Declare your independence from fear-mongering Greenie fund-raising groups!
In my latest HND piece, entitled "Sunscreen Smokescreen," I take a critical look at the Environmental Working Group's annual sunscreen investigation. EWG just loves going after evil chemicals and scaring the public into sending in more donations. You might remember them from the absurd and discredited Alar scare of 1989.
Never mind if there is no science behind this latest sunscreen screed. Well, actually there is something behind it, but that would be the carefully undocumented standards set up by...EWG itself.
EWG especially goes after the chemical oxybenzone, proven safe by the FDA, and many other regulatory organizations in Europe and elsewhere. As "proof" of the dangers of oxybenzone, EWG trots out a truly awful study on pregnant women and their offspring done by the endocrine disruptors witch hunt group at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (courtesy of your tax dollars). Using methods that could charitably be called "questionable," about all that Mount Sinai can come up with on oxybenzone is that it could cause lower birth weights in girls and higher birth rates in boys.
Yes, I realize that this is a paradoxical finding, but they make no attempt to explain it, besides referring to a few other papers that posit similar effects, that are also unexplained. Science used to mean proposing a hypothesis, testing it, and publishing your results. The Mount Sinai gang seems content to take a single urine sample during pregnancy, test for a chemical, and then use statistics to eke out a finding.
This is high school science fair stuff, and not top tier academic research. But, since you can get grants for this sort of thing these days, that's all that matters, right?
Bear in mind, though, that the birth weight effect is well within normal variations, and corrections for such confounding factors as smoking, drinking, and drug use in pregnancy are weak at best.
Notwithstanding the vast resources of EWG, this is as good as it gets, which is not very good.
Enjoy the sun, use your sunscreen, and forget about the fear entrepreneurs.
Memo to NIH, partial sponsor of this work: Why not take some of the money you're spending on this half-baked chemophobic research and put it into an area far more deserving, such as expanding clinical trials for generics like low-dose naltrexone?
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