Discover Top Posts Tagged with #junior scholastic

I don't know if I would go so far as to vilify the entire health industry (doctors, pharnacists, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) as a bunch of money-grubbers who keep the public in ignorance to maximize their profits. I know a lot of these people and by and large they are good, conscientious people who place a high priority on their customers'/patients' well-being.

I am also aware that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) takes a very conservative view on the effectiveness of drugs and supplements. A few posts ago I wrote about the health benefits of Ashwagandha. I checked the bottle I bought from GNC and, sure enough, there was the standard disclaimer, "This statement [of the product's effectiveness] has not been evaluated by the FDA". Ashwagandha has been around for centuries - one online spurce claims it's been used for 6.000 years - so if it was some placebo I doubt it would have been in use for this long... but then, that's just my opinion and I'm not a research scientist with the FDA so what do I know?

I will, however, bring up this memory from my younger days that was sort of awakened by the above meme.

In 1969, I was an eighth grader in Junior High school (what "Middle School" was called back then) and I, and all of my classmates, got copies of the magazine Junior Scholastic regularly. The magazine would often feature science fair experiments submitted by its readers, and one that was published was quite eye-opening. A student did an experiment with a number of commercial mouthwashes to see how effective they were in killing gerns in the mouth. He used about a half dozen brands of mouthwash, and salt water and tap water as controls.

It's been over 50 years so I don't remember every detail. But here's what I do remember:

All mouthwashes, even tap water, reduced the germ count in the mouth.

Listerine killed the most germs while (as might be expected) tap water killed the fewest.

A surprising result was that salt water was at the lower middle of the list, with commercial mouthwashes Lavoris and Micrin actually doing a worse job of killing germs than salt water.

The editors at Junior Scholastic made a point of adding a note that the results were from a single experiment performed by a Junior High school student and should not be taken as a conclusion of the effectiveness of all the mouthwashes tested. But you can bet a lot of students were going around telling their friends, "Did you read how rinsing your mouth with salt water is actually more effective than...?"

I also remember that, some time after the article appeared in the magazine, it was reported that the FDA demanded that the makers of Micrin stop advertising that their product was, or contained, a "foaming antiseptic" as their commercials had stated. The reason was that the FDA determined that Micrin did npt kill enough germs to consitute an "antideptic" as their definition warranted.

Was the young teen's science fair experiment what spurred the FDA to check out the mouthwashes and determine if they were really antiseptic? I don't know. But I'll grant you this: The makers of Micrin weren't about to authorize television ads that stated, "This product is less effective than salt water but we want you to buy it anyway."

Writer Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote a couple of the better episodes of the original Star Trek series, eventually lived on a farm where he grew most of his own food and made most of his own clothes and shoes. One observation he made was this: If you didn't make the product yourself - that is, if you bought it from a store - you have to exercise a lot of faith in how good the materials and workmanship that went into the product are. Unless you made it yourself, or oversaw the making of it, you have to take the maker's word for how good it is.

Last summer I got hit in the face with that truth when I bought bicycles from Walmart that fell apart on me after only a few miles of riding. In the 1960's consumers discovered the "antiseptic" mouthwashes they were paying for were less effective than salt water at killing germs. Who's to say what else is out there that is a lot more hype than it is a quality product?

#mouthwash #science fair project #junior scholastic #fda #theodore sturgeon #lavoris #micrin

To be sure, all Americans should learn about America’s complicated history with racism, slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. The study of these issues is not a problem — Black Lives Matter the organization is. It is currently forcing highly unscientific, racist propaganda into our public schools, and Junior Scholastic’s article “Uniting For Black Lives” assisted.

#Junior Scholastic #magazines #middle school #systematic racism #critical race theory #students #Jason Peirce

#magazine cover #junior scholastic #cover scan #endangered species #environmentalism #bulldozer #ephemera #1979

Indoctrinated children are being taught at an early age to believe fracking is polluting the water and air, overlooking the actual facts of the matter.

http://naturalgasnow.org/indoctrinated-children-say-darndest-things/

#indoctrinated children #fracking #junior scholastic #emissions #job opportunities