Posts tagged cancer

Today in “You can’t make this shit up”: Baker Hughes, a giant oil-field services company that provides hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) products and services, has donated $100,000 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation in support of breast-cancer research. And in the most egregious example of pink-washing we’ve ever seen, the company is producing 1,000 pink drill bits that will “serve as a reminder of the importance of supporting research, treatment, screening, and education to help find the cures for this disease.” There’s at least one weird little thing about this pairing: Fracking, one of the services that Baker Hughes provides and the drill bits are used for, has some serious links to cancer itself.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/fracking-co-makes-pink-drill-bits-for-cancer.html

Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world’s greatest quack.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-myth-why-we-think-we-need-supplements/277947/