azodicarbonamide

As hard as it is to believe, I've been spending a significant part of my time countering pseudoscience for close to 17 years, so long that it seems that I've always been doing it. Of course, that's not true; I didn't actually become involved in this seemingly never-ending Sisyphean task until I was in my mid-30s, which means that the majority of my life had been spent more or less blissfully ignorant that there are people out there who passionately believe, for example, that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism and that bleach enemas can reverse that autism or that there were quacks out…

It's been a while since I've taken notice of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, the misguided "food safety" activist who sees chemicals, chemicals, chemicals everywhere and raises fears about them all, especially the ones that she can't pronounce. The first time I took any significant notice of her was about a year ago, when she was making news for lobbying Subway to remove the "yoga mat chemical" azodicarbonamide from its bread. Of course, as I explained, azodicarbonamide is a safe chemical that disappears during the baking. It's a maturing agent that makes bread dough rise better and…

It’s been a bad week for celebrity quacks; that is, after starting out looking as though it would be a good week. For example, as I discussed a couple of days ago, contender for the title of world’s most brain dead antivaccine conspiracy theorist, washed up comedian Rob Schneider, having somehow managed to land a gig resurrecting his 20 year old “Richmeister” character (a.k.a. the “Makin’ Copies Guy”) in the service of an ad campaign for State Farm Insurance, found his ad dropped like the proverbial Ebola-laced bedding when State Farm was made aware of Schneider’s virulently antivaccine…

Back in December, I was excited. The reason I was excited was because everybody's favorite über-Libertarian, New World Order conspiracy theorist quack, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, had made an announcement. That announcement was that on January 6, 2014 Adams would announce astonishing "scientific findings" about food that would "revolutionize" nutrition and health. Given Adams' past history of doing hilariously off-base things with scientific instruments, such as putting Chicken McNuggets under a microscope and being amazed that things look a lot different when highly magnified,…