Sugar vs. Fat, Antibacterial Soap Ban, Mathematics of Crime

How the Sugar Industry Paid Researchers to Blame Fat Guest: Stanton Glantz, MLIS, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine contains an article you might expect to see from the investigative team of a newspaper. Someday, it may even turn into a movie, because Hollywood loves a conspiracy and that’s exactly what this article details – complete with a smoking gun. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found emails and other documents dating back to the 1960s, when the sugar industry paid three nutrition professors at Harvard to publish articles making fat and cholesterol out as the real dietary bad guys when it comes to heart disease. The articles helped shaped decades of nutrition guidelines that said eating fats was tied to heart health, eating sugar was mainly a problem for your teeth. The truth is, sugar is bad for your heart, too. Check out the research here. The Need for Handwriting Guest: Ellen Handler Spitz, PhD, Professor of Humanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County State lawmakers across the country are debating whether or not kids really need to learn cursive anymore these days. Many can honestly say the ability to type on a keyboard and text with thumbs are both far more important in daily life than good handwriting. A flurry of opinion pieces and letters to the editor in the New York Times took up this question recently. One titled “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter” prompted some rebuttal. FDA Ban on Antibacterial Soaps Guest: Allison Aiello, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill When you’re in the grocery aisle buying soap, it seems like a no-brainer to go for the one that promises to kill 99.9% of bacteria. The antibacterial just naturally seems better than the regular kind, doesn’t it? Well, a year from now, you won’t be facing that dilemma. That’s when a new FDA rule will take effect banning common in