Despite overwhelmingly cataclysmic defeats in the Bay Area city of Richmond and the San Gabriel Valley city of El Monte, activists still hope to force through extra taxes on sweet drinks. Reports are surfacing that the state of Vermont, several other cities in the Bay Area including San Francisco, and the Canadian province of Alberta are attempting to resurrect the reviled idea. When the two cities that got to vote cast ballots on the measures, the taxes crashed by two- and three-to-one margins. People realize that soda taxes will not effectively fight obesity: When will politicians?- In the least surprising study finding we’ve read about in quite some time, a researcher from Bellarmine University in Kentucky has discovered that men like to eat meat because it makes them feel manly. He’s a vegetarian, so of course he spins this as a problem. In response, we’ll modify our message defending President Obama’s meat tooth from the evangelical vegans at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine : Let men eat their hamburgers!
- The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has made a final decision on the scientific merit of a study that purported to link biotech corn with cancer, and it has ruled the study is bunk. An EFSA statement said that “Serious defects in the design and methodology of a paper by Seralini et al. mean it does not meet acceptable scientific standards.” The paper had been widely criticized already — a Los Angeles Times columnist called it “weapons-grade junk science” — and a preliminary EFSA report had already raised serious questions about the methodology.
- CCF in the News: We’re warning against blaming the dubious notion of “food addiction” for obesity from sea to shining sea and from north to south. We’re telling agriculture media that we’re thankful for farmers’ hard work and that we’re standing up for them against anti-agriculture groups like PETA and the so-called Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Our HumaneWatch project is getting the word out about HSUS’s paltry shelter giving and the importance of giving locally, and we’re calling out PETA for its silly pre-Thanksgiving stunts.
- CCF This Week: In our daily posts this week we’re taking on food addiction proponents’ war on our tables, criticizing another high-fructose corn syrup study that leaves a sour taste in even some food activists’ mouths, examining the sordid history of PCRM, and objecting to an author’s hysteria on brain scans of diners.
