Science Guardian/New Science Review/New Technology Review/HIV Truth/Damned Heretics » 2006

Fumento loses Scripps Howard for concealing payoff – is this fair?

January 15th, 2006

Some happy to see him get his comeuppance, but we see his point

The embarrassing exposure of Michael Fumento this week raises the following questions: Is it right for a science columnist to take money that is given to his think-tank by Monsanto on his application and use it to write a book on biotechnology without mentioning his happy sponsor? Is it right for him to later write a column for syndication which praises the company’s products without revealing they paid for the book as he had suggested?

Although he has done some yeoman work over the years as a mythbuster Michael Fumento has in one important respect – AIDS – been something of a now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t kind of critic, a brave skeptic at one moment and a ranting, hostile supporter of a questionable paradigm the next. He currently has a perch at the Hudson Institute where he writes a nice bunch of skeptical stuff supporting biotech, DDT and other outrages to liberal sensibilities.

His claim to fame in AIDS is to have written a book exposing The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, published in 1993, a gloriously vindicated analysis, while vehemently maintaining then and ever since that Peter Duesberg is wrong about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, a position which not only contradicts his betters but is totally inconsistent.

This extraordinary critical schizophrenia may have been an early indication of how Fumento’s brain is split further apart than normal into two independent halves, where verily the right hand writes and knoweth not whereof the left hand accepts what now look distinctly like solicited bribes, sorry to say.

For the latest news is that the famously combative scribe this week has managed to do exactly what the first paragraph above describes, without acknowledging the conflict of interest to himself or to the public even after he was let go on Friday by Scripps Howard, who will no longer syndicate his writings.

Asked about the payments, Fumento says, “I’m just extremely pro-biotech.” He says he solicited several agribusiness companies to finance his book, which was published by Encounter Books. “I went after everybody, I’ve got to be honest,” Fumento says of his fund-raising effort. “I told them that if I tell the truth in this book, the biotech industry is going to look really good, and you should contribute.
The book’s acknowledgements cite support from The Donner Foundation and “others who wish to remain anonymous.” Fumento didn’t disclose the payment from Monsanto either in the book or in at least eight columns he has written mentioning Monsanto since 1999. He explained in his recent column that he focused exclusively on Monsanto due to a “lack of space and because their annual report was plopped onto my lap while I was hunting for a column idea.”
The author says he sees no conflict of interest in his recent columns because the grant came several years ago. “If you’re thinking quid pro quo,” he says, “I think there’s a statute of limitations on that.”
BioEvolution argues that advances in biotechnology are overwhelmingly positive for humanity, and it quotes Monsanto scientists, along with those from other companies, at length. In one section, Fumento writes that Monsanto allowed outside researchers to use plant patents it had developed without a licensing fee, to help alleviate suffering in the Third World. “Has this all been good PR for Monsanto?” Fumento asks in the book. “Yes it has, as headlines have made clear. But a good deed is a good deed.”"

The statement issued in opposition to this defense was as follows:

“Scripps Howard News Service requires writers to disclose any conflict of interest or even an appearance of a conflict in the stories and columns we offer to hundreds of newspapers.
“For three years, we have distributed columns by Michael Fumento, a fellow at the Hudson Institute. On Jan. 5, he wrote about biotechnology and the role of Monsanto. He did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto. The Hudson Institute said the grant was used to support Fumento’s work on a book he authored about biotechnology.
“Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers.

The issue of the rights and wrongs was explored in more detail in

Syndicate Execs Discuss the Latest Paid Pundit Scandal by Aya Kawano in Editor and Publisher. She emphasizes the issue is not so much the money as disclosure:

“Disclosure is the most important thing,” said Creators Syndicate President Rick Newcombe. He noted that if a columnist hypothetically told Creators that he or she had taken money, “we would of course disclose it to the newspaper clients. If enough clients still wanted to run the column, we might not drop it.”

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Editor and Publisher

Syndicate Execs Discuss the Latest Paid Pundit Scandal

Aya Kawano

By Dave Astor

Published: January 13, 2006 6:45 PM ET

NEW YORK With Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) the latest distributor to drop a pundit for taking undisclosed payments, a question comes to mind: Is the main problem taking payments or not disclosing them?

SHNS Friday dropped columnist Michael Fumento of the conservative Hudson Institute for not disclosing he had accepted money from Monsanto in 1999. Fumento wrote in praise of Monsanto as recently as his Jan. 5 column.

“Disclosure is the most important thing,” said Creators Syndicate President Rick Newcombe. He noted that if a columnist hypothetically told Creators that he or she had taken money, “we would of course disclose it to the newspaper clients. If enough clients still wanted to run the column, we might not drop it.”

John Twohey, vice president for editorial and operations at Tribune Media Services (TMS), said: “Certainly accepting money from an entity you cover crosses a line. I can imagine exceptions, like going on the lecture circuit. But if columnists accept speaking fees from an organization they end up writing about, they would need to disclose that in the column.”

TMS was the syndicate that dropped Armstrong Williams a year ago after it was revealed that the broadcaster/columnist was taking money to promote the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative. At around the same time, Maggie Gallagher of Universal Press Syndicate and self-syndicated columnist Michael McManus were also accused of accepting government money.

Would syndicates reduce the chance of payola scandals if they signed more Op-Ed columnists who have journalism backgrounds rather than, say, think-tank backgrounds?

“We prefer columnists with journalism backgrounds,” said Newcombe. “On the other hand, there’s no guarantee a journalist won’t plagiarize or do something else.”

Newcombe added that Creators has some columnists who are economists and/or from academia. These commentators don’t have journalism backgrounds, he said, but they have “brilliant minds” and deserve syndication.

With paid pundits Fumento and Copley News Service’s Doug Bandow recently being dropped (after Business Week Online revealed they had accepted money), will syndicates contact their columnists to remind them about staying on the up-and-up?

King Features Syndicate Managing Editor Glenn Mott said it’s possible the issue might come up “informally” when he talks to King columnists, but he has no plans to send out formal reminders.

At least one syndicate — TMS — sent out ethical reminders a year ago after the Armstrong Williams scandal. Twohey told E&P he doesn’t see a need to do that again at this point. “Our creators know what our expectations are,” he said.

Syndicate executives also noted that they already have ethical guidelines in place, and that they check columnists as much as they can before signing them.

“We do a thorough review before we take anybody on,” said Mott. “I trust the people we have.” He did add that King has it easier than some distributors in reviewing Op-Ed columnists because it syndicates a relatively small number of them (fewer than 10).

“I do a fair amount of screening before we sign a columnist,” said Newcombe, while observing that “any syndicate can get burned” no matter what it does.

Editor/General Manager Peter Copeland of SHNS declined to comment when reached by phone Friday. He did e-mail E&P Online a statement that read:

“Scripps Howard News Service requires writers to disclose any conflict of interest or even an appearance of a conflict in the stories and columns we offer to hundreds of newspapers.

“For three years, we have distributed columns by Michael Fumento, a fellow at the Hudson Institute. On Jan. 5, he wrote about biotechnology and the role of Monsanto. He did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto. The Hudson Institute said the grant was used to support Fumento’s work on a book he authored about biotechnology.

“Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers.

“We learned of the grant from Fumento after he responded to questions from Business Week. We immediately suspended his column, investigated and severed our relationship with Fumento. His Jan. 5 column was the last to move on SHNS.”

Dave Astor (dastor@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

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Business Week did the investigate spadework which unearthed the conflict, and their story shows that it did not and still does not trouble Fumento:

Fumento insists that disclosure of financial transactions between op-ed columnists and the companies they cover wouldn’t be practical. The op-ed money trail is only now getting attention, he argues in an e-mail, because of BusinessWeek Online’s recent revelation that Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff had paid two columnists for years to deliver good press to his clients (see BW Online, 12/16/05, “Op-Eds for Sale”).
“We’re in a witch-hunting frenzy now but, as after all witch hunts, people do return to their senses and regret the piles of ashes at their feet,” Fumento writes. “Often it happened fast enough the witch hunters found themselves tied to the stake. I do hope that happens here.”
Fumento also points out that he criticized Monsanto publicly in a 1999 Forbes magazine column, calling the company “chicken-hearted” for caving in to pressure from environmentalists to terminate a seed program. “I acted completely ethically, and within a month or two nobody will doubt that,” Fumento says.
While Fumento doesn’t think he should have disclosed the payments to his readers, Hudson’s CEO Kenneth R. Weinstein is less sure. Asked if the scholar should have disclosed his financial relationship with Monsanto, Weinstein pauses and says, “that’s a good question, period.”

The Business Week article, A Columnist Backed by Monsanto, appeared on Friday (Jan 13). Fumento is saying he is the victim of a witch-hunting frenzy because of the other revelations along these lines in December:

Fumento insists that disclosure of financial transactions between op-ed columnists and the companies they cover wouldn’t be practical. The op-ed money trail is only now getting attention, he argues in an e-mail, because of BusinessWeek Online’s recent revelation that Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff had paid two columnists for years to deliver good press to his clients (see BW Online, 12/16/05, “Op-Eds for Sale”).

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Business Week

JANUARY 13, 2006

NEWS ANALYSIS

Eamon Javers

A Columnist Backed by Monsanto

Michael Fumento’s failure to disclose payments to him in 1999 from the agribusiness giant has now caused Scripps Howard to sever its ties to him

Scripps Howard News Service announced Jan. 13 that it’s severing its business relationship with columnist Michael Fumento, who’s also a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. The move comes after inquiries from BusinessWeek Online about payments Fumento received from agribusiness giant Monsanto (MON ) — a frequent subject of praise in Fumento’s opinion columns and a book.

In a statement released on Jan. 13, Scripps Howard News Service Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland said Fumento “did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson received a $60,000 grant from Monsanto.” Copeland added: “Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers.” In the Jan. 5 column, Fumento wrote that St. Louis-based Monsanto has about 30 products in the pipeline that will aid farmers, “but also help us all by keeping prices down and allowing more crops to be grown on less land.”

He listed some of the products Monsanto has on tap: drought-resistant corn, crops that could reduce the need for environment-damaging fertilizers, and soybeans that might reduce heart disease.

“YOU SHOULD CONTRIBUTE.” In his career at Hudson, Fumento has carved out a specialty debunking critics of the agribusiness and biotechnology industries. In 1999, he says, he solicited $60,000 from Monsanto to write a book on the business. The book, entitled BioEvolution was published in 2003. A spokesman for Monsanto confirmed the payments to the Hudson Institute.

Asked about the payments, Fumento says, “I’m just extremely pro-biotech.” He says he solicited several agribusiness companies to finance his book, which was published by Encounter Books. “I went after everybody, I’ve got to be honest,” Fumento says of his fund-raising effort. “I told them that if I tell the truth in this book, the biotech industry is going to look really good, and you should contribute.”

The Monsanto grant, he says, flowed from the company to the Hudson Institute to support his work. A portion went to overhead and “most of it” went into his salary. He says the money was simply folded into his salary for that year, and therefore represented no windfall to him personally.

“STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS.” The book’s acknowledgements cite support from The Donner Foundation and “others who wish to remain anonymous.” Fumento didn’t disclose the payment from Monsanto either in the book or in at least eight columns he has written mentioning Monsanto since 1999. He explained in his recent column that he focused exclusively on Monsanto due to a “lack of space and because their annual report was plopped onto my lap while I was hunting for a column idea.”

The author says he sees no conflict of interest in his recent columns because the grant came several years ago. “If you’re thinking quid pro quo,” he says, “I think there’s a statute of limitations on that.”

BioEvolution argues that advances in biotechnology are overwhelmingly positive for humanity, and it quotes Monsanto scientists, along with those from other companies, at length. In one section, Fumento writes that Monsanto allowed outside researchers to use plant patents it had developed without a licensing fee, to help alleviate suffering in the Third World. “Has this all been good PR for Monsanto?” Fumento asks in the book. “Yes it has, as headlines have made clear. But a good deed is a good deed.”

ONGOING RELATIONSHIP. Monsanto spokesman Chris Horner acknowledges two 1999 payments to Hudson of $30,000 each, but he says the company’s records don’t indicate whether the payments were expressly for the book, as Fumento says. “It’s our practice, that if we’re dealing with an organization like this, that any funds we’re giving should be unrestricted,” Horner says.

He adds that Monsanto maintains an ongoing financial relationship with Hudson, but explains that the company did not pay for the recent Fumento op-ed or any others he has written. “He received a press release from us, as did lots of others in his profession, and he chose to write about it on the basis of that,” Horner says.

New York-based Encounter Books says it doesn’t have an immediate response to queries about the book’s funding.

“WITCH-HUNTING FRENZY.” Fumento insists that disclosure of financial transactions between op-ed columnists and the companies they cover wouldn’t be practical. The op-ed money trail is only now getting attention, he argues in an e-mail, because of BusinessWeek Online’s recent revelation that Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff had paid two columnists for years to deliver good press to his clients (see BW Online, 12/16/05, “Op-Eds for Sale”).

“We’re in a witch-hunting frenzy now but, as after all witch hunts, people do return to their senses and regret the piles of ashes at their feet,” Fumento writes. “Often it happened fast enough the witch hunters found themselves tied to the stake. I do hope that happens here.”

Fumento also points out that he criticized Monsanto publicly in a 1999 Forbes magazine column, calling the company “chicken-hearted” for caving in to pressure from environmentalists to terminate a seed program. “I acted completely ethically, and within a month or two nobody will doubt that,” Fumento says.

While Fumento doesn’t think he should have disclosed the payments to his readers, Hudson’s CEO Kenneth R. Weinstein is less sure. Asked if the scholar should have disclosed his financial relationship with Monsanto, Weinstein pauses and says, “that’s a good question, period.”

Javers is BusinessWeek’s Capitol Hill correspondent

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Some people on Duesberg’s side of the HIV?AIDS issue are delighted that Fumento has suffered a bad tumble, even though they appreciate his achievement with his The Myth of Heterosxual AIDS, which was widely scorned at the time but has proven to be exactly right – right, that is, on his theme that heterosexual AIDS was never going to happen, but wrong about HIV causing AIDS, according to the scientific literature which Fumento cannot credit, for some reason, and which excites him to strange and rather unpleasant fulminations against Peter Duesberg.

In one email he sent last year which has made the rounds and horrified many observers with its inaccurate and oddly vindictive hostility toward Duesberg, Fumento expressed himself as follows:

I sure hate being cited in the same piece as Duesberg. He truly is the crackpot people claim. He didn’t invent the theory that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; his claim to fame is adopting it after every other scientist abandoned it in light of the obvious. His cancer work is also junk. I was actually an evaluator of a grant proposal of his on the subject. He quite plainly lied throughout it. And finally as to this Nobel stuff, that’s what his apostles say ? and have been saying for the better part of two decades. Even if he were right on both AIDS and cancer, the fact that the medical establishment believes he’s utterly cracked would preclude him from ever being considered.
Best,
Mike Fumento

In case anyone is influenced by this, we can note that it is almost entirely misleading as well as uncalled for.

Duesberg, a member of the National Academy of Science, is no crackpot, as his many impeccably argued and finely phrased papers attest. None of his papers have ever been questioned on the grounds of quality or fact, or hidden interest, and indeed Walter Gilbert, the Nobelist who discovered how to efficiently sequence DNA, used Duesberg’s work to show his graduate students at Harvard how paradigms might be expertly challenged.

Duesberg never claimed to have invented the theory that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, one reason being that it really isn’t a theory so much as the review and rejection of a theory of HIV as the “virus that causes AIDS” which has no basis that Duesberg could discover in scientific reason or evidence, either epidemiological or in the lab.

As to Duesberg’s cancer theory being junk. as we have noted in previous posts his approach (aneuploidy) has won the respect and interest of senior researchers at major institutions around the world, some of whom attended his conference at the beginning of 2004 on the topic, and this respect has been evidenced in Scientific American coverage of the field (for these references it is enough to go to the Peter Duesberg site, where you can also see the quality of his papers, which even the most belligerent Fumento fan is going to have a hard time characterizing as “crackpot”).

That Fumento was asked, among other people, to advise a foundation as to whether they should support Peter Duesberg in his research is true. But the idea that Duesberg would lie in describing his research is preposterous – no one has ever publicly accused Duesberg of improper behavior or research in any respect in his entire career, we are certain, and there is certainly no record of that anywhere. One suspects that this behind-the-back calumny says more about Fumento than about Duesberg.

His final thought is of course prima facie nonsense. If Duesberg was accepted as right on both AIDS and cancer the medical establishment would back his Nobel to the hilt, since one could hardly imagine a greater contribution to human welfare, which is what Nobels are all about. That Fumento’s sources in medicine tell him that Duesberg is “cracked” only suggests that his sources are people who have never met Duesberg or read his work and are probably no guide to reality on any level.

Like the entire message, the last thought raises the question as to what sources Fumento uses in his odd hostility to Duesberg and his contradiction of HIV=AIDS ideology. Whoever they are, it seems clear that they have beguiled him into a view which only suggests he is motivated by political and emotional factors, some of which may be private, not his usual productive public skepticism.

This is a pity, since Fumento does quite well when he is critiquing alarms, as he did for example in downplaying the mega-scare over bird flu in this piece, Bird flu: Much ado about nothing. However, it is clear that like virtually every other pundit commenting on science from a media or think tank perch, he is generally incapable or unwilling to read the scientific literature, which gives the simple answer to bird flu that we have so often noted in previous posts (see Bird flu flap continues needlessly. The antidote is Vitamin A, it’s clear):

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Bird flu: Much ado about nothing

By MICHAEL FUMENTO

Jan 1, 2006, 00:59

Feathers are flying anew over so-called “bird flu.” Researchers have reported that four Vietnamese patients suffering from it and treated with an antiviral drug have died. Perhaps two received it too late, but the others had resistance to the medicine. The drug? Roche’s Tamiflu, which the media have anointed with almost mythical properties.

But if this has you running around like an infected chicken with its head cut off, stop it. You’re scaring the eggs.

The first reason not to panic over Tamiflu is that there’s no reason to panic over a pandemic.

It’s true that avian influenza type H5N1 is constantly mutating. But the best-kept secret of the flu fright-fest is that it’s been doing so since at least 1959 when it was identified in Scottish chickens. Despite unsupported claims from the World Health Organization that it will almost inevitably become transmissible from human-to-human, if it hasn’t yet it probably never will. If it did, it wouldn’t let media hysteria dictate its appearance and therefore be upon us before effective vaccines become widely available.

As to that resistance, this almost always means simply that more of the drug must be administered than was previously required. Health officials say that applies here. Granted, since there’s already a shortfall of Tamiflu, it’s bad if we’ll need even more. But that’s a lot better than finding that Tamiflu’s only purpose now would be as landfill to build New Orleans back up above sea level.

Further, so far at least, Tamiflu-resistant H5N1 appears to be limited to part of Vietnam. Tamiflu may be fully effective everywhere else, although this serves as a sharp warning of what’s possible.

Now smooth those feathers a bit more: Tamiflu isn’t the only antiviral game in town.

GlaxoSmithKline’s drug Relenza also appears effective in reducing avian flu symptoms and death after exposure to the virus. Its seeming weakness proves to be its strength here. While Tamiflu is easily taken either as a pill or an oral suspension, Relenza is inhaled. Because that’s bothersome a lot fewer people have been using Relenza, thereby giving H5N1 less chance to develop resistance to it.

Indeed, there are no identified cases of Relenza-resistant avian flu.

Yet another drug has, in some animal trials, proved equal to both Tamiflu and Relenza. Called peramivir, in pill form it proved safe in all phases of human clinical trials. But it wasn’t effective enough. Inventor BioCryst Pharmaceuticals wanted to test it as an injection, but its partner with the money bags pulled out.

Of course, that was before pandemic panic. Suddenly peramivir was back big time, and on Dec. 22 the FDA granted verbal approval to begin human injection tests. BioCryst claims peramivir would be far easier and cheaper to produce than Tamiflu and that, with an emergency FDA waiver, it could start producing 10 million treatments a month.

Like Relenza, injected peramivir would have the counter-intuitive advantage of being relatively difficult to administer.

Drug resistance such as we’re seeing here occurs when bacteria or viruses in the body are exposed to the drug in absence of disease. The Vietnamese who died were almost certainly taking Tamiflu as a preventative, rather than waiting for symptoms. Pill availability encouraged them; a needle probably would have stopped them.

As I warned in a recent article, “Prophylactic panic-popping of Tamiflu like Chiclets, as happened with the antibiotic Cipro during the U.S. anthrax scare, could encourage viral resistance to the drugs. By the time we would need them, they might not do any good. This is but one price tab for avian flu hysteria.”

Yet even as you read this, based on Roche’s sales reports, many Americans are doing just this. As such, they’re not only abandoning a defense against the very avian flu they fear so much, they would also be denying it to others by spreading a resistant strain.

They could also be making themselves and others Tamiflu-resistant to the seasonal flu, which kills an estimated 36,000 Americans annually.

So put the pills down on the ground and then slowly step back with your hands in the air. Or just put the pills down. Panic kills; don’t be a victim.

(Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail fumento(at)pobox.com.)

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Perhaps it is just in the nature of things that those who make a living from criticism are often curmudgeonly in person, but Fumento does seem to be an extreme case. A blogger who clashed with him was served a put down recently which has boomeranged on Fumento rather quickly, to the great satisfaction of the blogger, Deltoid (Tim Lambert) on Scienceblogs:

When I criticised Michael Fumento’s innumerate writing about the Lancet study he responded with this:
You can blog all you want, but my next column is also on this. It goes out to over 350 newspapers
Not any more:
Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced Friday that it severed its relationship with Michael Fumento — a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute — for not disclosing he had taken payments in 1999 from agribusiness giant Monsanto. The payments were revealed by BusinessWeek Online.

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January 14, 2006 09:26 PM Sat eve !

DELTOID Tim Lamberts blog

Profile

Tim Lambert Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.

Retrain the brain – CBS tip for Dr Fauci

January 15th, 2006

Reading the scientific literature might be helpful

This morning CBS News Sunday Morning reminds us that scientists are proving that training the brain with exercise is a more effective treatment for stroke, Alzheimers and similar problems, than drugs or surgery.

What was striking about the imaging was the astonishingly rapid improvement over a matter of four months – the brain at first as smooth as an apple, then crinkly as a dried apricot.

Perhaps we misunderstood through inattention, but the story was clear in its import: the brain is quickly responsive to exercise at any age, growing a whole new structure almost as easily as it did in the womb.

This is a lesson that might be taken to heart by Dr Anthony Fauci and other scientific leaders who apparently are loathe to read the scientific review literature on HIV as the cause of AIDS.

Sadly we realise that this recommendation comes at an inopportune time for Dr Fauci and his colleagues at the NIAID who are probably currently preoccupied with keeping their rear ends out of the way of the meat grinder that Congress may yet roll through the corridors of power that the good Dr Fauci walks, when he is not appearing on Charlie Rose mouthing trite homilies about the need to combat bird flu with billions when if he had bothered to read any of the scientific literature on the topic he would have seen that this dire threat is easily deflected by running to the local drug store and popping a few Vitamin A pills (see earlier posts).

Of course, given this oversight we are now led to assume that the only reason Dr Fauci MD may have had for ignoring the scientific literature for over twenty years in the case of HIV?AIDS may be that he cannot understand it without using his index finger to trace the text while he moves his lips to the difficult words, and not that he has any deeper and darker reasons for avoiding it. Certainly not any understandable preoccupation he may have had with his personal and bureaucratic ambitions which have been so gratifyingly realized.

We are moved to this supposition by contemplating the way the cohort of Dr Fauci and other scientific leaders at the NIH and elsewhere treated Dr Peter Duesberg so shabbily for two decades for writing the reviews of HIV?AIDS which rejected the idea of HIV as “the virus that causes AIDS” as stupid.

All they had to do was be nice to Duesberg and give him plenty of research funds for his highly promising cancer research (which was privately funded in the end and has apparently brought us much closer to a solution to that dread killer) and his objections to HIV as “the cause of AIDS”: would have quietly floated downstream just as they so fervently wished. Instead they aroused the fighting spirit of any idealist anywhere who supported free speech in science and smelled a very large rat when they looked into the way Duesberg’s career was blighted by his once so friendly colleagues.

Apart from the stupidity issue however we respectfully grant the NIAID chief the benefit of the doubt as far as his motivations go and salute his efforts to solve the great health problems of the world as his chief priority in life, including the immense HIV?AIDS pandemic which is supposedly sweeping the world, at least in the fevered brains of Ms Laurie Garrett of the Council of Foreign Relation, Jeffrey Sachs, Dr Fauci and other leading advisers of where, in matters of global health, to spend our national and international resources.

That is to say, now on combating bird flu rather than “deadly scourges like tetanus, rabies, swine fever and poultry cholera” in the words of Keith Bradsher in the Times yesterday (Sat Jan 14), reporting from Laos, which hasn’t seen any bird flu at all so far but has been forced to spend its limited resources on making sure of this for the past two years.

As Keith remarks in Laos, Apparently Without Bird Flu, Is Still Pressed by the West to Join Global Fight.

Not one human case of bird flu was ever confirmed in Laos, and thousands of chickens have been tested in recent months without finding the slightest trace of the disease.
Despite the seeming disappearance of bird flu here, it has consumed most of the time and attention of Laos’s best doctors and veterinarians for the past two years.
Pressed by United Nations agencies, the United States, the European Union and other big donors, top officials at the health and agriculture ministries have set aside previous priorities – deadly scourges like tetanus, rabies, swine fever and poultry cholera – to focus on a disease that could someday set off a global epidemic but poses less of an immediate threat here.
As the global effort to combat bird flu has increased, Laos and other poor countries have become the front lines, expected to manage extensive programs to battle bird flu despite struggling to marshal enough doctors and veterinarians against diseases even in the best of times.
Next week, those pressures will reach a new level when health ministers, leaders of United Nations agencies and top officials from the World Bank and other lending institutions gather in Beijing to raise as much as $1.5 billion to fight bird flu.

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The New York Times

Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

January 15, 2006

Laos, Apparently Without Bird Flu, Is Still Pressed by the West to Join Global Fight

By KEITH BRADSHER

VIENTIANE, Laos, Jan. 14 – Khamla Sengdavong, the manager of a state-owned farm here, still remembers his horror and dismay when bird flu suddenly killed a quarter of the farm’s 2,000 chickens in five days in January 2004.

“They bled from the nose and the backs of their heads turned purple and then black, and then they died,” he said, gesturing with his hands.

But bird flu seems to have disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared in Laos, and Mr. Khamla and others in this impoverished Communist country on China’s southern border have restocked their coops.

Not one human case of bird flu was ever confirmed in Laos, and thousands of chickens have been tested in recent months without finding the slightest trace of the disease.

Despite the seeming disappearance of bird flu here, it has consumed most of the time and attention of Laos’s best doctors and veterinarians for the past two years.

Pressed by United Nations agencies, the United States, the European Union and other big donors, top officials at the health and agriculture ministries have set aside previous priorities – deadly scourges like tetanus, rabies, swine fever and poultry cholera – to focus on a disease that could someday set off a global epidemic but poses less of an immediate threat here.

As the global effort to combat bird flu has increased, Laos and other poor countries have become the front lines, expected to manage extensive programs to battle bird flu despite struggling to marshal enough doctors and veterinarians against diseases even in the best of times.

Next week, those pressures will reach a new level when health ministers, leaders of United Nations agencies and top officials from the World Bank and other lending institutions gather in Beijing to raise as much as $1.5 billion to fight bird flu.

Almost nobody questions that a global campaign is needed to stop the disease: if the bird flu virus, A(H5N1), evolves to be able to pass easily from person to person in the next few years, it could kill enormous numbers of people. But health experts are starting to raise questions about the trade-offs involved in such a huge effort.

The danger, even some managers of bird flu programs are starting to say, is that donors focus so intently on a single disease that they unintentionally disrupt many other health programs. “We could overlook that people could quite literally be dying because of this,” said Finn Reske-Nielsen, the top United Nations official in Laos.

In separate interviews, Mr. Reske-Nielsen and two of Laos’s top disease fighters – Dr. Phengta Vongphrachanh, the country’s foremost epidemiologist; and Dr. Somphanh Chanphengxay, the director of veterinary planning – said continued routine testing had not yet shown a resurgence here of other diseases despite the preoccupation with bird flu. But they and other officials in Laos and at aid agencies elsewhere said participants in the Beijing conference would face a series of hard choices.

Among the first of those trade-offs will be between short-term programs, useful mostly for fighting bird flu, and longer-term programs that may carry broader health benefits but do less to stamp out bird flu this winter or next winter.

The Asian Development Bank, a Manila-based multilateral lending institution like the World Bank, is one of the first organizations to start worrying about the bird flu trade-offs, partly because it has already had to make a hard choice.

Indu Bhushan, the leader of the bank’s bird flu task force, said that after approving a $40 million preventive health program in Vietnam last year, the bank decided this winter to turn the effort into a bird flu project instead, saving time over having to design a program from scratch.

The redesigned project will still address other communicable diseases, like dengue fever, because it may improve detection. But it will no longer cover noncommunicable diseases like hypertension and diabetes, Mr. Bhushan said.

He noted that the Asian Development Bank was also preparing $68 million in new grants for bird flu that do not involve taking money from other programs. But he said it would be important at the Beijing conference that donors not redirect large sums previously approved for other programs.

“While emergency response is great, let’s not get carried away here,” he said.

The emerging debate over spending on bird flu closely parallels the debate in the 1990’s over whether donor nations were paying so much attention to AIDS in the developing world that they were neglecting diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. That debate has helped lead to increased aid for research into tropical diseases, mostly from rich countries and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Following that example, it is possible that bird flu may yet prompt broader and more strings-free aid to poor countries in areas like veterinary care. But for now, much of the money being offered to poor countries to fight bird flu involves loans, not grants.

And health officials in poor countries are leery of borrowing heavily; no country has yet tapped the Asian Development Bank’s $300 million in loans available for bird flu programs.

Laos is one of the world’s poorest countries, rivaling Chad in Central Africa in having one of the world’s highest maternal death rates – problems related to pregnancy kill one mother for every 2,000 births, mainly in childbirth.

With the government able to spend less than $2 per person annually for health care, officials have been reluctant to take on debt.

“We try our best to utilize the grants first, and we reserve the loans for emergency response,” Dr. Phengta said.

That emergency response has not been needed.

Unlike in neighboring Vietnam, Thailand and China, where live poultry is often transported large distances to markets, sometimes on bicycles, most chickens and ducks in sparsely populated Laos are raised in backyards and eaten by their owners. That limits the spread of the disease, Dr. Somphanh said.

Turkey has captured international attention with 18 human cases, three of them fatal, in the past two weeks.

But Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization’s regional director for the Western Pacific, noted Thursday that Asia remains the center of the disease because contact between infected birds and humans is greatest in this region.

Laotian government officials reported to the W.H.O. within hours on a weekend last September the country’s only suspected human case of bird flu so far. A lab in Japan determined it was a false alarm.

The quick notification was one of several signs that Laos does not appear to be concealing any bird flu cases, although it may be hard at times even for the government to determine what is happening in the one-third of Laotian villages that lie a day’s walk or more from the nearest road of any sort, said Dr. Dean A. Shuey, the top World Health Organization official in Laos.

Dr. Shuey’s aunt and grandmother died in the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918, which scientists now attribute to another avian influenza virus. Despite that family history, Dr. Shuey of Nebraska says he worries that too much emphasis now on bird flu may create problems for Laos’s health system.

“The intense donor meetings, the number of conferences, the travel is taking a lot of time for people who have other things to do,” he said.

The United States, Japan and the European Union have donated advanced virus freezers and other high-tech gear to help Laotians gather any viral samples and ship them to labs in rich countries as fast as possible, where they can be analyzed for the possible creation of a vaccine.

But with flu vaccine production capacity short in industrialized countries, no one expects Laos, with no vaccine factories, to receive more than a few doses of any vaccine.

American aid has included hundreds of sets of masks, goggles and full-body suits that would be sweltering in the tropical climate here and that have limited use except for slaughtering sick birds.

Dr. Phengta called for general-purpose protective equipment. Health workers in Laos now receive only one gown and one surgical mask each year.

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Meanwhile it is worth noting that the CBS report contained the thought that this retraining the brain approach is novel because it doesn’t involve drugs or surgery, which tend to be the only two approaches that occur to established medicine for any ailment.

They refer to two places where the retraining is carried out which have a good reputation, Taubtherapy and Positscience

Posted by scienceguardian | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Altamura, City of Bread, defeats McDonald’s, but Italy succumbs

January 14th, 2006

So what is the rate of diabetes there?

A small defeat for McDonald’s three years ago in Italy – see The Bread Is Famously Good, but It Killed McDonald’s – might hearten those who fear that the company is taking over the world, but then we learn from this Times article from Thursday (Jan 12) that there are still 340 outlets in Italy and the burger barbarians plan many more.

“The long red mat was taken away secretly during the night,” it reported, noting too that the “enormous M” over Piazza Zanardelli was “also packed up surreptitiously.” The windows were covered “like a shroud on the victim of a culinary battlefield.”
“Today,” the newspaper (LibÃƒÂ©ration) said, “there are no longer Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets or industrial fries in Altamura….
McDonald’s began fighting back, offering school trips to visit the kitchens, free rentals of the restaurant for children’s birthday parties, coupons for children and a television for customers to watch soccer. Nothing seemed to work.
“They’d watch the game, and as soon as it was over go out and get focaccia,” Mr. Pepe said….
“In no way is this a defeat for McDonald’s,” contended Mario Resca, president of McDonald’s in Italy, saying he hoped to double the number of McDonald’s here from the current 340. “If anything, I am proud that the local culture is appreciating its local cuisine because this means that McDonald’s has stimulated a healthy competition.”

This sad failure of Italians outside this enlightened town to know which side their focaccia is baked reminds us of the report many years ago in the Wall Street Journal. The children of NASA astronauts in Florida proved to prefer Tang over fresh orange juice.

The taste of food is governed by context and culture, it seems clear, not the tongue or brain. The chances of America rejecting McDonald’s in the same way as Altamura seem slim for now. In taste the brain process is probably governed by the mental framing of the left hemisphere. Gauloises and cheap wine taste a thousand times better in Paris, for example. In such a romantic context, they just have to.

In Naples, which invented espresso and also pizza, both things taste divine compared to the same offerings in Manhattan. Restaurants in Little Italy import clay ovens from Sicily, and huge espresso machines, but there is no comparison when it comes to the result.

Manhattan espresso is nothing compared to a powerful shot of tasty Italian espresso, and the pizza here is thick and crude junk food compared with the slim and delicate pizza of Southern Italy, where one can appropriately fit it into a night at the opera.

Or is it all an illusion? What would the same Italian pizza and espresso taste like if transported to Manhattan? No worse in Little Italy than real Italy? Probably worse, if the principle of dominant context holds.

But by the same logic, if it is all context, why doesn’t the Manhattan espresso taste just as good in Starbucks as the Italian espresso does in Rome, since the context is right in each case?

These are important questions which neuroscience will no doubt answer in future decades. Meanwhile, one wonders why the “but” in the headline? Shouldn’t it read “The Bread Is Famously Good, and It Killed McDonald’s” Or is the Times headline writer a habitue of McDonald’s? If so, surely he/she is out of place in such a culturally important institution, with its prominent role as a guide to Manhattan restaurants.

And, enquiring minds may also want to know, what is the rate of diabetes in Italy? Was there even an Italian word for diabetes before McDonald’s arrived?

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he New York Times

January 12, 2006

Altamura Journal

The Bread Is Famously Good, but It Killed McDonald’s

By IAN FISHER

ALTAMURA, Italy, Jan. 10 – First, an inconvenient truth: This is not a new story. But somehow the tale of how the city with the best bread in Italy forced its McDonald’s out of business never really got told, and is spilling out now.

All the elements of a McDonald’s morality play remain relevant today: perceived corporate arrogance; traditional food triumphing over food product; a David in the form of a humble and graying baker against an expansionist American Goliath.

And, inevitably, it includes the French.

It was the leftist and Amero-skeptic French newspaper LibÃƒÂ©ration that last week wrote the fullest account of what happened in Altamura, in southern Italy, where the road signs rightly welcome visitors to “The City of Bread.”

“The long red mat was taken away secretly during the night,” it reported, noting too that the “enormous M” over Piazza Zanardelli was “also packed up surreptitiously.” The windows were covered “like a shroud on the victim of a culinary battlefield.”

“Today,” the newspaper said, “there are no longer Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets or industrial fries in Altamura.”

What LibÃƒÂ©ration neglected to say, as have most of the other articles in an irresistible landslide of coverage in print and on the Web, is that the McDonald’s closed in December 2002. The paper spoke vaguely of events a “number” of months ago.

But no matter. The protagonists here in Altamura as well as many others are thrilled with the belated attention, and the distinction as the city whose food was so good that it closed down a McDonald’s without really trying.

“What took place was a small war between us and McDonald’s,” said Onofrio Pepe, a retired journalist who founded an association here devoted to local delicacies. “Our bullets were focaccia. And sausage. And bread. It was a peaceful war, without any spilling of blood.”

Mr. Pepe and several like-minded citizens of Altamura, a city of 65,000 residents, made up one wing of the army. They say they fought largely for pride and for their food, which includes a local mushroom called the cardoncello, focaccia, mozzarella and, most of all, a coarse-grain bread famous for millennia around Italy. The bread is protected as unique in European Union regulations, which note that Horace called it, in 37 B.C., “far the best bread to be had, so good that the wise traveler takes a supply of it for his onward journey.”

When the McDonald’s first opened in early 2001, Mr. Pepe said, he was not opposed to it, and even welcomed the 25 or so jobs it created. “In the beginning,” he said, “it seemed like modernization.”

Then the modern seemed to take over: McDonald’s erected the huge arches on a pole near the old town center, jarringly near the 13th century cathedral, beaming yellow neon 24 hours a day (and disturbing, Mr. Pepe said, little falcons that nested in nearby trees).

“It gave the sense of a city being occupied,” he said. “It was considered a sort of challenge. Not a challenge to confront in anger but with a smile. They brought in their products, and we had ours.”

So his group held low-key protests to highlight local food, as another front on the war opened, very much unplanned.

A fourth-generation baker, Luca Digesu, now 35, opened Antica Casa Digesu, a small bakery right next to the McDonald’s. He said he had had no intention of challenging it, but had merely hoped to shake free some customers attracted to the spot by the novelty.

“I was afraid of McDonald’s,” he said in his bakery on Tuesday. “I was afraid we would be completely glossed over. I was afraid no one would even notice us.”

For a while, McDonald’s drew in the customers of Altamura. “In the beginning,” Mr. Digesu said, “McDonald’s was McDonald’s.”

But soon there was a migration of locals who preferred their own version of fast food: hunks of thick focaccia like the dozen that Mr. Digesu was tending in the oven as he spoke. Part of the reason seemed economic: Mr. Digesu said a big slice of focaccia cost the same as a single McDonald’s hamburger. It was also, clearly, preference.

McDonald’s began fighting back, offering school trips to visit the kitchens, free rentals of the restaurant for children’s birthday parties, coupons for children and a television for customers to watch soccer. Nothing seemed to work.

“They’d watch the game, and as soon as it was over go out and get focaccia,” Mr. Pepe said.

Finally, in December 2002, after less than two years in operation, the McDonald’s closed shop, according to the company, for lack of profitability. The huge space is now divided up into a jeans store and a bank. Mr. Digesu smiled broadly when asked how he felt that the Italian news media, which missed the story three years ago, are now hailing him as a modern-day David.

“I like it,” he said. “McDonald’s is big. I am small. Right now it is 1-0.”

The company sees it differently, of course. “In no way is this a defeat for McDonald’s,” contended Mario Resca, president of McDonald’s in Italy, saying he hoped to double the number of McDonald’s here from the current 340. “If anything, I am proud that the local culture is appreciating its local cuisine because this means that McDonald’s has stimulated a healthy competition.”

In the end, it seems there may simply be places in the world where McDonald’s is out of its depth on every front.

The landlord both for McDonald’s and Mr. Digesu happened to be Mr. Digesu’s brother-in-law. The brother-in-law gave Mr. Digesu a good deal on the rent. He did not do so for McDonald’s.

Then there is the local food – cheap and overwhelmingly good – and the people who have eaten it for centuries and consider it as much their tradition as their history. Odd as it might seem in a corporate boardroom, they put no value on a McDonald’s in Altamura.

“The majority couldn’t imagine McDonald’s becoming an integral part of their lives,” said Patrick Girondi, 48, an entrepreneur from Chicago who has lived here for 15 years. “McDonald’s didn’t get beat by a baker. McDonald’s got beat by a culture.”

Peter Kiefer contributed reportingfor this article.

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Five million buy a book saying AIDS is great deception

January 14th, 2006

But the source is banned huckster

Yes, before the AIDS dissidents get too excited, the author is Kevin Trudeau, the unstoppable infomercial salesman who is banned from selling any product on TV after being ordered to pay back $2 million for misleading the public about his cures.

However a book is not a product according to the rule, so he now has the best selling book on the Times advice list which five million people have bought so far ie a mega seller. It is “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About,”

Trudeau was getting hammered on ABC Nightline tonight (Fri 13 Jan), but he opened his wide blue eyes and asked, “What fine?” “What finding of wrongdoing?” He then said that he was thinking of running for president, Senate or Congress.

What was interesting from the point of view of those following the uphill battle to open up the closed debate on whether HIV is truly “the virus that causes AIDS” was that he evidently mentions Duesberg and says in his book that AIDS is a tissue of lies and is caused by drugs.

Sadly this is not the kind of support that is likely to do Peter Duesberg any good. But that unfortunate Berkeley scientist must be used by now to troublesome supporters.

How much valid information is in Trudeau’s book is obviously questionable since he has no research qualifications in medicine or science of any kind, and has little regard for the truth. But it seems to us that his book’s rocketing success is not just the result of his huge performance as a TV huckster.

There is a hunger out there for some alternative treatment to drugs and surgery for cancer and other ailments, and the word “natural” is magical.

But it is a great irony that the best scientific review literature would agree with him about HIV?AIDS.

His Nightline appearance:

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ABC News

January 13, 2006 | Get Your Local News and Weather

Is Infomercial King a Helper or Huckster?

Kevin Trudeau Courts Controversy Along With Great Success

kevin trudeau

Kevin Trudeau has a successful — but controversial — infomercial empire. (ABC News)

By JAKE TAPPER

Jan. 13, 2006 Ã¢Â€Â” Kevin Trudeau is handsome, charming and a financial success.

A few weeks ago in Chicago, at the multimillion-dollar pool tournament he has personally founded and financed, Trudeau bounded through his legions of fans and supporters like Sinatra at the Sands.

With a best-selling book, “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About,” as well as the No. 1 ranked infomercial to promote the book, Trudeau says he has a following of millions.

Without question, he has a familiar face. If you’ve watched late night TV, you know Trudeau. “Since 1989, I’ve been on TV, talking about the products that I’ve authored Ã¢Â€Â” like Mega Memory, Mega Speed Reading and Mega Math,” Trudeau says. In infomercial after infomercial, he’s pitched products that he promised will improve Ã¢Â€Â” if not save Ã¢Â€Â” your life.

But at least some of those claims went a little too far for the U.S. government. In 2004, Trudeau became the only person ever banned from selling a product on television. The Federal Trade Commission said that Trudeau falsely claimed that a coral calcium product could cure cancer and other serious diseases and that a product called Biotape could cure or relieve severe pain.

“This ban is meant to shut down an infomercial empire that has misled American consumers for years,” said Lydia Parnes from the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Other habitual false advertisers should take a lesson: mend your ways or face serious consequences.” Read the FTC release at www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/09/trudeaucoral.htm.

Still Selling

Trudeau is permitted to sell his book since, under the First Amendment, it does not qualify as a “product.” As part of his agreement with the FTC, he paid $2 million in “consumer redress.”

But here’s how Trudeau presents his interaction with the FTC:

“There’s been no finding of any wrongdoing,” he says. “They filed charges against me, for alleged misconduct, and they had to drop all the charges.”

It was pointed out to him that a settlement is different from dropping the charges.

“How is it different?” he asked.

Dropping charges involves an acknowledgment that the government could not make its case, it was said. His 2004 settlement with the FTC “bans him from appearing in, producing or disseminating future infomercials that advertise any type of product, service or program to the public, except for truthful infomercials for informational publications.

“In addition, Trudeau cannot make disease or health benefits claims for any type of product, service or program in any advertising, including print, radio, Internet, television and direct mail solicitations, regardless of the format and duration.”

Plus he had to fork over $2 million.

“No,” Trudeau says. “There was not one penny in fines.” ABC News hadn’t called it a fine, however. It was $2 million in “consumer redress,” which Trudeau satisfied by giving the government more than $500,000 in cash, as well as his house in Ojai, Calif., and a Mercedes-Benz.

He’s a fast-talking fellow, Mr. Trudeau.

“The government situation is a joke,” he says when pressed, “and everybody knows it’s a joke. The government is trying to discredit me because of the book, because I’m exposing them.”

Dangerous Cures?

Instead of products such as Coral Calcium, Trudeau now hits the airwaves to sell his book, which promises magical natural cures. But not all of them are in the book. “Natural Cures” often refers readers to his Web site, which requires lifetime membership at a price of approximately $500.

But in the book or on the Web site, many doctors have expressed serious concerns about Trudeau’s cures, saying his advice is not only misleading, it could actually hurt people.

“Stop taking nonprescription and prescription drugs,” the book instructs. “Remember, drugs are poisons. This includes vaccines.”

Trudeau says drugs are only OK in exceptional circumstances Ã¢Â€Â” such as trauma or in surgery. His book makes other outrageous claims.

Trudeau writes in his book Ã¢Â€Â” which has sold more than 5 million copies and will be listed as No. 1 on this Sunday’s New York Times best-seller list for hardcover “advice” books Ã¢Â€Â” that “the sun does not cause cancer. Sun block has been shown to cause cancer. The ingredients in sun block are now strongly believed to be the number one cause of skin cancer.” He says “antiperspirants and deodorants contain deadly poisons,” and that AIDS is “one of the greatest hoaxes and deceptions ever perpetrated on the American public.”

The government and the pharmaceutical companies conspire to keep natural cures from you, he insists, to make money by selling medicine.

“It’s so profitable to the companies that sell it,” he says. “Chemotherapy kills more people than cancer itself.”

Trudeau has no medical training and no particular health expertise. What he does have is a following, and that’s what concerns so many in the established medical community.

“I tell people, ‘Don’t listen to me,’” Trudeau responds when asked why anyone should listen to him instead of their doctor. “I say, ‘I’m reporting, and I’m giving you facts, make an informed decision.’”

Trudeau asks why anyone should listen to the Food and Drug Administration. “This is the same organization that said Vioxx is safe and effective,” he said.”Then they said, ‘Oops, we were wrong.’ Why should we listen to them?”

But some of Trudeau’s claims do not stand scrutiny.

Asked for his “natural cure” for diabetes, Trudeau continually cites a study from the University of Calgary, which he says “has 25 years of research” of a natural way to make it so “diabetes can be, if not completely cured and wiped out in America, dramatically reduced by this herbal combination.”

But when asked, the University of Calgary told ABC News that “there is no scientific evidence that any herbal remedy can cure any form of diabetes. In our review of the claims made by Kevin Trudeau’s book, we have established that there have been no human studies conducted at the University of Calgary in the past 20 years on herbal remedies for diabetes.”

Trudeau responded that he was “shocked and amazed” and that he would send us documentation he was referring to. We never did receive that documentation.

The book also claims: “All of the author’s royalties on the sale of this book are being used to help fund the mission of educating people about natural health care and exposing corporate and government corruption.”

But that “mission of educating people” includes paying for Trudeau’s flights and luxury hotel stays as he jets around the country for interviews, he acknowledges.

He says it’s “just like when you give money to the American Cancer Society, and the president flies on a corporate private Gulfstream [jet], stays in the Four Seasons hotel, your donation paid for that because he’s Ã¢Â€Â” in his opinion Ã¢Â€Â” helping to spread the news about cancer.”

A Future in Politics?

But his latest, quite successful incarnation as an author isn’t the final stage of Kevin Trudeau’s career, he says.

After one of his rants against the pharmaceutical industry and tort reform, it’s noted to Trudeau that he sounds like he’s going to run for office.

“I am,” he says.

Really?

“Absolutely,” he says. “There’s 25 million people in this country who purchase my products.”

He says he hasn’t decided what office he’ll run for, but it would be as an independent and it would be for federal office. “In order to make a change, you have to stand up and expose the corruption in government, and the Ã¢Â€Â¦ connection between big corporations and government.”

House? Senate? Presidency?

“One of those three,” he says.

ABC News’ Ted Gerstein, Zena Barakat and Melinda Arons contributed to this report

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Here is the FDC decision of September 2004:

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FTC

September 7, 2004

Kevin Trudeau Banned from Infomercials

Trudeau Settles Claims in Connection with Coral Calcium Supreme and Biotape

A Federal Trade Commission settlement with Kevin Trudeau Ã¢Â€Â“ a prolific marketer who has either appeared in or produced hundreds of infomercials Ã¢Â€Â“ broadly bans him from appearing in, producing, or disseminating future infomercials that advertise any type of product, service, or program to the public, except for truthful infomercials for informational publications. In addition, Trudeau cannot make disease or health benefits claims for any type of product, service, or program in any advertising, including print, radio, Internet, television, and direct mail solicitations, regardless of the format and duration. Trudeau agreed to these prohibitions and to pay the FTC $2 million to settle charges that he falsely claimed that a coral calcium product can cure cancer and other serious diseases and that a purported analgesic called Biotape can permanently cure or relieve severe pain.

Trudeau is paying $500,000 in cash and transferring residential property located in Ojai, California, and a luxury vehicle to the Commission to satisfy the $2 million monetary judgment against him. In the event that the court finds that Trudeau or his companies misrepresented their financial condition, the order would require Trudeau to pay $20 million pursuant to an avalanche clause.

Ã¢Â€ÂœThis ban is meant to shut down an infomercial empire that has misled American consumers for years,Ã¢Â€Â said Lydia Parnes, Acting Director of the FTCÃ¢Â€Â™s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Ã¢Â€ÂœOther habitual false advertisers should take a lesson; mend your ways or face serious consequences.Ã¢Â€Â

In nationally-televised infomercials, Trudeau advertised that Coral Calcium Supreme, a dietary supplement purportedly made from Japanese marine coral, provided the same amount of bioavailable calcium as two gallons of milk, could be absorbed into the body faster than ordinary

calcium, and could cure cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, lupus, and other illnesses. In a separate infomercial, Trudeau claimed that Biotape, an adhesive strip, provided permanent relief from severe pain, including debilitating back pain, and pain from arthritis, sciatica, and migraines. In June 2003, the FTC filed a complaint in the Northern District of Illinois against Trudeau and some of his companies, alleging that these disease claims for Coral Calcium Supreme were false and unsubstantiated. The Commission also alleged in a separate action that Trudeau violated a 1998 FTC order by making the Coral Calcium Supreme claims and the pain-relief claims for Biotape.

In July 2003, Trudeau entered into a stipulated preliminary injunction that prohibited him from continuing to make the challenged claims for Coral Calcium Supreme and Biotape. This summer the court found Trudeau in contempt of court for violating this preliminary injunction when he disseminated a direct mail piece and an infomercial making the prohibited coral calcium claims. The court ordered Trudeau to cease all marketing for coral calcium products.

The settlement announced today permanently bans Trudeau and the other defendants, Shop America (USA), LLC, Shop America Marketing Group, LLC, and Trustar Global Media, Limited (Ã¢Â€ÂœdefendantsÃ¢Â€Â), from appearing in, producing, or disseminating infomercials that advertise any product, service, or program and, regardless of the advertising medium used to make the claim, from making representations that any product, program, or service can cure, treat, or prevent any disease or provide health benefits. The orderÃ¢Â€Â™s ban on future infomercials exempts infomercials for books, newsletters, and other informational publications.

In addition, the order prohibits the defendants from transferring, selling, or renting personal information collected from customers who purchased Coral Calcium Supreme and requires the defendants to destroy this information for certain customers. Finally, the order contains standard recordkeeping provisions to assist the FTC in monitoring the defendantsÃ¢Â€Â™ compliance with its prohibitions and requirements.

The Commission vote to authorize staff to file the stipulated final order was 5-0. The stipulated final order for permanent injunction was entered in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division on September 3, 2004.

Note: This stipulated final order is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by the defendants of a law violation. A stipulated final order has the force of law when signed by the judge.

Copies of the stipulated final order are available from the FTCÃ¢Â€Â™s Web site at http://www.ftc.gov and also from the FTCÃ¢Â€Â™s Consumer Response Center, Room 130, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20580. The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices in the marketplace and to provide information to help consumers spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish (bilingual counselors are available to take complaints), or to get free information on any of 150 consumer topics, call toll-free, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357), or use the complaint form at http://www.ftc.gov. The FTC enters Internet, telemarketing, identity theft, and other fraud-related complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to hundreds of civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Brenda Mack,

Office of Public Affairs

202-326-2182

STAFF CONTACT:

Heather Hippsley or Daniel Kaufman

202-326-3285 or 202-326-2675

(FTC File No. X980014/X030066)

(Civil Action No. 03-C-3904)

(http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/09/trudeaucoral.htm)

The lesson of the diabetes epidemic which the Times ignores

January 13th, 2006

Acres of newsprint but not this one grain of sense

The mammoth diabetes series at the Times is now over, leaving us stunned in its wake and still unsure whether this just threatens the poor or whether the rich also suffer from diabetes in alarming numbers. Presumably if you are wealthier you are less likely to gorge on junk food and more likely to eat nutritious meals, but given the level of ignorance about nutrition that most of us suffer from this may not be true. One thing we should all do in self defense is read labels for ingredients. This often leads to instant diet reform.

Do the rich buy any less white bread and white flour products, and white rice, than the disadvantaged? We had a bad dream last night that we lived in a strange society where all the good vitamins and minerals were removed from bread and rice at the grain stage. Then we woke up and found we lived in that society, which is the United States. where these staples in the form of grain are prepared for storage and transport by removing a slew of vitamins and minerals which might attract insects to the grain or flour.

The insects are simply not interested in such nutritionally hollow fodder, and they pass it up, setting an example we would do well to follow.

This apparently is what enables the food industry to store and transport it without worrying about spoilage to our supermarkets and dinner tables, where we can then enjoy eating food which is so empty of nourishment that insects won’t have anything to do with it.

Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, of course, because flour is then “enriched” by adding back about four or five of the fifteen or so vitamins and elements removed – iron, B1, B2, sometimes niacin which is B3, and folic acid. But the others are still missing when white bread or white rice arrives on your plate.

The particular ingredients that are removed permanently which are involved in the diabetes epidemic include Vitamin B6 and magnesium. For some unfathomable reason (cost?) these are not put back into white bread and rice when it is restored to the form in which it is served and eaten. Since these are needed for the control of blood sugar and the health of the pancreas, diabetes results unless they are obtained from other sources.

As nutritional expert Robert Houston has noted in his comment to the Diabetes 4 post, none of this is mentioned in the acres of newsprint devoted to the diabetes crisis in New York City this week by the Times. It is a sad oversight.

It is a particularly sad omission because otherwise the series performed a public service in drawing attention to the principle that reforming nutrition may often be a better answer to ailments than the usual weapons employed by the members of the medical profession to whom we pay such large sums for advice, which is to say the profit-based artificial drugs and surgical intervention they resort to at the drop of a hat.

We recently listened to a friend recounting his experience with a small benign growth under his eye. He was on the point of resorting to the dermatologist to have it cut out when he tried eating a blend of sweet almonds and stewed apricots, both organic. The growth darkened in a few hours, blackened and fell away in four days.

Possibly this was merely the power of mind over matter, and scientifically purely anecdotal, but the literature of nutrition and alternative medicine suggests that ingredients in these items are effective in this way. The friend is convinced that this was the case, since he is philosophically opposed to standard medical thinking in the US.

His success in this case matches his preference for nutritional approaches to cancer that he says stands as “counterpoint to the whole medical notion that you have to use heroic measures of toxic or invasive therapies that put the patient through hell and to the brink of death to save them when all that may be needed is a couple of pieces of fresh and tasty fruit,” He sounds quite exercised as he speaks.

He reminds us of the reason that the English are called limeys, which is that their sailors were the first among Europeans to eat or suck limes, oranges and lemons to counter scurvy, which arises from a lack of Vitamin C.

They were led to this strategy by Dr James Lind, the Navy surgeon who conducted what may have been the first controlled experiment in nutrition when he studied scurvy and fed different possible answers such as vinegar to different groups.

The astonishing result was that a couple of slices of oranges a day or sucking on a lemon or lime for two weeks proved enough to cure the ravages of an ailment which otherwise sent many sailors to a horrible death.

The lesson of all this may be that nutrition and diet are the most powerful cures for many ailments and should never be overlooked, as they tend to be in a society where the medical profession is overly fond of more remunerative and possibly less effective and more dangerous cures.

Certainly the scientific and medical scene in HIV?AIDS seems to be a case study in this kind of distortion.

In this regard one of the most poignant points made in the Times series was that the reason why Asian parents allow their children to be too easily beguiled by Western junk food, instead of being alarmed and provoked to battling to keep them on a healthy traditional cusine of fresh chicken, duck and vegetables, so rapidly and easily cooked in a wok, is that for a thousand years natural food and its ingredients has been used as a cure in China.

It takes some time for them to realize that in this country some kinds of food can in effect be poison.

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Signs of skepticism about the literature now in the media

January 13th, 2006

But they fail to understand the subtler point

The Times notes that the naive faith that many science reporters have in the impeccable validity of papers in science journals is a little dented by the Dr Hwang debacle.

For their benefit, Nicholas Wade tells it like it is:

“Beyond Hwang, the more fundamental issue is that journals do not and cannot guarantee the truth of what they publish,” said Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times. “Publication of a paper only means that, in the view of the referees who green-light it, it is interesting and not obviously false. In other words, all of the results in these journals are tentative.”

However, there is no hint of the biggest elephant on the room, which is that science journals do virtually nothing to counter the overly zealous tendency of established scientists to protect a ruling paradigm from demolition, at least initially.

Science journals would do the public and science itself a favor if they would break free from this pattern, since a fundamental characteristic of science is that progress often means that ruling wisdom is replaced.

Journals should host worthy paradigm debate, rather than exclude it too easily. As the cases of Science and Nature in HIV?AIDS shows, it is all too easy for them to become the fellow travelers of those in power in a field, rather than serve science and the public interest by empowering debate.

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1) HEALTHY SCEPTICISM: REPORTERS FIND SCIENCE JOURNALS HARDER TO TRUST

The New York Times, 13 January 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/business/media/13journal.html

By JULIE BOSMAN

When the journal Science recently retracted two papers by the South Korean researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, it officially confirmed what he had denied for months: Dr. Hwang had fabricated evidence that he had cloned human cells.

The journal Science recently retracted two papers by the South Korean researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk.

But the editors of Science were not alone in telling the world of Dr. Hwang’s research. Newspapers, wire services and television networks had initially trumpeted the news, as they often do with information served up by the leading scientific journals.

Now news organizations say they are starting to look at the science journals a bit more skeptically.

“My antennae are definitely up since this whole thing unfolded,” said Rob Stein, a science reporter for The Washington Post. “I’m reading papers a lot more closely than I had in the past, just to sort of satisfy myself that any individual piece of research is valid. But we’re still in sort of the same situation that the journal editors are, which is that if someone wants to completely fabricate data, it’s hard to figure that out.”

But other than heightened skepticism, not a lot has changed in how newspapers treat scientific journals. Indeed, newspaper irs openly acknowledge their dependence on them. At The Los Angeles Times, at least half of the science stories that run on the front page come directly from journals, said Ashley Dunn, the paper’s science editor. Gideon Gil, t

he health and science editor for The Boston Globe, said that two of the three science stories that run on a typical day were from research that appeared in journals.

Beyond newspapers, papers from journals are routinely picked up by newsweeklies, network news, talk radio and Web sites.

“They are the way science is conducted, they’re the way people share information, they’re the best approximation of acceptance by knowledgeable people,” said Laura Chang, science editor for The New York Times. “We do rely on them for the starting point of many of our stories, and that will not change.”

There are limits to the vetting that science reporters, who are generally not scientists themselves, can do. Most journal articles have embargoes attached, giving reporters several days to call specialists in the field, check footnotes on an article and scrutinize the results.

“Scientific discoveries are more difficult because they often require in the generalist reporter a good deal of study, follow-up interviews and some guidance on how to make sense of technical matters,” said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, which studies journalism. “But I think the scandals do require both a new level of skepticism on the part of the reporter and also maybe some new protocols between scientists and journalists.”

The Hwang case was not the first time journals had been duped: recently, editors at The New England Journal of Medicine said they suspected two cancer papers they published contained fabricated data. In December, the same journal said that the authors of a 2000 study on the painkiller Vioxx had omitted the fact that several patients had had heart attacks while taking the drug in a trial. A study on the painkiller Celebrex that appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association was discredited when it was discovered that the authors had submitted only six months of data, instead of the 12 months of data they had collected.

While the journals have a peer review process that is in part meant to filter out fallacious papers by checking research techniques and conclusions, perhaps the greatest difficulty for science reporters is trying to catch what journal editors have missed.

After hearing the news of Dr. Hwang’s fabrications, Mr. Gil of The Globe said he immediately remembered his newspaper’s coverage of the stem cell papers.

“We were blown away, in part because we had written those stories on Page 1,” Mr. Gil said. “And when we wrote them, we called the leading experts in the world on all this embryonic stem cell stuff, who are here in Boston. And they were as hoodwinked as anybody else.”

Despite the fraud cases, most of what the journals publish is basically credible, said David Perlman, the science editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Among the most prestigious science journals that reporters consult regularly are Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“I think they and we have been burned enough that they’re making efforts,” Mr. Perlman said. “They’re being more careful now, and I think reporters are too. I definitely have more of a ‘Hey, let’s look more carefully’ attitude now that I did 5 or 10 years ago.”

Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science, said in a statement in December that the journal itself was not an investigative body. But when reporting on journal findings, most news outlets fail to caution that studies must be replicated to be truly authenticated.

“Beyond Hwang, the more fundamental issue is that journals do not and cannot guarantee the truth of what they publish,” said Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times. “Publication of a paper only means that, in the view of the referees who green-light it, it is interesting and not obviously false. In other words, all of the results in these journals are tentative.”

The journals’ own peer review processes, which are intended to be the first barrier against fraud, have come under criticism lately. A cover story in the February issue of The Scientist said that the top-tier journals were receiving more submissions every year, overtaxing peer reviewers and weakening the screening process.

After the Hwang scandal, Science announced it was considering a set of changes to better prevent fraud: Dr. Kennedy said in January that new rules could include “requiring all authors to detail their specific contributions to the research submitted, and to sign statements of concurrence with the conclusions of the work,” as well as “implementing improved methods of detecting image alteration, although it appears improbable that they would have detected problems in this particular case.” (Through a spokeswoman, Dr. Kennedy declined to be interviewed and said the editors were currently conducting a review of the episode.)

Some newspapers have adopted guidelines of their own to check for conflicts of interest involving authors of journal articles. The Globe instituted guidelines last July requiring reporters to ask researchers about their financial ties to studies, and to include that information in resulting articles. In its weekly health and science section, The Globe outlines any shortcomings of a study under the heading “Cautions.”

Kit Frieden, the health and science editor for The Associated Press, said: “We’ve always had our own peer review process, where on the major studies we seek outside expert comment. We’ve always regarded scientific research cautiously because mistakes can be made, and I don’t think that’s changed.”

The growing competition for the most important research among the journals may contribute to mistakes and fabrications, even in the most prestigious of the bunch. But in the end, the severe consequences of presenting fraudulent research generally act as a deterrent, said Mr. Dunn of The Los Angeles Times.

“Unlike financial fraud, where you can bamboozle somebody of their money and disappear and then start over again, in science the researchers are in one place,” he said. “If they get caught in this type of thing, their careers are over.”

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Diabetes 4 – Asian children easily sold on US snacks are at high risk

January 12th, 2006

Fat and sugar are much greater threats to Asians

Having barely had time to absorb the unhappiness and irrationality of the third shocking piece yesterday in the Times’ comprehensive survey of diabetes in New York City, we are today (Thu Jan 12) faced with East Meets West, Adding Pounds and Peril by Marc Santora, which explains that Asian immigrant children are easily seduced by Western junk food and have twice the risk of getting diabetes from it.

Meanwhile, schools pay their way by selling sugar-high Snapple and end up throwing fruit in the trash, and they flout state law by cutting down on gym and recess, so kids don’t exercise nearly as much as they need to.

The food and beverage industry protects its predatory access to children by spending millions in Albany, where legislators make fun of bills to make fast food restaurants tell customers what they are really eating.

Asians, especially those from Far Eastern nations like China, Korea and Japan, are acutely susceptible to Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease and the subject of this series. They develop it at far lower weights than people of other races, studies show; at any weight, they are 60 percent more likely to get the disease than whites…
Even in China, the number of obese people has tripled since 1992 to 90 million, as Western food has become popular and prosperity has made it possible to eat more. The World Health Organization has warned that Asia faces a “tsunami” of diabetes in the coming decade, and health officials have assailed the Chinese government for its tepid response to the crisis….
At age 3, Henry Chen is learning his first words in English. “Mother” was first, followed by “father.” What came next, however, surprised his aunt, Cindy Chen.
“McDonald’s,” she said. “It was one of his first words.”

Given that this information stands squarely in the path of the food and restaurant industry, which one assumes plays a big part in the finances of the precious institution that is the Times, one can only wonder with awe what is going on inside that citadel that allowed its publication,

Kudos to Times

Suddenly a paper that seemed intent on trashing its own reputation with its unwillingness or inability to fact check its own reporters has produced an exemplary series which is on the side of the poor and ignorant and seriously affects the interests of one of its biggest advertiser segments.

The restaurant labeling bill looked like another loser. It had no support from the Democratic leadership. Although it was backed by the American Diabetes Association, which has spent $9,000 lobbying New York lawmakers in the past few years, it was opposed by the food industry, which contributed more than $4 million to legislative and gubernatorial campaigns between 1999 and 2005, according to state records.

One interesting section provides the background to the new universality of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener in so many foods these days.

When 18-year-old Jin Yang dashed into a Key Food supermarket one rainy afternoon to buy food for her friends at Flushing High School, she wasn’t looking at nutrition labels. If she had, she might have noticed that nearly every purchase she considered – the low-fat yogurt, the basil vinaigrette and even the chicken noodle soup she ended up buying – shared the same major ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener first derived from corn in the 1960’s.
Underwritten by roughly $40 billion in federal subsidies paid to corn growers in the past 10 years alone, it is now so cheap that it has all but replaced cane sugar as the sweetener of choice in processed foods.
The syrup has been singled out by many health experts as one of the chief culprits in the rise of obesity. Its inexpensiveness, they say, has helped soda producers create the larger portions that have led to overconsumption. It is so versatile, they say, that it now shows up in many foods that would not have been sweetened at all in the past.
There is wide disagreement among scientists over some studies indicating that high-fructose corn syrup can hinder the body’s ability to process sugar, and can promote faster fat growth than sweeteners derived from cane sugar.
What no one disputes, however, is that since the advent of the syrup, consumption of all sweeteners has soared; the average American’s intake has increased about 35 percent, according to the Federal Department of Agriculture. And a 2004 study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that the rise of Type 2 diabetes since 1980 had closely paralleled the increased use of sweeteners, particularly corn syrup.
Food industry officials say there is nothing wrong with the syrup as long as people eat it in moderation.

The article ends with a depressing story of an Asian legislator failing to get his colleagues to take a bill seriously that would force restaurants to say what the fat. salt and calorie content of their offerings was.

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The New York Times

January 12, 2006

Bad Blood

East Meets West, Adding Pounds and Peril

By MARC SANTORA

May Chen is slender and healthy, a lively little girl whose parents left their rural Chinese village just a decade ago in search of a better life. But at age 9, still in pigtails, she is already coming face to face with the forces that many say are making America fat and diabetic.

When May watches cartoons in her family’s apartment in Flushing, Queens, the commercials tell her that junk food is good food – the latest message from an industry that spends $10 billion a year marketing to children.

When she strolls down Main Street, she walks a growing gantlet of fast-food restaurants, many of them built with the help of government loans.

At her public school, the city sells sugary Snapple in vending machines to raise money. But it does not pay for a full physical education program, so May’s fourth-grade class has gym just once a week, in violation of state law.

And when she and her friends gather for snacks, she basks in their approval as she produces the high-calorie American-style treats, from chips to sweets, that are rapidly replacing traditional foods in the local markets.

Children all over the world are walking the same sort of obstacle course as obesity and Type 2 diabetes increasingly strike the young.

But to spend time with May Chen and the other children of immigrants in Flushing – at home in front of the TV, in the places where they eat and buy food, in their schools – is to appreciate the everyday threat confronting a particularly vulnerable group: the Asian-Americans who make up half the community’s population.

It is also to understand what alarms health authorities about the future of New York, a city of immigrants where Asians are the fastest-growing racial group.

Asians, especially those from Far Eastern nations like China, Korea and Japan, are acutely susceptible to Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease and the subject of this series. They develop it at far lower weights than people of other races, studies show; at any weight, they are 60 percent more likely to get the disease than whites.

And that peril is compounded by recent immigrants’ sudden collision with American culture. Many of them left places where factory and field work was strenuous, televisions were rare and advertising was limited. They may speak little English and have poor access to medical care.

Many have never even heard of diabetes, much less the recent scientific studies showing that a Western diet, high in fat and sugar, puts them in danger of getting Type 2 diabetes, which has been linked to obesity and inactivity, as well as to heredity. (Type 1, which comprises only 5 percent to 10 percent of cases, is not associated with behavior, and is believed to stem almost entirely from genetic factors.)

Many recent Chinese immigrants have come from places where food was scarce, and experts say some view fat as a trophy of wealth and status. Their children try to fit into their new country by embracing its foods and its sedentary pastimes.

“When they give you the visa to the United States in Shanghai, Fujian or Beijing, they should stamp a clear warning: danger to your health,” said Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, co-director of immigration studies at New York University.

So far, that danger has not been fully realized. Flushing has only half as many diabetics as the New York neighborhoods where the disease has made its deepest inroads. City epidemiologists say they have limited data on its spread among Asians.

But they do know that 14 percent of Asian children in New York are obese, more than twice the rate among their parents. And they say there is mounting evidence – including soaring diabetes rates in major cities in China, and in other countries with Chinese immigrants – that New York will soon experience a similar explosion as more Asians arrive and have their first encounters with Western ways.

The clash of cultures is vividly apparent in Flushing, one of the city’s new Chinatowns. On streets like Roosevelt Avenue, older immigrants still throng traditional Asian markets, with their signs in Chinese, and dine at noodle shops where windows fog with steam. Their children, however, are increasingly lured by fast food. Along a 100-yard strip of storefronts are a McDonald’s, a Burger King, a Taco Bell, a Pizza Hut, and a Joe’s Best Burger.

Even in China, the number of obese people has tripled since 1992 to 90 million, as Western food has become popular and prosperity has made it possible to eat more. The World Health Organization has warned that Asia faces a “tsunami” of diabetes in the coming decade, and health officials have assailed the Chinese government for its tepid response to the crisis.

But in this country, where children are bombarded with much more food advertising, many health experts say the response has not been much stronger.

In Washington, money for school gym programs is measured in the millions, while billions are spent on subsidies for those who produce food sweeteners.

In Albany, where the restaurant and food industries are generous campaign donors, bills to raise awareness of nutrition and diabetes have been dismissed or derided.

In New York’s City Hall, a former councilwoman who has been outspoken on childhood obesity, Eva S. Moskowitz, sees similar apathy. “We have a massive problem on our hands,” she said. “There is an utter lack of urgency to do anything about it.”

And in Flushing, where the Small Business Administration has lent $4.6 million in the last decade to spur fast-food franchises, the community health center has trouble finding money for diabetes education.

Here, for anyone who cares to look, are the people left to fend for themselves: a new generation that will soon fill New York’s schools and workplaces, making the daily choices that could mean the difference between a healthy city and a colony of the sick.

A Melting Pot, Boiling Fiercely

Incredible, Li Li kept repeating, simply incredible.

For 14 years, ever since he moved to Flushing from Canton, China, he has hewed to the same diet that his ancestors ate for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. “Chicken, frog, duck, all very fresh – that is what we like,” said Mr. Li, a 40-year-old business consultant, as he steered a cart through the Hong Kong Market on Main Street.

But at only 3 years old, his twin daughters have already blazed their own path away from history. “They both like the American food,” he said. “I cannot stop that.”

He found the switch profoundly unsettling – not because he saw health consequences, but because it had happened so fast.

“Only recently, they tried Coke and they loved that,” he said, as one twin tried to grab a package of candy. “They won’t drink tea anymore. Can you believe it? They will not drink tea.”

It was a classic scene from the well-known story of American immigration: the children of newcomers eagerly assuming the ways of their new world, and rejecting the old.

But a rite of passage that used to take most immigrant families a generation or two – fully adopting the American diet – has accelerated for Asians, said James L. Watson, a Harvard anthropologist who has studied their response to fast food. Many have moved in just a few years from villages to China’s increasingly Westernized cities and then to the United States, he said, quickly abandoning traditional foods.

“Everything is happening at warp speed,” Dr. Watson said. “The melting pot may have been simmering in the past, but now it is raging.”

And the American diet they are taking up is far different from what it was for earlier generations of immigrants: a mind-boggling array of processed products, with added sugars and fats that can turn these unfamiliar foods into seductive pleasures.

Even the store Mr. Li was shopping in is a startling departure from the small produce and poultry shops that still crowd Flushing. The Hong Kong Market, which opened in 1996, is a meeting spot for old and new: a huge supermarket that stocks Chinese versions of processed American foods.

One shopper, Jian Kang Qiu, 43, an artist who moved from a coastal village in the province of Guangdong six years ago, said his family’s eating had changed radically.

“At home we would shop in the open market,” he said. “There was not so much packaged food. We would eat maybe two meals a day. Rice with something on the side, fish or vegetables.” Now, faced with the unlimited choices here, they eat a far broader diet, with many treats.

Mr. Qiu’s mother has Type 2 diabetes, and recently his younger sister learned that she does, too. It has made him a little more conscious of what he consumes. But he has given up trying to control what his 16-year-old daughter, Vicky, eats.

“She would prefer American food,” he said. “Her friends are going for pizza, she wants to go for pizza. It is normal. She wants to do what her friends are doing.”

The need to fit in is no less important for the fourth graders at Public School 120, where May Chen, the pigtailed 9-year-old, was the center of attention one afternoon as snack time rolled around.

May’s parents co-own a sushi restaurant, but she had come to school with a bag of all-American snacks: a shiny blue can of Lay’s Stax potato chips and a package of neon-orange Cheetos Puffs. She passed out chips to her friends, and in no time hands were stretched out all over the classroom.

No one gave a second glance to the steamed dumplings that a classmate, Annie Wu, had brought from home.

“There is a kind of shame issue,” said Professor Suarez-Orozco of N.Y.U., who has spent the last five years studying the lives of 400 immigrant families, with a focus on Asians. “The kids feel if they bring food from home, some ethnic dish, they are seen as not as cool and not with it.”

School is one place where good eating habits can be taught. Yet at P.S. 120, fats, sugars and calories figure heavily in cafeteria fare: burgers, pizza and chicken nuggets.

In the last two years, the Bloomberg administration has made some changes: hiring an executive chef to make food in all schools more nutritious; installing salad bars at many schools, including P.S. 120; and cutting the fat and calories in some of the most popular items. At lunch, every student gets a banana or an apple – a requirement that schools must meet to receive federal reimbursements.

But schools, critics say, are reluctant to change their menus too drastically and risk a drop in sales that would reduce those reimbursements. And at the end of each school day, the trash baskets at P.S. 120 are filled with the compulsory fruit.

‘If It Is Delicious, I Love It’

A sweet tooth is standard equipment on any child. But the sweetness that satisfies it is no longer limited to cookies and candy.

When 18-year-old Jin Yang dashed into a Key Food supermarket one rainy afternoon to buy food for her friends at Flushing High School, she wasn’t looking at nutrition labels. If she had, she might have noticed that nearly every purchase she considered – the low-fat yogurt, the basil vinaigrette and even the chicken noodle soup she ended up buying – shared the same major ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener first derived from corn in the 1960’s.

Underwritten by roughly $40 billion in federal subsidies paid to corn growers in the past 10 years alone, it is now so cheap that it has all but replaced cane sugar as the sweetener of choice in processed foods.

The syrup has been singled out by many health experts as one of the chief culprits in the rise of obesity. Its inexpensiveness, they say, has helped soda producers create the larger portions that have led to overconsumption. It is so versatile, they say, that it now shows up in many foods that would not have been sweetened at all in the past.

There is wide disagreement among scientists over some studies indicating that high-fructose corn syrup can hinder the body’s ability to process sugar, and can promote faster fat growth than sweeteners derived from cane sugar.

What no one disputes, however, is that since the advent of the syrup, consumption of all sweeteners has soared; the average American’s intake has increased about 35 percent, according to the Federal Department of Agriculture. And a 2004 study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that the rise of Type 2 diabetes since 1980 had closely paralleled the increased use of sweeteners, particularly corn syrup.

Food industry officials say there is nothing wrong with the syrup as long as people eat it in moderation.

But Jin, who came here just a year ago from rural northeastern China, said she had never even heard of the sweetener – or diabetes, for that matter. Thin and healthy, she subjects each food purchase to only one test. “If it is delicious,” she said, “I love it.”

Moderation may also be a foreign concept to many new immigrants from China because of deep-seated attitudes they have brought with them.

In many Chinese families, it is difficult to get parents and grandparents who were raised during the deadly famines and deprivations of the 1950’s to stop overfeeding their children. “Increased girth is an indicator of wealth,” said Dr. Thomas Tsang, medical director of the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in Flushing.

But any extra weight is dangerous for Asians, research shows, because of their susceptibility to Type 2 diabetes. For example, a 5-foot-9 Japanese man who weighs 156 pounds – and who may never develop the sort of belly that is a warning sign for the disease – is twice as likely as a white man that size to become diabetic.

Because of that, Dr. Tsang said he believed that the number of Asian diabetics is underestimated; he has recently diagnosed at least a dozen new cases among his longtime patients. “It’s astounding,” he said. “And it puts a lot of pressure on us to educate them.”

The Wang Center has hired three diabetes nurse educators and a nutritionist in the last two years. But the effort to prevent, diagnose and treat the disease is hobbled, Dr. Tsang said, by cultural barriers. Asian immigrants who are in the country illegally tend to avoid doctors, and some Chinese people will not test their blood sugar.

“My own mother has diabetes,” the doctor said, “and she will not draw her own blood. She believes blood is the life essence and should not be lost.”

Selling Frosted Flakes and Fitness

At age 3, Henry Chen is learning his first words in English. “Mother” was first, followed by “father.” What came next, however, surprised his aunt, Cindy Chen.

“McDonald’s,” she said. “It was one of his first words.”

Neither fast food nor television was part of the Chens’ life in Fuzhou, a Chinese city where they struggled to find work before moving to Flushing four years ago.

Now Henry and his family show up at least once a week at McDonald’s. At home, he perches on the sofa to watch Nickelodeon. By his aunt’s estimate, he spends as much as 30 hours a week in front of the TV – more than double the average for a child in China, according to data collected for The New York Times by AGB Nielsen Media Research. Like a human SpongeBob, he soaks up ads for Pop-Tarts and Lucky Charms.

There is nothing new about the marketing of food to children, with all of its cartoon characters and free toys. According to a study released in May by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the average child watches 4,900 food commercials a year.

What is new, though, is the message that child – and his parents – are hearing.

Ronald McDonald now snowboards, and his once-portly frame looks to have shed at least 30 pounds. The box for Henry’s Happy Meals reads, “A game of tag keeps me happy and fit.” In one commercial, a woman does a victory jig when she finds out her Lay’s potato chips are low-fat. A Frosted Flakes ad shows children running around a soccer field with Tony the Tiger.

“Without a doubt, the food industry, while not moving away from convenience, has begun to push health as the main driver of food packaging and promotion,” said Don Montuori, publisher of Packaged Facts, which does consumer research for food companies.

The companies say they are doing their part to combat obesity by offering lower-calorie, lower-fat choices, and encouraging children to exercise. McDonald’s sponsors track events for young runners, and Coca-Cola has created the Tiger Woods Foundation to promote children’s sports.

But what would seem to be welcome news has simply created a different problem, according to many nutritionists and public health officials. Despite a salad here or a lower-fat oil there, they say, the food industry has done little to change the basic unhealthfulness of its best-selling products. And by making the link to fitness, they say, the companies are telling children that all of those foods are good for them.

New immigrants from China are keenly receptive to such claims because the Chinese have used foods to cure illnesses and promote general health for thousands of years, said Dr. Watson, the Harvard anthropologist. One cure for a cough, for instance, involves duck gizzards, apricot kernels and watercress. A variety of foods are thought to improve brain function.

Many Chinese people have replaced those traditional foods with processed foods, Dr. Watson said, and have little idea what is in them. Still, the faith in food persists: for instance, he said, there is a widespread perception in China that eating at McDonald’s can somehow make you smarter. In New York, Professor Suarez-Orozco said, immigrant parents often reinforce that connection by rewarding academic achievement with a McDonald’s meal.

And many Chinese companies have adopted the same kind of health pitches as their American counterparts. At the Hong Kong Market, a juice box called Vita Chrysanthemum Tea promotes itself as a health drink for children, though nutritionally it is little different from Snapple.

Ye Zhou, a sixth grader whose parents arrived from China shortly before she was born, said she tried to eat right, and knew that some foods were unhealthful. On this day she had come to the McDonald’s on Main Street to try the new Premium Crispy Chicken Breast Sandwich, drawn by the ads that touted the “energy” packed in the meal, which includes French fries and a soda.

How, she was asked, did it compare nutritionally with the stir-fried chicken and rice her mother made at home?

“They taste different,” she said. “But one is not healthier than the other.”

Actually, the fast-food meal has at least one-third more calories, carbohydrates and grams of fat than a typical homemade one.

Even before the latest blitz of health messages, children were confused, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation said in a 2004 report on childhood obesity. In a 1997 study it cited, fourth and fifth graders were asked which of two foods – say, corn flakes or frosted flakes – was more healthful; the children who watched the most TV were the most likely to pick the less nutritious one.

For more than two decades, Dr. Daniel S. Acuff helped hone food ads aimed at children as a marketing consultant to companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle. But about two years ago, he said, he stopped consulting on products he did not consider nutritious after recognizing the threat posed by obesity. He called the industry’s new sales strategies disingenuous. “To position themselves as leaders in providing healthy food for children is nonsense,” he said.

He and others – including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association – have called for tighter restrictions on advertising to children, similar to limits in Australia, Canada and England. They are also concerned about the increasing use of the Internet and video games to sell food.

But repeated attempts to enact such strictures in the United States have failed for three decades, and at a meeting last July in Washington, the Federal Trade Commission told food and advertising executives that it favored letting the industry police itself.

A few companies have done just that – most notably Kraft Foods, which decided last January to curb its advertising of certain products, like Oreos and Kool-Aid, to children under 12. The move raised eyebrows both in the food industry and in public health circles because of its implicit suggestion that there are bad foods. The industry has long maintained that there are no bad foods, only bad habits – like overeating.

Tim Wong is only 10, but he had no problem polishing off a large dinner platter from the adult menu one afternoon at the KFC on Main Street in Flushing. He had asked his mother to take him and his 6-year-old sister, Tiffany, so they could try “the new stuff” on the menu. “I see the new items on television and I want them,” he said.

When he was asked what his favorite foods were, his mother laughed.

“Look at him,” she said in a matter-of-fact way, as Tim is obviously overweight. “He likes his junk.”

Time for Gym! O.K., Time’s Up!

“Two fingers in the air!” the teacher aides shouted at the more than 100 children squirming in the auditorium seats.

Two fingers held high is the way students at May Chen’s school signal that they are sitting quietly enough to be let out for recess. It was 10:30 a.m., less than two hours after they had been served a breakfast that included chocolate milk, a doughnut and a juice box – at least 400 calories and 47 grams of sugar waiting to be burned off.

Finally the doors opened, and the students scampered out to the playground, a parking lot ringed by a chain-link fence. Several boys ran around like mad. In a makeshift game of keep-away, May and some other girls tossed around a bag of cheese snacks.

They had to play fast. Twelve girls were lined up to jump rope, but only three had a chance before a bell summoned them back inside for lunch.

May’s recess had lasted eight minutes.

It was, as always, the only recess for the day, and fortunately the weather was mild. On cold or rainy days, the children stay inside and watch movies.

Recess and physical education are treated like luxuries in the New York City schools. Though half the grade schoolers are overweight and roughly one in four are obese, the city did little until last year to promote one of the best antidotes: exercise.

May, like most schoolchildren in the city, does not get even the minimum amount of physical education mandated by state law, two hours a week. She has a single gym class each week, for 50 minutes.

She is among the lucky ones. More than half the city’s 700 elementary schools have no usable outdoor play space, according to a 2003 survey by the City Department of Education. May’s school has only one gym teacher for its 1,000 students, but roughly one in seven elementary schools in the city have no teacher dedicated to physical education.

And although P.S. 120 has a functioning gym, many elementary schools do not, according to reports by the City Council and the State Assembly. Even those that have gyms often use them for classes or meetings. There has been no standardized testing of student fitness in more than a generation.

The sad state of the school gym class is a legacy of the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970’s, when the budget for physical education was slashed to protect other academic programs. But New York’s plight is not much worse than the rest of the country’s.

Even as the health authorities pronounced obesity a national epidemic, daily participation in gym classes dropped to 28 percent in 2003 from 42 percent in 1991, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the Bush administration recently proposed cutting Physical Education Program grants to schools by more than one-quarter, to $55 million, though Congress rejected the proposal.

Schools are so desperate to finance exercise programs that many have turned to food companies for help. McDonald’s is offering curriculums and undisclosed sums to 31,000 schools across the country to improve physical education through an effort called Passport to Play; every piece of program literature that children see will carry the company’s golden-arches logo.

Two years ago, even as New York’s health department was assigning a team to improve the treatment of diabetics, the city signed a deal with Snapple that made its fruit drinks the only beverages, besides water, sold in school vending machines. A 12-ounce can of Snapple contains 170 calories and 40 grams of sugar, as much as most colas. The calories in three cans – the amount many students drink every day – would take at least three hours to walk off.

The 29 fourth graders in May Chen’s class have gym directly after lunch, and their stomachs were full this day with chicken nuggets. They did not change into gym clothes. The teacher, Bruce Adler, started them off with calisthenics, moving quickly to situps and three leisurely laps around the basketball court. There were groans, and several children were winded, but few broke a sweat.

Mr. Adler, 55, said the school could really use a second teacher, recalling how different things were when he was growing up in Yonkers. Students there had at least three gym classes a week, he said.

New York school officials say they are adding more physical education teachers each year. And two years ago, the Bloomberg administration created the Office of Fitness and Physical Education. Its director, Lori Rose Benson, has begun a program called Physical Best, which will track students’ fitness, charting progress for each school. She said she hoped to start the program by the end of this school year in every grade school with a physical education teacher, including May’s.

She conceded it was merely a first step. “It is very difficult to reverse a culture that existed for 20 to 30 years,” she said.

Tilting at Golden Arches

At least two unthinkable things happened in Albany in the past year.

One made headlines: The Legislature passed a budget on time. The other went unnoticed: The Assembly actually debated a bill that tried to address, in some small way, the leap in obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

It was a rare moment of attention for a cause that has drawn little more than lip service from government officials, and it was short-lived. The debate, and the bill, died in mocking laughter.

The story of that bill, known as A5664, is a lesson in the ways of Albany – and the apathy that diabetes experts say is blocking any effective response to the epidemic.

The lesson was an abrupt one for Assemblyman Jimmy Meng of Flushing, who had already embarked on a sharp learning curve. When he was elected the previous fall – the first Asian-American voted into state office in New York – diabetes was nowhere near the top of his list of health issues.

But as he became more aware of the disease’s threat to children and young adults in his community, Mr. Meng said, he became frustrated with the ignorance and inaction he discovered.

In April, he organized and led the first march in Queens to raise money and awareness in the battle against diabetes. And he agreed to support legislation by a fellow Assembly Democrat, Felix Ortiz of Brooklyn.

The bill would require all restaurants to prominently post the amounts of calories, fat and salt in each menu item. It was hardly a radical notion. Many fast-food chains had already begun listing calorie counts in restaurants and on Web sites, and months later McDonald’s would decide to print nutritional data right on its wrappers.

But Mr. Ortiz felt those moves were only a start. Who knew how many calories were in a slice of the neighborhood pizza or a Starbucks caramel macchiato?

His passion for the issue – this was just one of six bills he introduced in the 2004-5 session to fight obesity and diabetes – was fed by his own loss. His mother died of the disease when she was only 58.

“Everything was caused because she did not take care of her weight,” he said.

In Albany, the path from legislation to law is thorny, and Mr. Ortiz brought along his own set of hurdles. He was hardly an insider within the Democratic conference, which is controlled by Speaker Sheldon Silver, and some of his bills were considered odd. One would have made it a crime for a person not to come to the aid of another in trouble.

The restaurant labeling bill looked like another loser. It had no support from the Democratic leadership. Although it was backed by the American Diabetes Association, which has spent $9,000 lobbying New York lawmakers in the past few years, it was opposed by the food industry, which contributed more than $4 million to legislative and gubernatorial campaigns between 1999 and 2005, according to state records.

And diabetes had hardly caught fire as a pressing health issue. The Pataki administration is investing $9 million this year to encourage physical activity among children, but the state has not moved to limit the sale of unhealthful snacks in schools, as a half-dozen other states have. Only $1.9 million of the $100 billion state budget goes directly to diabetes prevention and control, roughly the same amount spent to fight anorexia and bulimia.

Two months after the Health Committee approved Mr. Ortiz’s bill, it had still not come up for a full Assembly vote. But on June 22, as the legislative session wound down, the bill found its moment.

Many members were in a hurry to leave town. As evening approached, Mr. Ortiz spotted Mr. Silver, chased him down a corridor and cornered him outside the speaker’s office, in a space where legislators often horse-trade in whispers. Mr. Ortiz, however, was shouting: “I get the same excuse every year!”

He wanted his bill debated and voted on by the full Assembly – an unusual request in Albany, where measures rarely make it to the floor of either house unless they are assured passage. Mr. Ortiz’s five other bills to fight obesity had languished in committees.

If a bill this mild could not succeed in New York, Mr. Ortiz argued, what hope was there for more sweeping measures?

Mr. Silver relented. And when the bill came up for a vote, near midnight, Mr. Ortiz had the floor. “This is about the future of our children,” he said.

When he stopped, the sarcasm began.

James D. Conte, a Long Island Republican, said his family owned a burger restaurant. What would happen, he asked, in the case of all-you-can-eat buffets?

Mr. Ortiz said the law would apply only to standard menu items.

“What about the weekly specials?” Mr. Conte asked.

Laughter rose in the chamber. Daniel J. O’Donnell, a fellow Democrat from Manhattan, kept it going. “I watch people who work at McDonald’s, and they don’t measure how much salt they put on fries,” he said. “Do you expect there to be a shaker lesson?”

Mr. Ortiz said he guessed that employees were adequately educated.

An hour went by. A few colleagues defended the measure. Others argued that enforcing it would be a nightmare, and that the costs would hurt small restaurants.

As the time for debate waned, Joel M. Miller, a Republican from Poughkeepsie, rose to state his position. “I did not develop this physique by eating healthy,” Mr. Miller, a stout man, said to guffaws. A colleague completed the joke by bringing him a generous plate of cookies.

“The bottom line is, it is not going to matter,” Mr. Miller said. “We are fooling and deluding ourselves.”

Mr. Ortiz made one last plea. “When we look at the rate of diabetes in our state,” he said, “and when we look at this bill, we should remind ourselves that the decision we make here tonight will make an impact on our kids.”

The result was clear as soon as the voting began. The yes votes showed up on an electric signboard in green, the no votes in red. Within minutes, the board was glowing red.

Before the tally could be completed, Mr. Ortiz stood and delivered the final word: “I would like to say, with a lot of passion, I withdraw this bill.”

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