Public controversy over the safety of fluoridation programs continues, in some towns leading to successful resistance to water fluoridation. As a public health issue, the scientific evidence for risks vs benefits should be at the core of this debate. A new study sheds significant light on this question.

Some anti-fluoridation activists will latch onto any claim they feel supports their opposition (common behavior in any context), and this leads to a great deal of nonsensical conspiracy-mongering. My favorite is the claim that public water fluoridation is all a plot to allow companies to cheaply dump industrial waste into the public water supply.

These sorts of claims distract from the real issues, and in my opinion does a disservice to the anti-fluoridation movement. I don’t mind the existence of opposition movements, even if I disagree with their position. They can serve a useful function in driving public debate and keeping the powers that be honest and transparent.

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A news article in the Sacramento Bee declares: “Harvard Study Finds Fluoride Lowers IQ – Published in Federal Gov’t Journal.” Except – this is not a news item, and it’s not really a study. The article is about a recently published systematic review and meta-analysis – not new data. The term “study” is vague, and I find it often causes confusion.

Far worse than this common imprecision is the fact that this article, under the “News” tab on the Bee website, is not actually a news report. It is a propaganda article written by the NYS Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc. and distributed as a press release. The Bee does post a disclaimer at the top of the page, reading:

This section contains unedited press releases distributed by PR Newswire. These releases reflect the views of the issuing entity and are not reviewed or edited by the Sacramento Bee staff. More information on PR Newswire can be found on their web site.

That’s better than nothing, but I wonder how many people reading the press release will notice and read the disclaimer. In my opinion, a news outlet should not reprint press releases sent out from advocacy organizations clearly intended to promote an agenda. They especially should not print them under the banner of “News.” The disclaimer is not adequate.

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In my upcoming book, which I will now shamelessly plug – The Skeptics Guide to the Future (release date Sept 27th, but you can pre-order now) my co-authors and I spend a lot of time extrapolating cutting edge technology into the near and medium-term future. What are the technologies that are on the cusp of disrupting current technology and changing our lives? One of them is the technology to build ever-smaller and more capable machines – the technology of the very small. We can dream of having mature nanotechnology, robots at the nanoscale that can manipulate matter at the molecular level, but this is likely still centuries in the future. Between now and then there is a lot of territory, however.

In the meantime we can imagine what the most likely early applications will be. What is the low-hanging fruit? For medical purposes there are some likely early applications, even for robots that are not quite at the nanoscale, perhaps at the micro or even centimeter scale. Tiny robots can be useful as surgical aids. They can be injected through the skin (no incision necessary) where they can make precise interventions, such as removing tumors or suturing blood vessels. This could take microsurgery (which is already a thing) to the next level.

When such robots can be more autonomous or easy to control remotely, another possible early application is to have them crawl along the inside of the large and even medium-sized blood vessels, clearing up plaque and removing clots.  Or they can move along the inside of the intestines, removing polyps and scanning for cancers. In recent decades we have been transitioning from having to open up major body cavities in order to do surgery, to being able to do the same procedures through small holes using cameras and specially designed instruments. This has made many surgeries significantly less invasive, with dramatically reduced trauma and recovery time. Micro surgical robots have the potential to take this to the next level over the coming decades.

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By now you have probably gotten the memo – the world is drowning in plastic, and yet we continue to produce and throw away prodigious amounts every year. The world produces over 400 million tonnes of plastic every year. Only about 9% gets recycled. About 10% ends up in the ocean. This plastic hangs around for along time. It does not biodegrade, but it down break down into smaller and smaller pieces, ending up as microplastics. Microplastic are everywhere, from the deepest ocean to the highest mountain, and in most living things, including people. This is simply not sustainable.

A recent UK study, The Big Plastic Count, reinforces these numbers. They found that the average UK household throws away 66 pieces of plastic each week. In total the UK throws out 100 billion pieces of plastic a year. Only 12% of plastic in the UK is recycled. One of the primary lessons of this study is that recycling plastic does not work. It’s essentially a failed strategy for dealing with the plastic waste problem, and many consider the entire idea of recycling plastic to be an industry deception, “greenwashing” the problem.

This is part of a larger trend. Industries have historically figured out ways of shifting the responsibility for the waste they produce (or other problems they create) onto the public. This is a method of externalizing costs. In fact, the entire anti-litter campaign was created by a consortium of industry groups in order to divert attention away from their waste streams and serious regulations to deal with it. Remember the crying American Indian? That was industry propaganda.

As a general rule it is difficult to address any problem by counting on high public compliance. It’s just really hard to get most people to do something consistently, especially something tedious. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we don’t try to get people to express personal responsibility, for themselves, their environment, and for their society. You should brush your teeth regularly, using fluoride toothpaste and a soft brush, but probably not right after drinking acidic juice because that weakens the enamel, and make sure that you do a thorough job and floss occasionally as well. But this doesn’t mean that everyone is going to do this, no matter how hard we try to make it happen, and it doesn’t mean we don’t need to regulate the amount of fluoride in the public water supply to further promote dental health.

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European Union (EU) agricultural scientists are in a bit of a pickle. I’m not sure to what extent it is one of their own making or how much it was imposed upon them by politics and public opinion, but they are now confronting a dilemma they at least ignored if not helped to create. The question is – how best to achieve sustainable agriculture in a world with a growing population? This problem is made more difficult by the fact that we already tapped the most efficient arable land, so any extension of agricultural land will necessarily push into less and less efficient land with greater displacements of populations and natural ecosystems.

The dilemma stems from the EU’s regulatory support for organic farming. The core problem is actually the very concept of organic farming itself, which is rooted historically and ideologically in pseudoscience. Organic farming is philosophy-based rather than science-based farming – it is a manifestation of the appeal to nature fallacy. The result is a set of specific rules in order to qualify as “organic” that mostly represent a rejection of modern agricultural technology. There are some good things in there as well. Sometimes low tech methods are best. But organic farming does not use the best most sustainable methods. It uses the most “natural” methods, by some vague, arbitrary, gut-feeling criteria. So, for example, you can use pesticides, but only if they are derived from natural sources, even if they are less effective and more toxic. You also can’t irradiate food, because irradiation seems scary (even though it safely reduces food spoilage thereby reducing waste and foodborne disease).

And of course the organic farming industry is driving the biggest controversy in agriculture – the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This is the focus of a new paper by EU agricultural scientists who now have to confront the organic farming hobgoblin which is getting in the way of sustainable farming. Here are the highlights: They open by dispensing with the most common argument used to dismiss the need for GMOs and justify organic farming inefficiency –

Sustainable food systems will require profound changes in people’s consumption patterns and lifestyles, which is true regardless of the farming methods used and does not change the fact that organic farming often requires more land than conventional farming for the same quantity of food output.

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A recent commentary on Forbes advises: You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science. I agree  with everything the author, Ethan Siegel, says in the piece. It was a good start – but did not go far enough. For example, he did not really reach any conclusion about what people should actually do, beyond “listen to the experts.” OK – how, exactly, do we do that? This is not a criticism (I have written similar articles before) but an observation: after trying to communicate these same skeptical themes for decades and getting thousands of questions from the public, I have realized that it is perhaps not so obvious what it means to listen to the experts.

First let me amplify what Siegel gets right, although I may reframe it a bit. He correctly describes the typical process that people use when evaluating new information, although does not name it – confirmation bias. His summary is as good as any:

• formulating an initial opinion the first time we hear about something,
• evaluating everything we encounter after that through that lens of our gut instinct,
• finding reasons to think positively about the portions of the narrative that support or justify our initial opinion,
• and finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss the portions that detract from it.

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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov

As science-communicators and skeptics we are trying to understand the phenomenon of rejection of evidence, logic, and the consensus of expert scientific opinion. There is, of course, no one explanation – complex psychological phenomena are likely to be multifactorial. Decades ago the blame was placed mostly on scientific illiteracy, a knowledge deficit problem, and the prescription was science education. Many studies over the last 20 years or so have found a host of factors – including moral purity, religious identity, ideology, political identity, intuitive (as opposed to analytical) thinking style, and a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking. And yes, knowledge deficit also plays a role. These many factors contribute to varying degrees on different issues and with different groups. They are also not independent variables, as they interact with each other.  Religious and political identity, for example, may be partially linked, and may contribute to a desire for moral purity.

Also, all this is just one layer, mostly focused on explaining the motivation for rejecting science. The process of rejection involves motivated reasoning, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and a host of self-reinforcing cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias. Shameless plug – for a full discussion of cognitive biases and related topics, see my book.

So let’s add one more concept into the mix: anti-intellectualism – the generalized mistrust of intellectuals and experts. This leads people to a contrarian position. They may consider themselves skeptics, but they do not primarily hold positions on scientific issues because of the evidence, but mainly because it is contrary to the mainstream or consensus opinion. If those elite experts claim it, then it must be wrong, so I will believe the opposite. This is distinct from conspiracy thinking, although there is a relationship. As an aside, what the evidence here shows is that some people believe in most or all conspiracies because they are conspiracy theorists. Others believe only in some conspiracies opportunistically, because it’s necessary to maintain a position they hold for other reasons. There is therefore bound to be a lot of overlap between anti-intellectualism and holding one or more conspiracies, but they are not the same thing.

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Being involved in skeptical activism for over two decades does provide some perspective. One phenomenon I have noticed is that most pseudosciences and weird belief systems are, at their core, the same. Sure, the details vary, but the underlying errors in logic and thinking are the same. Essentially people make the same mistakes over and over again.

This, in fact, was the original motivation for developing a list of common logical fallacies. We kept encountering the same poor logic time and again and wanted to address the underlying cognitive errors. This is why scientific skepticism is so heavily involved with metacognition – thinking about thinking. There are thousands of fake medical claims out there, for example. Debunking every one is an endless game of whack-a-mole. Better to understand and address the underlying flaw in logic and method that leads to all the medical nonsense.

More recently this phenomenon has been dubbed, “Crank magnetism.” This is the closely related notion that people who believe on type of pseudoscience tend to believe multiple types – they tend to attract each other. The cause of this seems obvious – if your method is flawed, you will achieve the same flawed results over and over.

There may also be different flavors of crank magnetism, although there is a lot of overlap also. For example, there are conspiracy theorists who believe every conspiracy, there are spiritual true-believers who are prone to believing anything mystical, and there are “nature is best” fanatics who are vulnerable to marketing anything as “natural” and fearmongering about “the chemikilz.”

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This aphorism has been around since about 1600, originating with Voltaire in French. I have found it to be a useful concept – not an iron-clad rule, but an excellent guiding principle. The perfect is the enemy of the good (sometimes “good enough”).

What this means is that we should not be paralyzed into inaction because we cannot achieve a perfect solution to a specific problem. The idealized perfect solution becomes an obstacle to solutions that are adequate, or at least an improvement on what we have now.

In reality this can be a tricky principle to apply, however. Like the informal logical fallacies, or any informal guideline for clear thinking, there are no rigid rules or definitions. Judgement is required, which means that subjectivity and bias are also involved.

There are two specific ways this principle is either applied to not applied that tends to come up with skeptical topics. The first deals with our own activism – when should we apply this principle?

For example, over the years I and some of my medical colleagues have had a disagreement about how best to approach topics like vaccine exemptions. We all agree that non-medical exemptions decrease vaccine compliance and are a threat to public health. We all agree that in a perfect world states would not allow non-medical exemptions (only exemptions for children who medically are unable to be vaccinated).

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Aflatoxin is a serious food contaminant that causes both acute and chronic illness in animals and humans. It was first discovered in 1960 when 100,000 turkeys in the UK died over the course of a few months. Their deaths were tracked to a nut-based feed that was contaminated with a newly discovered toxin, named aflatoxin.

Aflatoxin is a group of 20 toxins produced by a fungus, Aspergillus species. According to Food Safety Watch:

Aflatoxins may be present in a wide range of food commodities, particularly cereals, oilseeds, spices and tree nuts. Maize, groundnuts (peanuts), pistachios, brazils, chillies, black pepper, dried fruit and figs are all known to be high risk foods for aflatoxin contamination, but the toxins have also been detected in many other commodities. Milk, cheese and other dairy products are at risk of contamination by aflatoxin M. The highest levels are usually found in commodities from warmer regions of the world where there is a great deal of climatic variation.

Corn is perhaps the biggest source of aflatoxin contamination. It is estimated that 16 million tons of corn are disposed of each year due to aflatoxin contamination. The toxin is highly stable and can survive most types of food processing.

Acute toxicity can result in death when severe. Chronic toxicity is difficult to detect, and the most common effect is liver damage and increased risk for liver cancer.

Many techniques are used to minimize contamination, but even with these methods aflatoxin is a huge source of food waste and an important cause of human illness, especially in developing countries. Continue Reading »