule, too, because they top the EWG’s Dirty Dozen list almost every year. We write about that list a lot, because it ranks produce by how many pesticide residues turn up, not by whether any of them come close to a harmful level, and even its own authors concede it doesn’t assess actual risk. The main thing it reliably does is make people anxious about some of the healthiest food they can buy. We covered the strawberry case in full here, and the broader Dirty Dozen problem in our pesticide Q&A (here’s part one and part two of our series, and there are more posts coming!).
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
There is a woman who lives on my For You page. She has wild curly hair and a wardrobe of whimsical dresses, and she lives in a cottage with a garden that looks like it was set-dressed for a fairy tale. She walks you through the beds and tells you what she grows, what she dries, what she steeps. Lemon balm for anxiety. Raspberry leaf for cramps. Her voice is low and calm, and somewhere in the background the song from Practical Magic plays quietly, so the whole thing feels less like a video and more like a spell.
I watch every single one.
My algorithm has me figured out. It serves up the cottage videos, the bread made from scratch, the women in linen aprons pulling carrots out of dark soil. I am mesmerized by all of it.
What you might not guess, watching me watch her, is that I’m a public health scientist. I have a doctorate in public health and I’ve spent my career in vaccines, in data, in the unglamorous machinery of evidence. And I watch her anyway, because the appeal is real.
The pendulumI did not grow up crunchy. I grew up in South Brooklyn with parents who took me to Atlantic City on weekends to scratch my father’s gambling itch, and I don’t remember the room service being organic. We ate out four or five nights a week, and when we didn’t, dinner was a TV dinner or a Happy Meal handed through a car window that let the cigarette smoke out when it rolled down. Nobody was checking labels, because checking labels wasn’t really a thing yet.
Then I got into public health, and the pendulum swung hard the other way. I remember a school project where I measured out the actual sugar in sodas, spooning it into little mounds, and feeling something close to betrayal. I married a California boy with deeply crunchy roots, and my mother-in-law taught me the “Dirty Dozen” (more on this soon) and the long list of things to avoid while pregnant. She once went through my cupboards and was genuinely aghast. The bleach in my cleaning supplies. The carrageenan in the almond milk in my fridge. The aluminum in my deodorant. Monster.
These days I’ve landed somewhere in the middle: a public health scientist with a few crunchy-ish habits. We keep a vegetable garden. We compost. I occasionally make my own oat milk, though I should be honest about why. It’s to dodge the price tag, not the gums and additives.
That little distinction, the reason I make the oat milk, is the whole point of this piece.
Two ideas wearing one apronWhen I watch the woman in the cottage, or the sourdough videos, what pulls me in is the making. It is genuinely wonderful to bake bread with your own hands and then eat the thing you created. To grow food and pick it. To know how to do things. What I don’t believe is that the loaf at the grocery store is hurting me.
Those are two different ideas, and nearly all the trouble in the wellness world comes from quietly fusing them.
The first idea is additive (it adds to your life). Grow things. Make things. Slow down. Dry herbs on the windowsill, learn what lemon balm smells like when you crush it, feed the compost, knead the dough. All of it is good for you in the way that hobbies and rituals and beauty are. You can keep every bit of it. No scientist anywhere wants to take your garden.
The second idea is subtractive (it takes things away from your life), and it usually slips in wearing the first idea’s clothes. Skip the vaccine, because natural immunity is better. Skip the antibiotics, take the elderberry. Skip the sunscreen, because the sun is natural. (So is melanoma.) Pay double for anything labeled clean or non-toxic, as if the unlabeled version were dirty and toxic, which, legally and chemically, it is not allowed to be.
Earth, balms, gardens, healing. Hands in soil. It evokes an image that feels like the opposite of factories and labs, and if you carry any mistrust of industry, and most of us carry some, a fair amount of it earned, then the cottage starts to feel not just lovely but safe. Safer than the pharmacy. That’s the leap I want to gently take apart, because the lovely part is true and the safer part is not.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPIngredients you can pronounceThe strange part is that you never have to go looking for any of this. The vocabulary comes to you. The podcasts I put on to let my brain unplug (the pop culture ones, the celebrity interviews, the true crime) all run the same ads. Without fail, once I hit play I hear the same laundry list of buzzy terms: non-toxic, clean, all natural, no artificial ingredients, organic, non-GMO, no aluminum, pesticide-free, raw, ingredients you can pronounce. Those words are drilled into our subconscious every time we consume content in 2026.
Nobody ever sits you down and argues that natural means safe. There’s no lecture to push back on. You just absorb it, passively, until the framing feels like common sense, until “I can’t pronounce it” starts to sound like a reason to be afraid of something.
For the record, I can’t pronounce cyanocobalamin on the first try either. It’s vitamin B12. Meanwhile, arsenic and hemlock roll right off the tongue. Everything has a chemical name, because everything is made of chemicals. A banana contains phylloquinone and 3-methylbutyl ethanoate. Water is dihydrogen monoxide. The lemon balm in the cottage garden is, chemically speaking, a long list of terpenes.
When I say this, people tend to roll their eyes. You know what I mean, they say. The “bad” chemicals. And I do know what they mean, that’s the thing. There really is a difference between something that helps you and something that hurts you. It’s just not the difference between a hard word and an easy one, or between a lab and a leaf. It’s the dose. So let’s talk about the dose.
Toxic at what dose?The other word doing heavy lifting in those ads is toxic, and toxic is a measurement pretending to be a category. Everything is toxic at some dose, water included, but for most of what gets called toxic in a wellness ad, almost nothing is toxic at the dose you actually encounter it. So when a product is sold as free of toxic aspartame or toxic aluminum, the questions that actually matter never get asked. Toxic at what amount? And how much would I have to consume to get there?
Take aspartame. To reach the acceptable daily intake the FDA has set, an adult would need to drinksomething like 75 packets’ worth, or well over a dozen cans of diet soda, every single day, and that threshold already sits far below where any harm appears. Or aluminum, the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust. It’s in the soil of that cottage garden and in nearly everything that grows from it, which means the trace amounts in an antiperspirant or a vaccine are a rounding error next to what you take in from an ordinary week of meals.
The pesticide panic runs on the same missing number. Take the Dirty Dozen, the annual list of produce ranked by pesticide residue. What the ranking measures is whether a residue was detected, not whether the amount detected comes anywhere near a level that could harm you. So a fruit can top the scary list while carrying a quantity thousands of times below any threshold of concern. It’s a list of “we found a trace,” dressed up as a list of “this will hurt you.” Strawberries are the perennial villain. So, we ran the math: to reach the EPA’s chronic safety threshold for the residue in question, a 154-pound adult would have to eat roughly 123 pounds of strawberries a day, every day, for life, and that threshold already carries a hundredfold safety margin. You would make yourself sick on the sheer volume long before the pesticide could do a thing. Eat that many strawberries and it’s the strawberries that get you, not what’s on them.
What worries me about the strawberry panic isn’t the strawberries, it’s that it scares people off produce entirely, when not eating enough fruits and vegetables is a far more certain harm than any trace residue. I want my kids eating greens. I don’t track whether they’re organic or conventional, because I have a finite amount of worry to spend, and the food supply is not where I’m spending it. People whose entire job is setting these limits have already done it, with margins built in by the hundredfold, and I’d rather trust that and use my attention on things that are actually up to me.
And plenty of the vilified ingredients aren’t just failing to harm us, they’re doing a job. Preservatives are in food because the alternative isn’t purity, it’s mold and botulism, and we put them there on purpose after a long history of people dying from food that spoiled. Pesticides, used within regulated limits, are a large part of why food is abundant and affordable, and organic farms use them too, just from a different approved list. Organic doesn’t mean pesticide-free, and an organic pesticide isn’t automatically safer or gentler on the environment than a synthetic one. There are many of each, and what matters is the specific compound and the dose, not which list it came from. And the appeal of aspartame is that it isn’t sugar: sweetness with almost no calories and no blood sugar spike. Most of the nutrition scientists on my feed will tell you that for the many people who are going to drink soda regardless, the diet version is the better choice, not the dangerous one. “Not natural” tells you nothing about which side of the ledger an ingredient sits on. Sometimes the unpronounceable thing is the reason the food is safe.
Genetically modified food triggers the same reflex, and it might be the clearest case of fear attaching to an aesthetic rather than a fact. GM crops are among the most studied foods on the planet, examined across decades and thousands of studies, and the scientific consensus that they’re safe to eat is about as settled as the consensus on vaccines. Some were built to resist insects so the field gets sprayed less, which means the very technology people fear as unnatural is part of why there’s less pesticide on the food they’re trying to avoid. What the label sells is a feeling about origin. Frankenfood, something foreign and lab-made standing in for something grown, when the lab and the field were never the opposites the word wants them to be. (By the way, the technology is already in the medicine cabinet of people who’d never think twice about it. The insulin that keeps a diabetic alive is made by genetically engineered microbes, bacteria or yeast given the human insulin gene and set to produce it, which is purer and steadier than the older version scraped from pig and cattle pancreases. The same tool behind the “scary” GM crops is behind a drug nobody calls frankenfood.)Subscribe
A petition to rename natural immunitySo let’s talk prevention, because this is where the stakes climb. The phrase “natural immunity” makes it sound like Mother Nature bops Snow White on the nose and grants her protection from future illness. A more honest name would be survivor immunity, or infection immunity, as my colleague Dr. Aimee Bernard calls it, because you have to survive the infection to gain protection, and you take on every risk it carries along the way.
And those risks are not small, with death only the most final of them. Measles can erase your immune system’s memory of other diseases it already learned to fight, and in some children it swells the brain.Mumps can cause permanent hearing loss. Chickenpox never fully leaves; it hides in your nerves and can return decades later as shingles. HPV causes cancers that take years to announce themselves. Flu kills tens of thousands of Americans in a bad season, most of whom assumed they’d shake it off, and hospitalizes far more.
A vaccine offers your immune system the same protection with the dangerous parts removed. Nothing about it bypasses nature. It works through the most natural equipment you own, your own immune system, the same cells and antibodies and memory. The only thing it skips is the part where you might get seriously ill, or worse.
Medicine and nature were never the opposites the marketing implies. Aspirin began as willow bark, penicillin is a mold, and the lab didn’t replace the garden so much as learn from it, then add what the garden never had: precise doses, purity, and proof.
About the supplementsIf you love your vitamins and your elderberry syrup, I’m not coming for them. But there are a few things to consider before the next repurchase.
For most people who aren’t actually deficient in something, most supplements do very little, which means that you’re mostly paying for a feeling. Feelings have value, so that can be fine, as long as you know what you’re buying. And supplements are not held to the same standards as medications. A drug has to prove it is safe and effective before it can be sold. A supplement does not. There’s no required testing before it reaches the shelf, and studies that check bottles against their labels keep finding doses that don’t match and ingredients that were never listed. The pharma-versus-natural framing has it backward here: the synthetic pill is the one somebody had to prove something about. There’s a strange asymmetry in who gets the skepticism. People distrust the FDA and CDC while giving the supplement and wellness industry a pass, even though it’s a multi-billion-dollar business selling peptides and powders and proprietary blends with a fraction of the oversight. The doubt is sometimes earned. It just rarely gets pointed at the people actually profiting from the fear.
The benefits get inflated on the way to you, too. A cottage video tells you a spice or a berry is a powerful anti-inflammatory, and underneath that claim is usually a study where the compound did something interesting to cells in a dish, or to mice at a dose no human could eat. The clip keeps the impressive verb and quietly drops the context: how much you’d actually need, whether your body absorbs it, whether it does anything in a person at all. A modest finding in a lab becomes a miracle in your cupboard, and the part that got cut is almost always the part that mattered.
Natural also doesn’t mean gentle. St. John’s wort can interfere with birth control and antidepressants. Turmeric has been linked to liver injury at high doses. Megadoses of certain vitamins cause real harm. These compounds follow the same rule as their synthetic counterparts: harmless at one dose, harmful at another. “Herbal” describes where something came from, not what it will do to you.
And none of it is a substitute for medicine. Enjoy the herbal tea because you like it, because it’s warm and it tastes like something and the ritual is its own reward. Just not in place of the antibiotics your doctor prescribed. The tea is lovely. The tea was never the medicine.
The pull of the simpler pastI live in western Massachusetts now, surrounded by dairy farms, and plenty of them have raw milk signs out front. I understand the pull completely. And I should admit something: I’m a city girl who landed in a pretty rural part of the country on purpose. I came for the calm, the farmstands, the Saturday markets, the quiet simplicity of it. So I’m not standing outside this feeling. I’m in it.
Raw milk is the purest version of the fantasy. Milk warm from the cow, nothing done to it, no factory and no lab between the animal and the glass. It isn’t really about milk. It’s about wanting the thing closest to the origin, before anyone in a white coat got their hands on it, because surely that’s how it was meant to be. And underneath that is the bigger romance, the one this whole essay keeps circling: yesteryear. The sense that people once lived closer to the land and were better for it, that somewhere back there was a simpler, cleaner way we’ve since lost.
Will everyone who drinks raw milk get sick? No, and that’s exactly what makes it persuasive. Most people who skip a single vaccine in a given year are fine too, but only because nearly everyone around them didn’t skip it; the protection they’re enjoying was paid for by the people who showed up. Raw milk works similarly in reverse. It’s a reliable carrier ofListeria, E. coli, and Salmonella, and the people who pay for that gamble most often are the ones least able to absorb it: the children it gets poured for, pregnant women, the elderly, anyone immunocompromised. And the danger isn’t filed away in some distant past. As I write this, Idaho is investigating an outbreak that has sickened nearly 60 people since mid-May, traced mostly to raw milk from two dairies, at least 45 of them testing positive for Campylobacter. All pasteurization does is heat the milk enough to kill those bacteria. It doesn’t touch the nutrition. The sign out front is rejecting the one step that would have kept those people out of the doctor’s office.
That’s the trap in the simpler past. It looks simpler partly because the harm gets edited out of the picture. We keep the cow in the field and the warm glass of milk, and quietly crop out the part where it puts real people, this month, in a real place, in the hospital.
Keep the gardenI’m going to keep watching the woman in the cottage. I’m growing mint in my garden right now to dry for tea, and over the weekend my husband and I got our raised garden beds ready for the season and talked about how good it felt to have our hands in the dirt.
Here’s the line I’ve landed on, for myself and my kids. Natural is wonderful right up until it starts costing you the things that actually keep you alive. The vaccine. The antibiotic. The preservative that’s standing between you and a foodborne illness. It turns sour when it tips into constant worry about what’s in everything, into anxiety around food and your own body, into a forced choice between the garden and the doctor’s office. The fallacy isn’t loving lemon balm. It’s the dichotomy, the belief that to have one good thing you must refuse the other.
You don’t. We can love nature and also love the modern marvels that science has built on top of it.
And it helps to be honest about the fantasy because, for almost all of us, it is one. We don’t live in cottages in mountain towns or on small farms with a cow out back. We live in towns and cities and buy our food at grocery stores, and that food has to be grown at a scale that requires pesticides, kept shelf-stable with additives, and protected, along with the rest of us, by vaccines that are the reason children no longer routinely die at twelve of things that used to be ordinary. Our minds live in the past. Our bodies live in the present. We are being sold a picture of a life that almost none of us actually lead.
But you can keep the real parts. The garden, the sourdough, the herbs drying upside down in the kitchen, the candles, the tea you grew yourself, the whole gorgeous slow world of making things by hand. None of it conflicts with a flu shot. None of it is threatened by an antibiotic. Keep all of it. Just keep it as your hobby, in your kitchen, and for your hour of calm at the end of the day, but not as your immune system’s entire plan. Because Mother Nature, whatever the cottage videos suggest, was never really taking sides. She made the lemon balm.
She also made the measles.
Jess Steier is a public health scientist dedicated to bridging the gap between complex scientific evidence and public understanding. Jess is the Founder of Unbiased Science, CEO of Vital Statistics Consulting, and Executive Director of The Science Literacy Lab (a 501c3 non-profit organization).
A version of this article was originally posted at Unbiased Science and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Unbiased Science on X @unbiasedscipod
The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Monsanto in a high-stakes dispute over cancer warnings on pesticide labels. In an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, the court ruled, by a vote of 7-2, that state lawsuits aimed at holding the company liable for failing to warn consumers about the potential risks of Roundup exposure are barred by the federal law governing pesticide sales.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. In it, she contended that Thursday’s ruling is based on “a labeling requirement that does not exist,” and described the effects of the majority’s interpretation of the law as “both remarkable and regrettable.”
The court’s ruling comes after decades of debate and litigation over the safety of glyphosate, a highly effective and popular herbicide that serves as the main active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Since 1974, when the Environmental Protection Agency first reviewed and registered glyphosate-based pesticides, clearing the way for their sale in the United States, the EPA has repeatedly concluded that such products do not need to carry a cancer warning. However, the EPA’s determinations have not dispelled concerns about Roundup’s cancer risks. These concerns increased in 2015, when a working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
The IARC’s report led to tens of thousands of lawsuits against Monsanto over how Roundup products were labeled. Plaintiffs such as John Durnell, who brought the case that was before the court, contended that the company was liable for failing to warn them about the alleged link between glyphosate and cancer, while Monsanto countered that the EPA, which oversees pesticide labeling, had not required a cancer warning.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPOver the past decade, Monsanto has paid billions in damages and settlement agreements in these lawsuits even as it has continued to assert that state-level claims over Roundup labels are preempted by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which authorizes the EPA to regulate the use, sale, and labeling of pesticides and which includes a uniformity requirement prohibiting states from imposing “any requirements for labeling or packaging in addition to or different from those required” by the federal government.
When it asked the Supreme Court to clarify the scope of FIFRA, Monsanto emphasized that thousands of lawsuits over Roundup’s label remain pending and claimed that the future of U.S. agriculture was at stake in the case. In January, the justices agreed to weigh in.
On Thursday, the court held that FIFRA expressly preempts a state-law failure-to-warn claim against Monsanto, because such a claim would require the company “to add a cancer warning to Roundup’s label” that is not part of the EPA-approved label. That outcome, Kavanaugh wrote, runs afoul of FIFRA’s uniformity requirement.
Kavanaugh also noted that the EPA has repeatedly assessed the safety of glyphosate-based pesticides and “repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer.” “Therefore, as a matter of federal law,” Kavanaugh wrote, “Monsanto legally must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until EPA approves or requires a change.”
In her 24-page dissent, Jackson wrote that the court should have joined the “chorus” of “state and federal courts that have rejected this preemption argument,” asserting that FIFRA gives the EPA the authority to review product labels when assessing pesticides, but not the authority to have the final say on cancer warnings. “In accepting Monsanto’s argument and holding that Durnell’s failure-to-warn claim is preempted, the Court misunderstands FIFRA’s requirements, misinterprets the scope of FIFRA’s preemption, and ultimately leaves Durnell without a remedy for the significant harms he has suffered,” she wrote.
Kelsey Dallas is SCOTUSblog’s managing editor. Find Kelsey on X @kelsey_dallas
A version of this article was originally posted at SCOTUSblog and is reposted here. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find SCOTUSblog on X @SCOTUSblog
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Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.
Deeply mistrustful of career civil officials, the secretary has surrounded himself with a close circle of handpicked advisers and stacked agencies with political appointees aligned with his views. While major posts have sat vacant and a wave of veteran health experts and scientists have departed, Mr. Kennedy has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe secretary’s detachment from much of the work of the agency, along with the administration’s deep staff cuts and his attacks on career staff, have driven down morale, [sources] say. It’s a dynamic that could threaten the department’s ability to protect Americans in a crisis, according to public health experts and former secretaries.
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From tampons to tap water, from cereal boxes to vaccines, nearly every modern health scare rests on the same myth: chemicals are killing us. This fear—chemophobia—has become one of the most powerful engines of misinformation worldwide.The World Health Organization (WHO) lists vaccine hesitancy as a top global health threat, but I’d argue that chemophobia is even more pervasive. It’s the common thread that links all forms of science rejection; it fuels fear around vaccines, food, medicine, agriculture, and cosmetics.
Chemophobia, the irrational fear or aversion to chemicals, is everywhere—whispered in parenting Facebook groups, shouted by influencers, amplified by media outlets that should know better, and weaponized by politicians.
Chemophobia is the hidden language of health misinformation.
You’ve seen it:
- Headlines about “heavy metals in tampons”
- Myths about vaccines containing “toxic” ingredients
- Legislative bans on synthetic food dyes
- Public outcry against fluoride in drinking water
- The Environmental Working Group’s annual Dirty Dozen list, warning about “toxic pesticides” in produce
- “Paraben-free” or “preservative-free” marketing slapped on cosmetics, sunscreens, and even foods
If you didn’t know better, you might think you and your family are in constant danger. You’re not. Instead of protecting people, chemophobia increases costs, reduces safety, harms public health, and stalls lifesaving science.
What Is Chemophobia?Chemophobia claims that synthetic chemicals are inherently harmful, while “natural” chemicals are safe—a textbook example of the appeal to nature fallacy.
Chemophobia gained traction in the mid-twentieth century, following real industrial disasters such as Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and the Bhopal gas leak. Those events, which led to justifiable concern, were used to demonize all “synthetic” chemicals.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) fueled the flame:
“The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper … they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind … Such ingenious manipulations have produced a battery of poisons of truly extraordinary power.”
The origins of chemophobiaCarson was a gifted writer and a marine biologist. Her work contributed to the EPA’s creation and the restriction of DDT use, which previously helped eliminate endemic malaria in the United States during World War II.
While DDT saved lives from mosquito-borne disease, it caused ecological damage in birds, where exposure thinned bald eagle eggshells, leading to fragile eggs and high chick mortality. Once malaria was controlled and the off-target effects were understood, the ecological risks outweighed the benefits, though the danger was not to humans.**
Carson contributed to important scientific efforts in her field, but she wasn’t a chemist or toxicologist.
Yet, when she framed all “synthetic creations” as a “battery of poisons,” Carson unintentionally left a legacy of exaggerated distrust toward synthetic chemicals.
That distrust metastasized into today’s chemophobia, where people are terrified of anything artificial, even while scientific principles tell us that the source of a chemical has no bearing on its potential harm or safety.
Many of the most toxic chemicals are all-natural, including Botulinum toxin, abrin, ricin, arsenic, and cyanide.On the flip side, countless synthetic chemicals are lifesaving.Chemistry enables scientists to harness our knowledge, nature, and chemical synthesis to expand our health-improving resources.
Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) exists because chemists improved upon the natural compound salicin found in willow bark to make a safer and more effective pain reliever. Many lifesaving chemotherapies are synthetic derivatives of natural chemicals altered to improve effectiveness and safety (read more on that, below)
Chemophobia paints synthetic chemicals as universal villains. You’ve heard the commonly repeated claims:
- “I only want natural ingredients.”
- “If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.”
- “Vaccines are filled with harmful chemicals.”
- “GMOs aren’t natural, so they must be bad.”
Fear in a soundbite beats nuance, especially when leveraged as a marketing ploy by the wellness industry.
Their tactic: if synthetic is “bad,” then the “natural” alternatives they promote must be safer, healthier, more beneficial, and even more eco-friendly—because they are trying to convince you that modern science and tools developed by it are evil.
But your body doesn’t care if a molecule was isolated from a plant or synthesized in a lab.
Vitamin C is vitamin C (scientifically, it’s actually (5R)-5-[(1S)-1,2-Dihydroxyethyl]-3,4-dihydroxy-5H-furan-2-one), whether it’s extracted from a lime or fully synthesized in a laboratory.
Formaldehyde is formaldehyde (and yes, your body makes much higher levels of formaldehyde every day than you would ever encounter in a vaccine).
What matters is dose, not origin. All-natural botulinum toxin is a million times more toxic than synthetic sarin—yet people willingly inject that into their faces while fearing preservatives in bread.
This context is almost always omitted from public discourse, where media outlets, influencers, and even policymakers repeat false claims about chemicals without scientific evidence.
Even among individuals who vocally proclaim to support science, you see anti-science actions rooted in chemophobia. That’s why Democratic governors ban artificial food colorings without considering that they’ll be replaced with naturally derived coloring chemicals that are less studied, less safe, and more ecologically damaging (yes, I am talking to you, Gavin Newsom).
That’s why Democratic legislators move to restrict the use of glyphosate, one of the safest herbicides, while conveniently ignoring that this would force farmers to use weed control measures that are more toxic, less effective, and have broader ecological impacts. That’s also why European governments restrict genetic technologies in farming, even while they embrace the same science for cancer therapies.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPChemophobia Thrives on Low Chemistry LiteracyOnly 28 percent of Americans are civically scientifically literate, meaning they can find, understand, and apply science to policy decisions.
So, when voters are told fluoride is “toxic,” they predictably vote to remove it. When they’ve heard for decades that glyphosate causes cancer, despite data showing otherwise, they support bans.
And when new parents are bombarded with disinformation from Moms across America or the Environmental Working Group (EWG), they make choices that don’t actually protect their families but do drive profits for those very people spreading the fear. While many believe these organizations have their best interests in mind, they are major contributors to disinformation.
Moms Across America is an activist organization founded in 2013 that spreads pseudoscience and chemophobia about GMOs, pesticides, vaccines, and food additives.
EWG is a nonprofit and lobbying organization best known for its annual “Dirty Dozen” list and alarmist rankings of consumer products and foods. Most people don’t know that they also spread objective lies about vaccines—something they have attempted to scrub from their history. EWG is one of the biggest propagators of chemophobia, routinely exaggerating risks of chemicals for their financial benefit.
This isn’t just an American problem, either.
In Europe, 40 percent of adults say they’d prefer to “live in a world without chemicals,” and nearly a third openly fear them. Ninety-one percent don’t grasp that toxicity depends on dose, and 82 percent don’t realize that table salt is always sodium chloride (NaCl), whether isolated from nature or synthesized in a laboratory.
Too many people forget that chemistry shapes their existence—food, medicine, clean water, even their smartphones and homes—until it is used to stoke fear. Combine that with a “do your own research” culture where Google and TikTok pass for toxicology training, and chemophobia spreads unchecked.
Chemophobia Shapes Policy—and Not in a Good WayChemophobia doesn’t just distort individual choices; it influences lawmaking across political ideologies and harms public health as a result.
Chemophobia hinders the development of crops using genetic engineering that can withstand more extreme climates, grow in places that were previously inhospitable, and produce higher yields with fewer pesticides. Chemophobia drives anti-vaccine opposition, slows development of novel therapeutics, fuels unfounded fears about medicine ingredients, and erodes trust in evidence-based science and medicine.
Chemophobia leads to banning safe food ingredients and demonization of healthy fruits and vegetables, causing people to avoid nutritious food, which, unlike the pesticide residues they fear, actually does pose a health risk. Chemophobia forces consumer product companies to kowtow to public outcry and remove safe and effective ingredients (such as preservatives like parabens), increasing costs, reducing safety, damaging the environment, and legitimizing misinformation.
The most dangerous expression of chemophobia right now is RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.Now that he has co-opted the Department of Health and Human Services, he is wreaking havoc on public health, trust in science, and our safety guardrails. MAHA gains appeal because it’s marketed as a bipartisan “health” platform: rhetoric around healthy foods, chronic health issues, and environmental contaminants.
But peel back the façade?
MAHA is a full-blown chemophobia manifesto, the magnum opus of RFK Jr.’s forty-year anti-science career. None of it will make Americans healthier.MAHA appeals to anti-GMO and anti-pesticide sentiment among left-leaning people who, ironically, have been misled by decades of anti-science rhetoric by RFK Jr. and his allies. Organic purity narratives blend with “ban preservatives” rhetoric, while building on distrust of corporations and “Big Food.” This same tactic fueled the original anti-vaccine activists, many of them left-leaning individuals concerned about toxic vaccine ingredients.
MAHA appeals to the right by branding chemophobia as government overreach: the FDA and EPA are “poisoning” citizens with vaccines, fluoridated water, and processed foods. It feeds broader anti-regulation, anti-institution ideology that led to the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which removed FDA oversight of dietary supplements and drove exponential growth of the wellness industry.
Chemophobia is uniquely dangerous because it transcends political lines. RFK Jr. doesn’t need to persuade people on policy specifics; he only needs to stoke distrust in “chemicals” or legitimate qualified experts who try to educate people, and fear does the rest.
MAHA positions have already seeped into legislation.* The Department of Health and Human Services adopted a federal policy legitimizing falsehoods about thimerosal, used globally to prevent contamination in multi-dose vaccines. * They have halted $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research, claiming it is a “risky” technology. * Multiple states around the country are pursuing bans on “genetic medicines” based on the same reasoning. * This year Utah and Florida banned fluoridation of public water, even while nearly eighty years demonstrate its benefit for dental and overall health. * Legal challenges that block cultivation of golden rice, a lifesaving farming technology, have drawn support from environmental activists and conservative conspiracy platforms alike. * California food dye bans were cheered by left- and right-leaning wellness influencers similarly touting it as the path to healthy food. It isn’t; it instead legitimizes false claims that these colorings are harmful while global experts have asserted their safety.
Chemophobia is the common theme.Chemophobia thrives on the risk perception gap between real and perceived risks. People fixate on Red Dye 40 in snacks while ignoring real systemic factors that impact health, such as healthcare inequities, income inequality, and food deserts.. They avoid nutritious foods because of unfounded pesticide fears but freely consume unregulated supplements full of untested compounds. This double standard distorts personal decisions and public policy and harms society.
Chemophobia has staying power because it is applicable to every single topic in science and health. Today it’s food dyes, tomorrow it’s pesticides, next week it’s vaccines. The narrative doesn’t require data—only fear of the chemical boogeyman.
We All Must Recognize Chemophobia as a Global Health ThreatIf we want better health and smarter policy, we must confront chemophobia. That starts with science literacy—basic chemistry, toxicology, biology, and, yes, media literacy. Education matters, but so does accountability.
Stop confusing notoriety with expertise. A podcaster saying “trust me” is not a credential. Journalists need to quit amplifying clickbait and start quoting real experts, not wellness influencers. And elected officials must write laws based on evidence, not vibes, polls, or lobbyists’ checks. Scientists can contribute by meeting the public where they are, using plain language, acknowledging fears, and fact-checking loudly and often. If we don’t, misinformation gets a free pass.
Chemistry underpins everything—medicine, food, clean water, sustainability, climate science. Yet public fear of “chemicals” stalls progress, raises costs, and undermines safety. Chemophobia thrives because fear is profitable, politically useful, and amplified by powerful networks. Scientists fighting it do so on our own time, without the money or infrastructure backing the fear machine. Until society treats chemophobia as the public health crisis it is, we’ll keep losing ground.
Chemophobia isn’t a nuisance; it’s a global health threat. If you consider yourself a skeptic, this is your call to action: challenge chemical fearmongering wherever you see it—even in yourself. Our health, our safety, and our future depend on it.
Dr. Andrea Love, a microbiologist and immunologist, provides the facts (and the data!) on science and health topics. Follow Andrea on X @dr_andrealove
A version of this article was originally posted at Immunologic and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.
Several weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article titled “The mysterious rise of cancer among adults in the Corn Belt.” It leads with Mackenzie Dryden, Winterset, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer at 18 years old.
Corn Belt, Iowa, the land. You know what’s coming. And sure enough, later in the article, there it is: “At the turn of the century, Iowa ranked 18th in the nation for cancer rates among adults under 50. Today, it’s fifth.” (It’s actually seventh.) And then comes this observation: “At the center of the controversy is glyphosate ….”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP* IF glyphosate is the cause, one would think this would all be neatly proportional – it’s not. For instance, why the disparity between Iowa and Illinois? They’re essentially equivalent in terms of annual acreage, [but] Illinois’ cancer rate is roughly 8 points lower than Iowa. * Alternatively, Nebraska and Minnesota plant only two-thirds of Iowa’s acreage, yet those two states possess higher cancer rates among young people.
All this focus on glyphosate represents lost opportunity towards solving the real problem. That ultimately cheats all cancer patients (now, and in the future).
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After trying unsuccessfully to treat his depression with medication over several decades, Noel Farris, a 43-year-old web developer based in Philadelphia, found a ketamine clinic through a friend’s recommendation. He’d heard that the drug helped people mentally dissociate from the disease. So last year, he met with the clinic’s doctor, who recommended three intravenous infusions per week for a month, at $400 a session. He never saw or talked to the doctor again.
Instead, he said, a nurse took his blood pressure, placed the IV, then left the room each session. He was told to avoid driving for a few hours but was allowed to return to work. After several months and several thousand dollars, he stopped, saying he felt temporarily lighter, but didn’t see any long-term difference.
But Farris’ experience was specific to that one Philadelphia clinic. If he’d gone to a different site, even in the same city, he likely would have received a different treatment plan: a different dose, a different number of infusions, and different after-care instructions. And he might have experienced a different result.
In Jacksonville, Florida, Kevin Beaugrand, a 33-year-old restaurant server, received IV ketamine infusions while connected to a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, and an electrocardiogram. A medical professional stayed with him for most of the hour-long session, and his mother drove him home. After six treatments in two weeks — combined with outside counseling sessions — he started to feel better and purchased about 20 sessions over three years, at a total cost of about $10,000.
Across the country in Spokane, Washington, Jake Reinert, a 26-year-old insurance adjuster, said they started taking Spravato, a ketamine-derived nasal spray also known as esketamine, in April 2024. The first clinic Reinert tried required them to come in twice a week for a month and monitored their blood pressure from another room. Reinert then switched to a private psychiatrist and now pays $50 a month for a ketamine nasal spray made at a local pharmacy. At one point, Reinert was taking ketamine every day, and now uses the spray four times a week.
For more than five decades, ketamine has been used as an inexpensive anesthetic in operating and emergency rooms. But in recent years, the drug has emerged as a last-chance treatment for depression. The market really took off after 2019, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Spravato, which is chemically related to ketamine, for treatment-resistant depression.
Ketamine itself, though, isn’t approved to treat any mental health condition, meaning it must be prescribed off-label. It’s now available across the U.S. through mail order and private IV infusion clinics, and in the form of nasal spray and medicated lozenges. And the drug has recently come into the national spotlight since billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk discussed his ketamine use in an interview, and suggested it could be an alternative to traditional antidepressants.
Evidence on the efficacy and safety of ketamine as a depression treatment is still evolving. But some patients who have tried other medications without success call the drug life changing. And it’s popular: More than 1,000 private IV ketamine clinics have reportedly cropped up in recent years. One 2023 market research report estimated the private ketamine market would double from $3.41 billion in 2023 to $6.9 billion in 2030.
Yet despite that popularity, there are few state regulations and little federal oversight about who can administer the drug, at what dose, and how many times. In fact, one state has pulled back on requirements to gather data about adverse events despite concerns of underreporting.
Experts say that lack of regulation and oversight is concerning and could be dangerous. While ketamine is unlikely to be fatal unless combined at high doses with other drugs, it’s regulated as a Schedule III controlled substance, meaning it has potential for addiction and abuse, like Tylenol with codeine. Repeated use has also been associated with damage to the bladder and kidneys, and studies on the effects of long-term use are limited. Safety concerns led the United Kingdom to consider putting ketamine in the same restricted class as cocaine and heroin after “Special K,” as ketamine is also known, became widely used as a party drug.
In the U.S, much of the challenge with using ketamine as a depression treatment is related to its off-label use. When a drug that can have serious side effects, like Spravato, is prescribed, doctors follow a safety program set by the FDA, called a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy. But such a program does not exist for ketamine.
In more than 30 interviews with private clinic owners, current and former federal sources and state government officials, researchers, and patients, Undark found that dosing, safety protocols, and administration methods varied significantly from provider to provider. One clinic director was unclear if they should be reporting serious adverse events like breathing problems and manic episodes to their state or to the FDA, which collects medical reactions in its national database. (An email to Undark that Emily Hilliard, deputy press secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, requested be attributed to an FDA spokesperson, noted that distributors of the drug are required to submit reports of adverse events “that are both serious and unexpected.”)
Several experts Undark interviewed could not point to a state-by-state list of regulations, and independent searches revealed limited information.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPAlthough medical providers at clinics must register with the Drug Enforcement Administration for approval to administer a controlled substance, that’s about the limit as far as regulations. Seth Mehr, who started his own ketamine clinic, Cascade Psychedelic Medicine, in Portland, Oregon in 2021, said he is frustrated by the lack of state and federal guidelines about how a ketamine clinic should operate, calling the system “a sea of non-answers.”
“You don’t have to register with anybody to open a ketamine clinic,” said Mehr, a former emergency room physician. “There’s not a gold standard set of rules as far as who needs to be there, how many people need to be there, what kind of safety equipment you can use, what dosing ranges you’re allowed to use. Really, none of that exists.”
For-profit clinics do have to adhere to general safety regulations and may face varying restrictions on how they can operate, depending on the state. But because treatments at such clinics are usually not covered by insurance, clinic directors can set their own prices and the number of sessions recommended — with little science to guide any standard.
Some in the field have tried to collect data on ketamine use for years, as the number of private clinics and telehealth businesses continued to grow.
Gerard Sanacora, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Yale Depression Research Program, who has long studied the impact of ketamine on depression, is among those who have called for a “ketamine registry,” to track dosage, treatment frequency, and adverse events.
But that, too, has its challenges, he said. “While it seems like such a simple thing — that we should be having some way of tracking this and registering it and everything else,” Sanacora said, adding that “it’s really hard to set up a regulatory control over it without dramatically limiting access to people that will need it to have their wisdom teeth extracted,” among other applications. He said that he has spoken to many regulatory agencies, including the FDA and National Institute of Mental Health, as well as professional societies, about increasing ketamine oversight and data collection.
“It really is one of these unique things that just seems to fall through the cracks,” Sanacora said.
Ketamine was first developed in 1962, and soon began to be used as a battlefield anesthetic in the Vietnam War. Army doctors had previously relied on a related compound, phencyclidine, otherwise known as PCP, but some patients experienced hallucinations and convulsions after use. Ketamine seemed to induce similar dissociative effects but was shorter-acting and safer.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that researchers became increasingly interested in its potential as an antidepressant. Studies began to find that subanesthetic doses of ketamine — meaning below the threshold dose for anesthesia — relieved symptoms of major depression and reduced suicidal thoughts.
Researchers and psychiatrists were excited about ketamine because it acts quickly and dissipates from the body within a few hours, compared to SSRIs — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — which can take weeks or months to have an impact and often have side effects like changes in appetite.
Although there are few studies addressing the long-term impact of ketamine efficacy, some small trials have shown that ketamine could have an impact in just a few hours where others failed, particularly for suicidal patients. One 2024 study of 75 people who received three ketamine IV infusion treatments over 11 days found that two-thirds of the participants experienced at least a 50 percent reduction in suicidality as measured by a self-reported questionnaire. And meta-analyses have found the drug to be a promising antidepressant.
Patients characterized the impact of ketamine treatments in different ways. Just one patient interviewed for this story described the ketamine experience as a high. Some said that ketamine allowed them to separate their thoughts from their emotions, or that they felt the weight of their depression lift.
Although everyone’s experience with IV infusion was slightly different, most people interviewed said their sessions lasted about 45 minutes to an hour. Some wore eye masks, some did not. And some listened to music. And while ketamine isn’t generally considered to be a classic psychedelic like LSD or psilocybin, it can induce a psychedelic effect at high doses.
“It sort of takes you out of your body into what feels like another realm or bubble or plane of existence,” said Beaugrand, the Florida restaurant server. He said he frequently listened to a reggae-version of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” and would, at times, experience “visual hallucinations that make you leave your body when your eyes closed, are very vivid in real life, and it can be kind of disconcerting.”
Despite its promise as an antidepressant, doctors warn that ketamine is not a good choice for everyone. It raises blood pressure and heart rate, so isn’t recommended for people with uncontrolled heart disease. Several guidelines advise those with a history of mania or psychosis to avoid the drug. And there is concern about long-term use causing cognitive impairment and what’s known as “ketamine bladder,” which can cause the bladder to shrink and become irreversibly damaged.
Kimberly Juroviesky is a nurse practitioner and a captain in the Air Force who was disabled during active duty and started receiving ketamine treatments for chronic pain. She also is president of The Ketamine Taskforce, a volunteer organization aimed at improving education, access, and insurance coverage for ketamine.
“You watch any drug commercial on television and what are they going to say, ‘may cause kidney issues, may cause this, may cause that, may cause death,’” she said, noting that she now limits her ketamine treatments to once every four to six weeks. “That’s why you have to have guidelines, that’s why you have to use it appropriately.”
When the FDA approved the nasal spray Spravato — otherwise known as esketamine — it came with strict treatment guidelines: Clients had to have tried and failed at least two oral antidepressants first. Treatment also required a two-hour monitoring period in which a health care provider watched for serious side effects such as vomiting or dizziness.
Psychiatrists started using ketamine off-label in the late 2000s, after a study found that 71 percent of participants who received intravenous ketamine reported feeling better. But the number of clinics expanded significantly after Spravato was approved. And those clinics didn’t have to follow the strict guidelines required for Spravato.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit a year later, the FDA allowed providers to prescribe controlled substances virtually. That’s when telehealth companies like Mindbloom became popular; they created online consults and sent medicated ketamine lozenges, called troches, through the mail. The lozenges release the drug more slowly than through an IV. Trapped in their homes, people reached out, looking for relief from their depression and fear.
While state boards of medicine oversee the medical practitioners administering the ketamine, and the Drug Enforcement Administration issues licenses to those prescribing controlled substances, it’s up to states to decide who can administer the treatments, what data to collect, if any, and what safety standards to impose, said Seth Mailhot, a former FDA investigator and compliance officer who specializes in FDA regulations for Husch Blackwell legal firm in Washington D.C.
This January, Mindbloom announced an injectable program, allowing patients to draw a dose from a vial of ketamine at home. Concerns about safety abounded, but Mailhot said it’s unclear if, in general, telehealth companies legally fall under the state where they send the product, or where the company is based.
Meanwhile, the landscape could change dramatically in the next couple years. During Covid-19, regulations passed to allow practitioners to prescribe controlled substances to patients after telehealth appointments. But those regulations are set to expire on Dec. 31, 2025.
Credit: WikimediaIn untangling the patchwork policies, Undark examined three states with contrasting ketamine approaches: Pennsylvania, Utah, and Oregon. Pennsylvania, recognizing the growth of private ketamine clinics, created a task force to develop general guidelines in 2020, early in the ketamine boom. Utah, at one point, appeared to have very strict rules for ketamine clinics. And Oregon’s guidelines for its ketamine clinics differ from its psilocybin centers, which were legalized in 2020.
Most states have guidelines — voluntary rules for ketamine clinics, not regulations. Regulations would take a legal process, and states would need the money and manpower to enforce those laws, whether it be through regular inspections or data collection, said Mailhot.
In Pennsylvania, the challenge was that when those guidelines were developed, it was unclear what potential issues might arise.
“We were aware that there were a lot of clinics opening up, but probably not with the appropriate providers or equipment, and we realized that this was a space that really wasn’t governed or regulated in Pennsylvania,” said Jessica Poole, a nurse anesthetist who served on the state’s task force and helped develop state guidelines for best dosing practices.
The current guidelines recommend strict monitoring, including blood pressure, cardiac, and neurological checks, and the availability of emergency equipment. But Poole said there are a lot of gray areas for clinics operating outside of hospitals and ambulatory surgical facilities (ASFs), which specialize in outpatient procedures. The guidelines do not require clinic directors to report adverse events to state or federal agencies.
“There are not any strict black and whites on it when we’re talking about clinics outside of a hospital or an ASF unfortunately,” she said.
Although private ketamine clinics in Pennsylvania do not have to register with the state department of health, practitioners do need to have a DEA license and to follow the same license rules as any other business, according to Barry Ciccocioppo, communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
The current guidelines also recommend that a physician or a certified registered nurse anesthetist who has adequate training and experience supervise any ketamine administration. But again, Poole said, those are only guidelines, not requirements.
In 2023, Evan Husted, an emergency room physician, opened Mindstream Medicine, a private ketamine clinic in Philadelphia, after, he said, he had a positive experience with ketamine himself. But he said the state guidelines were often unclear about safety protocol. For example, he was unsure if he was supposed to be reporting adverse events and to whom. (Pennsylvania guidelines call for monitoring for adverse events, but do not require adverse event reporting.)
As an emergency physician, Husted said he’s comfortable handling physical issues that may come up — for example, increased blood pressure and heart rate. But because he doesn’t have a psychiatric background, he chose not to accept bipolar patients or those with a history of psychosis, as some evidence suggests ketamine treatments can trigger rare manic episodes. The Pennsylvania guidelines, however, don’t stipulate which medical or psychiatric conditions should exclude patients from treatment. They simply caution that patients with high-risk coronary artery disease and poorly controlled psychosis are at increased risk for adverse events following ketamine infusion.
Husted said more guidelines are needed, both for patients and for the medical practitioners trying to provide a uniform treatment.
“You can go to 10 different clinics — not even in other parts of the state, but just other parts of the city of Philadelphia and the suburbs — and find people using ketamine in 10 different ways,” he said.
Among those major differences is dosing, which is largely left up to providers.
Some experts, like Sandhya Prashad, a practicing psychiatrist near Houston and president of the American Society of Ketamine Physicians, Psychotherapists, and Practitioners (ASKP3), caution against using high doses due to safety concerns.
But Husted, for one, said he believes patients get more out of a level of what he called “therapeutic intoxication,” though he said that dose differs dramatically from person to person.
“There’s no telling how much ketamine someone’s going to need to get to the level you’re trying to get them to,” Husted said, “and so I would be wary of regulations that tell me I can only give so many milligrams per kilogram [of body weight] and still be operating in good practice as a ketamine clinic.”
In contrast to Pennsylvania’s minimal oversight, Utah started out as a strict outlier. In 2017, the state passed a law requiring clinics to track adverse events related to outpatient anesthesia. However, the monitoring ended in 2023 despite a Utah Department of Health and Human Services task force recommendation that it continue until 2025, amid concerns of underreporting. Of the 14 adverse events reported during that time, eight of them involved dental procedures. It was unclear if any involved ketamine infusion clinics.
It was also unclear why the monitoring ended. Melanie Hall, communications director for the state Department of Commerce, which oversees the Division of Professional Licensing, said there was a “sunset” date of 2023 on the monitoring law: “We do not monitor the use of ketamine or any adverse events associated with it,” she wrote in an email.
Some clinic directors said the Utah oversight was helpful, particularly when Covid shut many of the clinics down and providers switched to providing ketamine via mail. When the pandemic shut down services, William Beesley, founder of Restorative Health — a clinic that offers ketamine treatments as well as weight management and hair loss therapies in Sandy, Utah — said he was able to call the state and see what they could provide, and under what circumstances.
Beesley also noted that the state keeps a controlled substances database so providers can confirm that patients are not getting ketamine from other clinics. According to Patrick Fitzgibbon, a spokesman from Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing, telemedicine prescriptions would be in the database if reported by the pharmacy.
“Utah’s systems seem to work better to me,” he said. “It’s a very, very, very complicated situation but the state is handling it better than the national government.”
Meanwhile, in Oregon, clinics face an additional challenge, as many of them provide both ketamine and psilocybin treatments. But the state takes a much stricter approach with the latter: Oregon requires providers at its psilocybin centers to take a verified training course, register with the state, and collect data on any events requiring emergency medical attention. Tim Heider, a spokesperson with the state’s health authority, noted in an email that the agency does not regulate ketamine.
It’s confusing for the clinic directors and the patients, said Mehr, the emergency room doctor who founded Cascade Psychedelic Medicine. The private clinic offers both ketamine and psilocybin treatments. Mehr said he remains with patients throughout the experience and asks them to seek additional mental health support as part of the treatment process.
Like Husted in Philadelphia, Mehr uses doses of ketamine high enough to induce a psychedelic state. He said he turns down about 10 to 15 percent of patients who apply for treatment due to mental health concerns or physical health issues. Patients typically start with sessions twice a week for a few weeks, and then taper from there. They generally move to sessions every other week for a few months, Mehr said, and then once a month after that. An individual session is $685, although a sliding scale is available. About 50 percent of the treatments are now partially covered by insurance, he said.
He said part of the problem is that there are so many organizations developing their own versions of guidelines. All of them are voluntary. The reality, he said, is that ketamine practitioners are held accountable by two entities: the legal system and the state medical boards, the latter of which will investigate if there is a complaint.
“Being accountable to a lawsuit and being able to demonstrate that you are practicing within community standards, that’s how a malpractice suit is defined,” he said. “Then there’s the boards themselves that regulate their providers the same way they do everything else.”
Eric Hermes, the national director of psychopharmacology and somatic treatments at the Veterans Health Administration Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, said the VA has two national programs to train personnel about ketamine, from clinical needs to developing ketamine programs at facilities. He said because IV ketamine is unregulated, providers tend to use higher doses because some feel that the length of dissociation is linked to overall effectiveness in treating depression long term, but that has not been proven in the research or in his experience.
Another challenge with ketamine, he added, is ending treatment: “What we’ve found in clinical treatment is that some patients, sometimes a large proportion of patients, don’t do well when you try to taper off ketamine.”
That results in some VA patients receiving what he called “long term serial treatments,” even though there is not a lot of data about the benefits and risks of long-term use.
In a 2023 article looking at legislative reform for psychedelic drugs including MDMA and psilocybin, Joshua Siegel, a psychiatrist then at Washington University, wrote that “legislative reform for psychedelic drugs has been proceeding in a rapid, patchwork fashion in the U.S.” For ketamine, he said, the legal situation is even more challenging, since it’s already an approved drug but is being prescribed off-label.
The lack of regulations could have serious consequences, said Siegel, now an assistant professor at New York University’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine, because while overdoses with ketamine are uncommon, they do happen, particularly when combined with other drugs.
“You can overdose on ketamine and stop breathing,” he said. “But that’s not the case with LSD and psilocybin, where you don’t really see overdoses like you do with ketamine.”
Siegel pointed out that at least in a clinic, there is some medical oversight and someone is physically in the clinic in case something goes wrong. That’s not the case with mail-order services, leading to a higher-risk situation, he said.
Prashad, president of ASKP3, echoed safety concerns, particularly regarding dosing.
Patients have come to see her, “and they’ve seen someone else in the past that administered IV ketamine, and they gave them such high doses they were practically anesthetized,” she said. “There’s no data that suggests that that’s what you should be doing. In fact, there’s data that shows that that’s neurotoxic.”
ASKP3 is working to develop updated guidelines for drug type, dose, and frequency, though it would be voluntary for practitioners to follow them.
L. Alison McInnes, a psychiatrist and former medical director for Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s ketamine infusion therapy program, agreed with Mehr that enforcing those guidelines will likely only happen through patient lawsuits.
“If you have standard of care out there,” she said, “then malpractice courts have something to deal with.”
But Mailhot said it’s up to the states to create legislation — like Utah did requiring adverse event reporting. But most states haven’t issued more regulations because state legislators aren’t comfortable weighing in on the practice of medicine for fear of unintended consequences, he said.
He pointed to the effort it took to shut down opioid “pill mills,” noting that the government was able to track the biggest offenders through the number of prescriptions, but that’s harder to do with ketamine because it is not being tracked, and it is not being used in the same volume.
“When there’s enough of an outcry to the safety issues, they’ll crack down,” he said, noting that the country is currently in a “deregulation environment.” “But for now, you can’t stop everything from happening.”
While states and professional organizations are struggling to address the increasing number of private ketamine avenues, experts like McInnes are trying to work with clinics through an entirely different path: She’s the vice president of scientific affairs for Osmind, an electronic health record system specifically for clinicians administering psychiatric medications and treatments like ketamine.
As of late May, she said at least 200 clinics had signed up, including more than 250,000 patients. The record template includes vital signs, doses, any medication the patient is on, and any side effects. And there’s a new record for each infusion, she said.
The clinics and patients consent to use the data — without identifying factors — for research. Right now, McInnes is working on a paper in consultation with a researcher at Yale University comparing esketamine results with those from ketamine infusion therapy.
She said it would be helpful if there was a nationally recognized ketamine certification program for providers and those working in the field. Instead, she said, there are some “charismatic figures” offering training courses for thousands of dollars, but there’s no standardization.
McInnes said that, from her data, most people don’t need more than six ketamine infusions to treat their depression. But for many clinics, there is no end point for its use.
“It’s just really quite egregious,” she said.
For patients who work with ketamine, part of the challenge is figuring out how to use the drug as a tool and not a crutch.
Reinert, the insurance adjuster from Spokane, has been regularly taking ketamine since October 2024, increasing the dose to where they are now taking 140 mg several times a week. The treatment has been life changing, Reinert said. At one point, Reinert had taken a medical leave to deal with their depression but is now working full time and taking a full load of college courses, aiming for a degree in sociology.
“I’ve tried other antidepressants but this is the first that has launched me towards life goals,” they wrote in an email.
The challenge is that Reinert plans to move to Australia in a year, where ketamine treatments are much, much harder to find. They are working with their psychiatrist to come up with a plan to drastically reduce their use of the medication.
The longest Reinert has been off the drug was three weeks, and they said their mood plummeted. They were a little worried about life without ketamine.
“They say it’ll be six sessions, but from my experience it does seem to be a long-term thing,” Reinert said. “And once you stop, the benefits also stop.”
Dawn Fallik is a medical and science reporter specializing in data analysis. She worked as a staff writer for The Associated Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has won awards for investigative reporting, feature writing, and column writing. She is now a professor at the University of Delaware. Find Dawn on X @dfallik
A version of this article was originally posted at Undark and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find Undark on X @undarkmag
Enjoying delicious food is a fundamental part of the human experience. Few of us would deny the enjoyment we get from that first bite of pecan pie after Thanksgiving dinner, or the aroma of a perfectly cooked steak coming off the grill. Eating is undeniably pleasurable, in other words, and we certainly do find some choices more appealing than others. This preference is nature’s way of directing us toward safe, nutritious foods and away from toxins that can harm us. In recent decades, however, some scientists have warped this basic evolutionary fact into a convoluted theory of “food addiction,” the belief that people can become dependent on specific foods the same way they do with deadly drugs like heroin. On the surface, food addiction makes sense. America remains in the throes of an obesity crisis, and heart disease—a condition heavily influenced by poor dietary choices—still kills more Americans than any other cause. Against that backdrop, the addictive nature of our favorite foods seems to explain our ongoing willingness to overindulge despite the often-fatal consequences.
But the food addiction narrative begins to unravel the more experts scrutinize it, raising questions proponents of the hypothesis don’t have good answers for. For example, only a minority of obese people fit the definition for food addiction while a larger share of patients diagnosed with anorexia do. This paradox badly undermines food addiction and goes to a broader point: the diagnostic criteria are not distinct from existing disorders. Indeed, large-scale studies show that food addiction symptoms almost perfectly overlap with binge-eating disorder and normal overeating driven by stress or restriction.
Once those factors are controlled for, an independent “food addiction” syndrome disappears. “Collectively, the present findings support the view that [food addiction] reflects a cluster of preexisting psychological constructs—such as craving, guilt, and disordered eating attitudes—rather than a clearly delineated disorder,” the authors of a July 2025 review concluded.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPPerhaps more importantly, no unique addictive agent has been identified. Decades of searching for a “food drug” (sugar, fat, palatability) have failed. While some mental health experts insist there is an “emerging consensus” about the validity of food addiction, they can’t seem to settle on exactly what quality makes a certain dietary choice addictive. This seriously undercuts any attempt to analogize food addiction to a well-established substance use disorder like alcoholism.
In short, “food addiction” is a metaphor stretched into a diagnosis. It pathologizes common human struggles and distracts from evidence-based drivers of overeating: sleep deprivation, emotional distress, and the modern food environment’s relentless cue exposure. The science has moved on; the label should too.
Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they take a closer look at “food addiction.”
Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples of North Carolina residents.
It sounds scary, but scientifically, there are two things to keep in mind:
- We can detect anything in anything in 2025.
- Presence is not pathology.
About the first Don’t Be Alarmed qualifier, it is important to know the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) don’t do any science at all. They do epidemiology, which is EXPLORATORY and why they grudgingly use terms like “correlated”, “suggests”, and “linked to.” That is not to say epidemiology isn’t important. We only learned that smoking and alcohol are killers due to epidemiology; we didn’t do clinical trials on humans and give them cancer.
Yet those successes turned the field into a money grab. Universities, led by Harvard’s School of Public Health, began to claim they found ‘smoking guns’ like cigarettes everywhere, from saturated fats to gluten, and then promoted miracle foods like kale and quinoa, and promoted miracle diets like the Mediterranean and vegetarian. No science needed, they looked at a spreadsheet of lots of products and matched them to outcomes. They still do, but now a lot of other schools do it also. Now government does also. When NIEHS epidemiologists look at enough spreadsheets and maybe add in ‘we believe mice are little people’ studies and find enough to declare statistical significance, they write a paper and publish it in their in-house, taxpayer-funded magazine.
There is a big problem with all of that, but let’s just talk about the methodology. Statistical Significance has been reduced by activist epidemiologists and the trial lawyers who fund them and their allies to a “P ≤ 0.05 Fetish” culture. Epidemiologists with an agenda want journalists and the public to believe a p < 0.05 result will mean a false positive rate of 5%. That is actually terrible in the real world, but to them it is compelling. Yet in reality, the false positive rate can be 76% — if the hypothesis is borderline impossible, like that a weedkiller that acts on a biological pathway only found in plants can magically cause human cancer.
Despite that, a company is on the hook for billions of dollars because Predatorts, as such lawyers in the industry are called by the politically neutral science community, don’t need evidence on their side; they only need jury members who don’t trust science. Like in San Francisco, where Robert Kennedy-style progressive distrust of science is still part of the cultural fabric. That’s why so many lawsuits get filed there.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPPhysicists would never allow one of their own to get away with that terrible confidence level, and if your ATM were so inaccurately handing out money, the government would have bank executives in jail.
Yet it’s a common metric for practical and even clinical significance in epidemiology and other soft fields like psychology.
The second Don’t Be Alarmed qualifier is a form of ‘the dose makes the poison.’ You know it is true that water is good for you but too much will kill you, just like aspirin and caffeine and lots of other things. Illiterate peasants in the 17th century knew it.
Modern epidemiologists deny it. They will accept studies using rats fed 10,000X real-world levels of chemicals because they claim they want to detect “hazard” and disclaim that they are computing risk. Yet in their press releases and media kits, epidemiologists in groups like IARC will talk about risk dozens of times, and advocate for bans.
When No Adverse Effect Levels were first created, we could detect parts per million. Anything below that was ‘nothing.’ Today, we can detect parts per quadrillion. That is 1,000,000,000 times more sensitive than 70 years ago. Are products suddenly less safe because detection one billion times greater can find the presence of a chemical? Not at all, presence is still not pathology. Yet every day we see claims about flame retardants and processed foods and pesticides, which use that methodology to claim we are being harmed.
We got claims that not only did vaccines cause autism, from the same political demographic claiming to be on Team Science today, but that pesticides also did. Unless they were pesticides, the National Organic Standards Board declared could be Certified Organic.
Nothing about that is scientific.
It is instead statistical homeopathy, but environmental Predatorts know that they don’t need science to convince a jury, they only need emotion. They need a juror who can be convinced that scientists at DuPont are risking the lives of their own children by pouring toxic chemicals into groundwater. Scientists do whatever they are told by their evil corporate overlords.
Does that sound like Secretary Kennedy now? It does, except NIEHS was saying all of these things before Trump was elected. The Biden administration made efforts to throw out all chemistry, biology and toxicology — science — in EPA guidelines and replace it with epidemiology. Which they called fuzzy-wuzzy “real world data” despite lacking any plausible biological mechanisms for how volunteers claiming they saw a dead frog can infer it was caused by farmers.
Real world data like in the recent NIEHS-funded paper claiming they can detect ultrashort-chain PFAS in water and in blood. Hint, hint for journalists who don’t know any better: Presence equals pathology.
It should work. Corporate media have repeated claims about everything from weedkillers being “linked” to cancer – only in a spreadsheet – to vaccines “correlated” to autism to pizza boxes “suggested” as endocrine disruptors, whatever that means.
Those are all claims made by epidemiologists and touted in newspapers like Guardian in the UK and New York Times in the United States.
Many epidemiologists don’t want to find true environmental harms, if any are left, they essentially exist to try and scare the public about science. The crossover among the U.S. covert activist group and France’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and Italy’s Ramazzini Institute should be alarming, and perhaps it will be now that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is in charge of American health policy. A man they all loved when he was a loyal organic-loving, raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-denying Democrat, so inside the circle, President Obama floated him to run EPA; a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and a solar energy magnate was considered the perfect choice to ban everything, because Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy.
We can only dream that this newfound We Stand With Science mentality remains in fashion once the party that dominated American universities is back in power. Given the 25 years of denial and conspiracy theories that existed before Trump and Kennedy, it is unlikely.
Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and the author of Science Left Behind. Follow Hank on X @HankCampbell
A version of this article was originally posted at Science 2.0 and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find Science 2.0 on X @science2_0
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a reputation for bashing powerful corporate interests in his quest to “Make America Healthy Again.” But one industry has eked out a win under Kennedy’s MAHA agenda: Big Agriculture.
In May, the Trump administration’s MAHA commission released a report raising questions about the health effects of two commonly used pesticides, glyphosate and atrazine. …
Major trade groups scrambled to meet with White House officials. They urged the commission in a coordinated social media campaign to take a “fact-based approach,” and sent letters to key federal departments.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPTheir efforts seemingly paid off. The Trump administration’s MAHA strategy document … did not call for restrictions on pesticides and instead said the EPA would work to ensure the public is aware of its “robust” review procedures, a marked shift from Kennedy’s past criticism of chemicals as contaminating the nation’s food supply.
…
The scientific and regulatory consensus on the safety of glyphosate is divided. … Bayer, which has faced a blitz of lawsuits over its glyphosate-containing herbicide, has stood by the chemical’s safety.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
You shouldn’t drink Roundup. You shouldn’t bathe in it, either. But you shouldn’t worry about eating crops sprayed with Roundup. Even though President Trump’s brain-wormed health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says it’s fueling a disease crisis. … [The] all-natural-food purists on the left and the right hate it more than any other chemical.
Now they hate me, too, because I wrote an essay in the New York Times debunking the health hysteria swirling around Roundup. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, sounds nasty, but it’s less toxic than caffeine, and way less toxic than most other pesticides used by American farmers. … If you insist on worrying about Roundup, worry that Roundup-phobia will lead to its replacement by much nastier chemicals.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPAs you can imagine, I’m getting roasted online …. In the food and ag space, vibes about what’s “natural” routinely outweigh facts about what’s safe.
I don’t know how to fix that.
…
But I’m starting to get pissed, too. There’s too much pseudoscience out there, and too much handwaving about the brutal challenge of feeding 10 billion people without frying the planet.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here