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

How the Sugar Industry Paid Researchers to Blame Fat Guest: Stanton Glantz, MLIS, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine contains an article you might expect to see from the investigative team of a newspaper. Someday, it may even turn into a movie, because Hollywood loves a conspiracy and that’s exactly what this article details – complete with a smoking gun. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found emails and other documents dating back to the 1960s, when the sugar industry paid three nutrition professors at Harvard to publish articles making fat and cholesterol out as the real dietary bad guys when it comes to heart disease. The articles helped shaped decades of nutrition guidelines that said eating fats was tied to heart health, eating sugar was mainly a problem for your teeth. The truth is, sugar is bad for your heart, too. Check out the research here. The Need for Handwriting Guest: Ellen Handler Spitz, PhD, Professor of Humanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County State lawmakers across the country are debating whether or not kids really need to learn cursive anymore these days. Many can honestly say the ability to type on a keyboard and text with thumbs are both far more important in daily life than good handwriting. A flurry of opinion pieces and letters to the editor in the New York Times took up this question recently. One titled “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter” prompted some rebuttal. FDA Ban on Antibacterial Soaps Guest: Allison Aiello, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill When you’re in the grocery aisle buying soap, it seems like a no-brainer to go for the one that promises to kill 99.9% of bacteria. The antibacterial just naturally seems better than the regular kind, doesn’t it? Well, a year from now, you won’t be facing that dilemma. That’s when a new FDA rule will take effect banning common ingredients in soaps and body washes marketed as “antibacterial.” More than 2,000 products will have to be changed or discontinued because the FDA says they don’t work and may actually do more harm than good. The Mathematics of Crime Guest: Brendan Hassett, PhD, Professor of Mathematics at Brown University and Director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics The power of big data is well-established. It powers the recommendations that keep us coming back to Netflix and Amazon. It’s why Google seems to know what we’re searching for before we know it ourselves. For that matter, it’s why every company we do business with seems to know more about us than we know about ourselves. That was the goal of a weeklong workshop last month that unleashed 25 mathematicians from around the globe on data from police departments and Twitter. Among their findings? Rioting in Baltimore at the time of Freddy Gray’s death in 2015 was five times as contagious as the Ebola virus. Shopping for Hijabs Guests: Lisa Vogl and Nadine Abu-Jabara, Co-founders of Verona: a clothing store for Muslim women Modesty is a growing fashion trend right now, fueled by blogs, online stores and clothing lines designed for women who want to look good while covering up. Often religious beliefs are part of the motivation – here in Utah, the Mormon culture spawns stores selling long skirts and modest prom or wedding dresses. Stores selling headscarves and flowy cardigans are beginning to pop up in communities with lots of Muslim women. I’m joined on the line by the founders of one such store that recently converted from a purely online outlet to an actual retail space in a mall in Orlando, Florida. They opened just a month before the Pulse nightclub shooting, which was committed by a Muslim man and since then, the store has become more than just a place to buy clothes. It’s also become a place for dialogue and understanding. Worlds Awaiting Guest: Rachel Wadham, Host of “Worlds Awaiting” on BYUradio Time now to talk about books with the host of Worlds Awaiting, another show here on BYUradio where the conversation is always about encouraging a love of reading and discovery in children. It’s a show for grownups who want to help the kids in our lives discover great literature and to learn to think critically about the world around them. Worlds Awaiting airs weekly on Saturdays at 1:30 pm ET here on BYUradio, Sirius XM Radio channel 143.