The controversy over polyunsaturated seed oils is in some respects the mirror image of the fight over saturated fats in meat, milk, and eggs. Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are essential fatty acids. They are “essential” since they must be provided by foods because they cannot be synthesized in the body yet are necessary for health. Both act as structural components in cellular membranes and modulate inflammatory responses.

The three main omega-3 fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). The principal sources of omega-3 fatty acids are oily fish, flaxseed oil, and nuts like walnuts. The chief omega-6 fatty acid is linoleic acid. The prime sources of linoleic acid in modern diets are seed oils including soybean, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, canola, safflower, rice bran, and grapeseed oils. The use of these oils has increased in modern diets, and they have been dubbed by some self-proclaimed health and wellness gurus as the “hateful eight.”

The main contention by these health gurus is that the modern dietary “balance” between omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids is out of whack, resulting in a host of alleged bad effects on health. For decades, American physician and endocrinologist Artemis Simopoulos has been one of the chief proponents that a present-day imbalance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the contemporary diet is the source of many modern ills. Simopoulos appears to have first encountered this hypothesis while attending the 1988 NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Dietary Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acids in Italy.

Simopoulos became the co-editor of the proceedings volume for that conference, publishing a paper that suggested that the optimal ratio for intakes of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids was 1 to 5-6 based on a 1985 study in which a team of French researchers fed 24 nuns different proportions of the two nutrients for five months published in Lipids. The proceedings volume also noted that “the current estimate of this ratio in the western diet is 10-11/1. Evidence based on estimates from paleolithic nutrition and from terrestrial animals (mammals) in the wild indicate a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 to be 1 to 1 in the diet.”

An earlier 1988 summary of that same conference in the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society noted that “some conference participants felt that the dietary ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids of about four-to-one might be desirable.” In her 1989 summary article in the Journal of Nutrition, Simopoulos cited the paleolithic ratio estimate but also reported that conference “participants could not agree on either a recommendation for omega-3 fatty acid intake as a percent of dietary calories or on the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the diet.”

However, Simopoulos had made up her mind. In her 1991 review article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, she again asserted that the recent big increase in the availability of seed oils had created evolutionarily suspect “imbalances between omega-6 and omega-3″ fatty acids.” Simopoulos suggested that this “imbalance” significantly contributed to coronary artery disease, inflammatory disorders, and cancer. She later popularized her theories about the alleged ill effects of increased seed oil consumption in her co-authored 1997 diet book, The Omega Plan: The Medically Proven Diet That Restores Your Body’s Essential Nutritional Balance. In the book, she asserted that the “hidden imbalance” between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids “makes you more vulnerable to heart disease, cancer, obesity, inflammations, autoimmune diseases, allergies, diabetes and depression—all of the so-called diseases of civilization.”

It is worth noting that exercise physiologist and chief originator of the paleo diet, Loren Cordain, participated in a number of nutrition and fitness conferences overseen by Simopoulos in the 1990s. For example, he was one of the promulgators of the 1996 Declaration of Olympia on Nutrition and Fitness that among other things recommended that “nutrient intakes should more closely match human evolutionary heritage,” specifically mentioning the role of “essential fatty acids.”

In 1997, Cordain was co-author of an article on evolutionary aspects of diet in World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics edited by Simopoulus in which they observed, “The ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acids) is estimated to have been far lower for preagricultural humans than for Americans.” He and his co-author then speculated that this higher ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids “may have important physiological consequences.” The authors modestly concluded, “Paleonutrition is an intellectually appealing, but unproved, dietary paradigm.”

In 1998, Cordain was a co-author of an article focused on fatty acids during the Paleolithic that was published in the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, again edited by Simopoulos. While noting that “evolutionary considerations are not (yet) a basis upon which to make nutritional recommendations,” Cordain and his co-authors nevertheless went on to observe that with respect to essential fatty acids, “current intake clearly differs from that of our ancestors: preagricultural humans generally consumed omega-6 and omega-3 PUFA [polyunsaturated fatty acids] in roughly equal amounts.” Cordain and his co-authors then added, “This pattern fueled the emergence and development of our genus; evolutionary considerations commend its restoration.”

And “commend its restoration” Cordain certainly did in his 2002 blockbuster The Paleo Diet. There Cordain endorsed Simopoulos’ claims about the health harms of “imbalanced” omega fatty acids. He asserted that “the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats in Paleo diets was about 2 to 1; for the average American, the ratio is much too high—about 10 to 1. Eating too many omega-6 fats instead of omega-3 fats increases your risk of heart disease and certain forms of cancer; it also aggravates inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.”

For what it’s worth, a 2018 study in Lipids In Health and Disease confirms the modern ratio of fatty acids in the modern American diet when it reported that the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio for U.S children and older adults averages 9 to 1, and 8 to 1 respectively.

Keep firmly in mind that with respect to the problematic subject of nutritional epidemiology, no prior claims about the harms or benefits of any nutrient ever fully disappear. For example, alternative medicine proponent Joseph Mercola is a co-author of the 2023 narrative review in Nutrients that outlines research that purports to demonstrate the deleterious health effects of consuming linoleic acid.

However, as you will see in the main article, the bulk of recent research has not been kind to Simopoulos’ assertion that the supposedly imbalanced consumption of linoleic acid found in seed oils “makes you more vulnerable to heart disease, cancer, obesity, inflammations, autoimmune diseases, allergies, diabetes and depression.” On the contrary, most research finds that consuming seed oils reduces the risks of these maladies.

The post How Seed Oils Were Demonized appeared first on Reason.com.

Having a baby? There’s a new law meant for you: the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

America needs this law, say activists, because “pregnant workers, especially those in low-wage and physically demanding jobs, have been forced to choose between their health and a paycheck.”

In my new video, Vanessa Brown Calder, director of Family Policy at the Cato Institute, explains why this new law will make life worse for many women.

“These policies are motivated by good intentions,” says Calder. “But that doesn’t mean that the consequences of these policies will turn out well.”

Calder, who is pregnant, thinks the law will lead to fewer women being hired in the first place.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a good example of that.

Both Democrats and Republicans applauded when President George H.W. Bush signed it. Everyone loves the ADA.

But the law hurt disabled people who want to work.

Before it passed, more disabled people got jobs, year after year. When it passed, almost 30 percent were in the workforce. But once the ADA passed, employment of disabled workers dropped by half!

It happened because of the job “protection.” Employers fear disability lawsuits. They’re afraid that if a disabled person doesn’t work out, they’ll never be able to fire them. Now the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act will make hiring young women risky.

“You may be a lawsuit bomb,” I say to Calder, who nods and says: “It does make women more risky and more costly to hire. Employers don’t know exactly what accommodation the woman might ask for.”

It’s safer for the employer to say, “I’m just not going to hire you. There’s no way for the government to know why I didn’t hire.”

“Companies get good at working their way around these regulations,” Calder responds.

But government officials assume their laws will do what they’re supposed to do. They also are eager to please special interest groups.

The chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission went before cameras to brag that this law has support from “businesses, faith, health, women’s and civil rights organizations!”

So what?

“Activists think of the short-term effects of the law,” says Calder. “It’s pretty easy to get behind a superficial reading of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and think that it could be a good idea.”

“The momentum is always for more rules,” I say.

“Oftentimes there’s guidance issued many years after the fact,” says Calder. “This is probably just the beginning.”

The growing number of rules kills jobs in several ways.

Since the rule applies to companies with 15 or more employees, it’s an incentive for companies with 14 employees to stay small.

“You get penalized as you grow,” says Calder.

“Without a law like this, who would hire someone like you?” I ask. “You might have more medical problems. You’re going to leave, for weeks at least.”

“Pregnant workers bring a lot to the table,” she responds. “Many employers see that. But when you create a one-size-fits-all policy like this, it starts to raise many employers’ concerns.”

I ask: “The Cato Institute should have the right to fire you because you got pregnant?”

“I think they should,” responds Calder. “Because I want people like me to be able to be hired in the first place.”

Exactly. I’m a stutterer. I didn’t have my stuttering under control when I applied for my first job. Had the ADA existed then, I could have demanded special accommodation. “Disability lawyers” would have been ready to protect my “rights.”

No TV station would have risked hiring me! I would have never gotten a chance.

Now the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act will kill opportunities for women.

COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post This Law Will Kill Opportunities for Pregnant Workers appeared first on Reason.com.

In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weismueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about today’s “psychedelic renaissance.”

The most surprising speaker at the conference was Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and Trump administration energy secretary. What in tarnation was a conservative Republican doing on the stage, extolling the virtues of drugs long associated with hippies and 1960s counterculture?

I sat down with Perry to learn why he believes psychedelics should be legal medicine for veterans and others suffering from PTSD, how to allow more immigrants to come to America lawfully, and why if he were ever to take a psychedelic drug it would be Ibogaine, a notoriously powerful substance made from the bark of an African tree.

The post Rick Perry: The Conservative Case for Psychedelics appeared first on Reason.com.

Credit where credit is due: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) may be a self-described democratic socialist, but when it comes to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) overregulation of sunscreen—a nontrivial issue—she sounds a lot like a libertarian.

In a recent TikTok video, AOC interviewed esthetician Charlotte Palermino about the abysmally limited sunscreen options in the United States.

“U.S. sunscreen regulations are not necessarily making us more safe,” explains Palermino. And AOC agrees:

US sunscreens are far behind the rest of the world and our regulations aren’t necessarily making our sunscreens better or safer — but it doesn’t have to be this way! pic.twitter.com/vaZXpZ2a7S

— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) August 11, 2023

AOC is calling out a very real problem. Sunscreen is regulated like a drug, which means the product is subject to byzantine FDA regulations that have largely thwarted innovation in the category for the last 20 years.

As the economist Alex Tabarrok has pointed out, European and Asian countries enjoy vastly superior options.

“Suncreens in Europe and Asia are better than in the United States because more ingredients are allowed and these create more effective and more pleasing suncreens,” he writes.

This is no accident, but rather the deliberate result of regulatory policy. The European Union, for instance, has approved 27 different compounds for use in sunscreen, whereas the FDA has only approved 17.

“The number of approved ingredients matters because not all filters can seamlessly be formulated into sunscreens or other suitable products for skin application,” writes the Cato Institute’s Gabriella Beaumont-Smith. “Moreover, some of the ingredients approved in the EU and Japan but not the US are more effective and long‐​lasting.”

If the FDA won’t clear more sunscreen ingredients for use in the U.S., the agency should at the very least allow reciprocity: Foreign sunscreens could be made available with warning labels noting that they were approved by European health officials but not by the FDA. Of course, the best option would be for U.S. regulators to simply get out of the way and acknowledge that these products are obviously safe for human use. Indeed, not approving them is the greater danger, since using sunscreen is one of the best ways to prevent skin cancer.

In her TikTok video, AOC encourages her supporters to confront their members of Congress on this issue. Ideally, she would pursue the argument she’s making here to its logical end and endorse very broad regulatory reform. After all, FDA inaction is depriving Americans of much more than just sunscreen: Regulatory hurdles are partly responsible for everything from the baby formula shortage to the high price of insulin.

Nevertheless, it’s good that even though AOC was feeling the Bern, she apparently doesn’t want to get burned.

The post AOC Slams the FDA's Harmful Overregulation of Sunscreen appeared first on Reason.com.

In this week’s The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman appraise the current state of “Bidenomics” as well as the self-described No Labels centrist movement.

0:58: Assessing Bidenomics

24:03: The No Labels movement

39:42: Weekly Listener Question

47:43: Over-the-counter birth control!

53:14: This week’s cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

“‘Bidenomics’ Is Nothing New,” by Veronique de Rugy

“Turns Out ‘Bidenomics’ Means Top-Down Economic Control,” by Peter Suderman

“Joe Biden’s Endless River of Debt and Regulation,” by Nick Gillespie

“Joe Biden’s $11 Trillion Plan to Bankrupt America,” by Nick Gillespie

“The Fantasy of a 2020 Independent Centrist,” by Matt Welch

“John Avlon: ‘How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America,'” by Nick Gillespie

“On Independence Day, Find Common Ground Over Freedom,” by J.D. Tuccille

“All Birth Control Pills, Not Just One, Should Be Over the Counter,” by Jeffrey A. Singer

“What if the government banned birth control?” by Nick Gillespie, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, and Scott Winship

“Review: Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One,” by Kurt Loder

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: COVID, Ukraine, Bitcoin, Guns, Free Speech, and More,” by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller

“Milan Kundera’s Eternal Feud With Václav Havel,” by Matt Welch

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsor:

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Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.

Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve

The post 'Bidenomics,' Like All Industrial Policy, Sucks appeared first on Reason.com.

An infant genomic screening test conducted as part of a research study found that a newborn has the BRCA2 gene variant, which predisposes its carriers to a higher risk of adult-onset breast cancer. Should the researchers tell the baby’s parents?

No, argued bioethicists Lainie Friedman Ross and Ellen Wright Clayton in a December 2019 article in Pediatrics. They asserted that “researchers should design their pediatric studies to avoid, when possible, identifying adult-onset-only genetic variants and that parents should not be offered the return of this information if discovered unless relevant for the child’s current or imminent health.” Why? Because imposed parental genetic ignorance somehow maintains the child’s autonomy.

That’s ridiculous.

The BRCA2 finding stems from the BabySeq Project, in which parents agreed to have their newborns randomly assigned to either standard care or standard care plus genomic sequencing. The study aimed to find out if genetic testing provides additional benefits beyond those associated with the standard heel stick blood tests that currently screen for approximately 50 different disorders among newborns.

The BabySeq infant is indeed very unlikely to get breast cancer until reaching adulthood. However, the fact that the newborn carries that variant means that one of the parents does, too, and that is highly useful information. In fact, BabySeq researchers have just published an article in The American Journal of Human Genetics finding that parents of newborns who test positive for specific genetic risks take action to protect not only their children, but also themselves.

The researchers found that out of 159 infants sequenced, 17 (10.7 percent) of them had unanticipated monogenic disease risks. Genes predisposing the newborns to higher risks for various cardiomyopathies, hearing loss, hormone deficiencies, and cancers were identified.

Given this risk information, most families had their infants evaluated by relevant medical specialists and also had themselves tested for the genetic variants identified through the screening of their newborns. Three of the mothers found to be carrying genetic variants predisposing them to breast and colon cancers subsequently got “life-saving risk-reducing surgeries.” A significant upshot is that these children are now more likely to have their mothers around as they grow up.

Earlier research reported that informing parents about the genetic risks identified by sequencing their newborns “found no evidence of persistent negative psychosocial effect in any domain.” In other words, the bioethicists are wrong: Enforcing genetic ignorance does not increase people’s autonomy; it diminishes it.

(For more background, see my article: “Warning: Bioethics May Be Hazardous to Your Health.”)

The post Don't Keep Parents in the Dark About the Genetic Risks in Their Families appeared first on Reason.com.

In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don’t back up his claim, they undermine it.

Haidt, who has also been calling for new federal legislation that would restrict teen access to social media, responded to my article (and the criticisms of three other writers, who he labeled the “skeptics”) with a lengthy Substack piece.

Jonathan Haidt continues to set a fine example of how debate on public policy should be conducted, and so seldom is. He offers clear claims with detailed references. He acknowledges complexities and uncertainties. He offers detailed replies to critics, without rancor or name-calling.

However, in his response, Haidt erroneously depicted me as being dismissive of all social science research. He characterized my critique of his work as consisting mainly “of criticisms of specific studies,” conceding that many of those concerns are “justified,” but “what level of skepticism is right when addressing the overall question: is social media harming girls?” He continued, “If multiple studies find that girls who become heavy users of social media have merely twice the risk of depression, anxiety, self-harm, or suicide, [Brown] doesn’t want to hear about it because it COULD conceivably be random noise.”

I didn’t express “concerns” about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt’s list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren’t longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).

He should remove them from his research compendium and excise them from his upcoming book. Including them would be analogous to the financial industry’s decision to bundle toxic mortgage assets in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. “A bad study is like a bad mortgage loan,” I wrote in my original piece. “Packaging them up on the assumption that somehow their defects will cancel each other out is based on flawed logic, and it’s a recipe for drawing fantastically wrong conclusions.”

Haidt was correct, however, when he noted that I won’t take a field of study seriously that can’t produce a 3–1 odds ratio or greater, e.g. a subpopulation with at least three times the risk of depression than similar people who use less social media. That’s because there are so many studies that draw conclusions based on weak findings. It’s not that studies with weaker findings “COULD conceivably be random noise,” as Haidt wrote; we must assume they’re random noise until a researcher can meet a high enough bar to demonstrate actual causation. If you lower the bar so that studies can be rigged to confirm our suspicions instead of actually testing them, statistics is worse than useless because it gives a false veneer of rigor, or what the economist Friedrich Hayek called “scientism.”

When a researcher can refine a result to a 3–1 odds ratio, there probably is an important causal connection to investigate. If not, the research is probably worth discounting.

Of course, investigations rarely start with 3–1 odds ratios. Skilled researchers know how to zone in on observation. Maybe you see in a broad population survey that heavy social media users have a 10 percent higher rate (1.1 odds ratio) of being admitted to emergency rooms for self-harm. So you do more research and then zero in on teenage girls and get a 2–1 odds ratio. Further studies isolate certain types of teenage girls (perhaps ones with single parents and no siblings), and specific types of mental issues (perhaps insomnia caused by anxiety). Once you get to the 3–1 odds ratio, you have a proverbial smoking gun.

Haidt compared his research quest to a civil trial in which a preponderance of the evidence is sufficient. But he hasn’t come close to reaching that bar. The analogy also fails because legal trials have to result in verdicts, but for policy questions, there’s always the option of not making any changes because the statistical evidence doesn’t lead to a strong enough conclusion.

So what is an appropriate standard? If you are going to recommend parents think twice about buying a 12-year-old girl a smartphone, guessing that it could be harmful even in the absence of statistical evidence may suffice. But if you are going to recommend new laws, as Haidt has, which are ultimately enforced by state violence, you must clear a higher bar. And even then you need to consider the likelihood that your intervention may not yield the effect you want.

Contrary to Haidt’s claim that I’m dismissive of all social science research, I actually found an excellent one first on his list titled “A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well-Being of Adolescents.” It pre-registered its design, which is a simple step that hugely increases credibility. It used a large and carefully selected sample with a high response rate. It employed exploratory data analysis rather than cookbook statistical routines.

But it didn’t measure the variables Haidt is interested in. (The results, in fact, strongly undercut his thesis, which I’ll get back to in a moment.) In fact, none of the studies I looked at in Haidt’s compendium studied depressed teenage girls who used social media. Instead, researchers found data on other types of subjects that someone compiled for another purpose. Few or none of the subjects were depressed teenage girls who used social media heavily.

Haidt also responded to my critique by asserting that “the map is not the territory. The dataset is not reality.” Haidt argued correctly that a weak effect in one study might be the result of factors like measurement error, misspecified models, insufficient data, or other issues. So one weak result doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong causal effect. In other words, if you can’t find a lost city of gold on a map of the Americas, it doesn’t mean there is no lost city of gold.

But he’s using this metaphor to cover for the glaring deficiencies in the research he’s assembled. Yes, the map is not the territory. If 301 maps have missed the lost city, I oppose policies that assume it exists.

All that said, must we still assume that Haidt is right because there are no other plausible explanations? Haidt conceded that there are problems with the research he’s assembled (my claim, again, goes much further), but then concluded that nothing else “can explain the relatively synchronous international timing” of the mental health crisis and spiking use of smartphones and social media. Writing in the Washington Examiner in defense of Haidt, Tim Carney did not dispute my claim “that social science has yet to prove social media is harming the mental and emotional health of young people.” But then he asserted that if “you know any significant number of teenagers, you know that this is true. If you spend any time on social media, you can see roughly why and how social media use would be both addictive and harmful.”

The purpose of social science research is not to confirm but to challenge our knee-jerk assumptions because reality is so complicated. It wasn’t that long ago that everybody knew that homosexuals were rare and mentally troubled, that women took wolf whistles as compliments, and that sparing children the rod spoiled them. And most social changes remain unexplained. Why do crime rates, attitudes toward gay marriage, music, fashions, and everything else change the way they do? Why did the Arab Spring, reality television, and PT Cruisers come and go? 

I grant that social media use is a plausible contributing factor to teenage girl depression, both in terms of psychosocial development and timing. But Haidt is claiming far more certainty than he should, and instead of compiling flawed studies to confirm his guess, he should ponder more seriously why he’s been unable to find any well-executed studies that support his thesis.

The proper scientific approach is to try to falsify hypotheses, not to confirm them.

If Haidt wants parents to allow smartphones only for high school–age students, he should look into the age at which depressed teenage girls got smartphones and see if it’s younger than the population average for similar girls. This could prove that the policy is unwise, falsifying Haidt’s assumption. We trust hypotheses that survive rigorous falsification efforts, not ones that are weakly confirmed by indirect and low-quality studies.

Haidt also wants schools to forbid phones during the school day. Why is there no study asking depressed teenage girls about the rules in their schools for phones? Did their schools have looser phone rules than would be expected by random chance?

Testing Haidt’s proposal to limit social media access to kids over 16 is a little trickier, but you could gather some evidence as to whether this would work. In many states, seventh-graders will turn 13 between September 1 and August 31. Girls born in September will be internet adults under current law for most of the seventh grade, while girls born in August will be internet minors until the eighth grade. If this legislation will help, we’d expect to see higher rates of teenage girl depression for September birthdays than August birthdays. Of course, we’d have to adjust for specific state rules, and also children younger or older than usual for each grade.

The good study that I mentioned above, “A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis,” actually does shed some light on the likely impact of social media prohibition. The authors found the most well-being among moderate television watchers, video game players, computer users, and smartphone users, with lower or higher use rates associated with lower measures of well-being. Nearly all the bad studies use methods like correlation that assume linear relations and these are useless if the actual relation is nonlinear. The very similar graphs for these four different activities suggest that the specific activity doesn’t matter. Fifteen-year-olds who spend seven or more hours a day—nearly all their free time—in any one activity report lower levels of well-being than kids with varied activities. This suggests that even if depression is associated with heavy social media use, the problem is spending excessive time on any one activity rather than anything dangerous about social media. Social media prohibition could thus likely lead to more concentration in other activities and erode rather than improve mental health.

This isn’t surprising because prohibition rarely has its intended effect. It often drives behaviors underground, making them harder to monitor and thus less safe. In this case, if there were a law preventing teenagers from having social media accounts, they might switch to harder-to-regulate forms of connecting online that are further outside their parents’ purviews. Or they might find new activities with new risks. The only certainty is they won’t go back to doing what teenagers did 20 years ago. Therefore there is no reason to assume depression rates will fall to 2003 levels even if leisure activities are the key driver of depression.

Raising kids is hard and no new social media law is going to make it easy. Parents need freedom and information and help more than acts of Congress. I applaud calling attention (“alarm ringing” in Haidt’s words) to the consequential choices of giving young people smartphones or allowing extensive social media use in elementary and middle school. Responsible parents will keep their eyes on social media use, especially if it consumes most of a teenager’s spare time or seems to involve negative moods and emotions. Haidt’s writings might help focus and inform that attention. But I don’t see anything like the evidence I would need to support the legislation that Haidt is calling for, and he should eliminate the many, many deeply flawed studies from his analysis.

The post Not Every Study on Teen Depression and Social Media Is Bad. Only Most of Them. appeared first on Reason.com.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, worker shortages hit American nursing homes particularly hard. A survey conducted last year by the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL) found that 87 percent of nursing home providers were grappling with moderate to high staffing shortages. According to a January AHCA/NCAL analysis of labor data, nursing homes have lost 210,000 jobs since the pandemic began—”the worst job loss of any health care sector.”

That decline presents an obvious problem since the number of Americans 65 and older is projected to reach 80 million by 2040. But a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper points to a promising solution: immigration.

The paper found “strong and consistent evidence that increased immigration leads to improved patient care,” as well as a decline in hospitalizations corresponding with an increase in female immigrants. That’s according to new research from Harvard University’s David C. Grabowski, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jonathan Gruber, and the University of Rochester’s Brian McGarry. Their paper relies on a sample of over 16 million Medicare beneficiaries in 13,000 nursing homes.

“Collectively, these results suggest that immigrants increase the quality of care of older adults residing in nursing homes,” they write.

Adverse outcomes decline during short-term stays—especially restraints, which fall by 7 percent for every one-unit increase in female immigrants per nursing home residents. During longer stays, the researchers report “a strong negative impact on use of restraints” and “a very large and significant reduction in inpatient psychiatric medications.” Immigration does not meaningfully impact mortality rates, they write, but it does lead to “significant reductions in hospitalizations in the short run.”

The researchers found that increased immigration can lead to better outcomes for older adults outside of nursing homes as well. A 10 percent increase in the female immigrant population equated to a 0.4 percent reduction in a metropolitan area’s nursing home population— “consistent with the fact that immigrants also often work as home health or personal care aides, professions that allow older adults to remain in their home longer.” Bolstering that claim, the researchers write, is a 2021 study that found “influxes of immigrants between 1980 and 2000 likely reduced the lifetime risk of an older adult becoming institutionalized by 10 percent.”

Immigrants now make up 25 percent of direct care workers in home health care and 19 percent of direct care workers in nursing home care, outpacing their overall share of the American labor force, which stands at roughly 17 percent. The upshot of all this is that immigrants have a proven ability to address a mounting need. Politicians crafting immigration policy ignore this at their own peril.

The post More Immigration Leads to Better Nursing Home Care, Says New Paper appeared first on Reason.com.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are likely to add the COVID-19 vaccine to the immunization schedule for children and adolescents. Last week, an advisory panel voted unanimously to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans ages 6 months and older, and the full agency is almost certain to sign off on this decision.

Such a move would not automatically make the vaccines mandatory for children: In theory, CDC guidance is optional. But in practice, many municipalities will be inclined to require whatever the CDC recommends. During the pandemic, cities and states controlled by Democratic political figures frequently rubber-stamped federal health officials’ extremely cautious coronavirus recommendations relating to masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. Blue municipalities took their cues from their local health departments, which in turn copied the CDC’s guidance wholesale into formal policy. When frustrated, caution-weary constituents would ask their local officials about timelines for getting rid of mask mandates and reopening schools, their answer was usually something like, “When the CDC says so.”

This means that adding the COVID-19 vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule will create a tremendous incentive for blue states to require it for public school children. This would be a profound mistake.

In general, the rationale for vaccine mandates is public health: Public school children are required to get vaccinated for measles, for instance, in order to prevent the spread of measles to other, more vulnerable individuals. This same logic does not hold for the COVID-19 vaccines, which have largely failed to prevent the spread of infection, particularly for the COVID-19 variants. The vaccines do a tremendous job of preventing elderly and at-risk people from suffering severe illness and dying, but most children are spared the worst effects of COVID-19, anyway—particularly if they were already infected, which is the case for nearly nine out of every 10 kids, according to the CDC.

Some European countries have looked at the data and determined that there isn’t enough net benefit to merit childhood vaccination. Denmark, for instance, is no longer recommending COVID-19 vaccines for otherwise healthy young people under the age of 18. This is not because Denmark’s government was overtaken by anti-vaxers, but rather because there are reasonable arguments both for and against the policy. Thus, leaving the matter to individual families and their doctors is wise. Indeed, even in the U.S., less than 40 percent of kids under the age of 11 have received the vaccine. Most parents have evidently decided that this course of action is not strictly necessary for their children, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Requiring children to get the COVID-19 vaccine could, on the other hand, create several problems. Parents who are disinclined to give their children the COVID-19 vaccine might start to wonder whether the other vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule are similarly unnecessary—which could have dire results for public health. Unvaccinated children might simply end up dropping out of school, which would worsen the pandemic-driven crisis of learning loss. Low-income students and students of color will be hardest hit; attempts by Washington, D.C., to require public school children to get jabbed were delayed after it became clear that a disproportionate number of unvaccinated black and brown young people would be banned from school under such a policy.

“If mandates become the norm, unvaccinated children will be displaced to virtual school, home school, or perhaps no school at all,” writes Vinay Prasad, a health researcher and professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “The harm to kids from substandard education—after nearly two years of disruption—far exceeds any gains from compliance.”

Some states have already signaled that they will not require the COVID-19 vaccine of school children, even if the CDC schedules it. Given the reality of COVID-19—most children already have some protection from it, and getting vaccinated does not substantially prevent outbreaks of it—this is the right move.

Let individual families talk to their doctors about vaccinating their children and make this decision on a case-by-case basis. The government does not have a legitimate rationale for butting in.

The post Adding the COVID-19 Vaccine to the Childhood Immunization Schedule Is a Mistake appeared first on Reason.com.

The state of California is attempting to outlaw doctors from communicating what authorities deem COVID-19 “misinformation” to their patients.

AB 2089, which passed the California legislature earlier this week, designates the dissemination of “misinformation or disinformation” relating to COVID-19 as “unprofessional conduct” for doctors. The text of the bill explains that its aim is to prevent doctors from giving patients information that contradicts the “contemporary scientific consensus.”

If California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signs the bill, doctors who violate its tenets could lose their licenses. It is unclear whether the governor currently supports the bill.

“Misinformation” is a highly dubious and debatable category. The scientific consensus has often expressed views relating to COVID-19 that were later contradicted. Official guidance with respect to masks has changed frequently. During the early days of the pandemic, White House coronavirus adviser Anthony Fauci initially downplayed the need for masks. Then, for more than a year, the scientific community urged people to wear any mask at all. Today, it is widely believed that only high-quality masks are offering meaningful protection. At various stages of the masking discourse, what many scientific experts had to say on the subject turned out to be inaccurate or at least incomplete.

The same is true of the COVID-19 vaccines. While they remain remarkable tools for preventing severe disease and death, particularly among older and more vulnerable populations, they do not substantially reduce COVID-19 case counts, contrary to what was said about them in late 2020 and early 2021.

Science is a deliberative process, and medical professionals need to be allowed to dissent from mainstream orthodoxies and challenge dominant perspectives. Patients deserve expert care, but it’s unreasonable for the government to compel ideological conformity in this field.

Besides, the state has shown no particular aptitude for discerning what constitutes genuine misinformation. On the contrary, government actors have frequently instructed social media companies to be wary of perfectly legitimate points of view. This happened with the lab leak theory, which was brutally suppressed on social media at the behest of the government, and it happened with The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story, which was wrongly branded Russian disinformation by top law enforcement agents, and punished accordingly.

It’s also likely that this bill violates the First Amendment. Governments have the power to regulate medical care, but the compelled speech component of AB 2089 would probably perturb the Supreme Court. Even some legal experts who support the bill’s goals concede that it will have a hard time surviving scrutiny.

“Initiatives like this will be challenged in court and will be hard to sustain,” Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford University, told The New York Times. “That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.”

Policing misinformation is a fraught task, and the state inserting itself between doctors and their patients is usually a recipe for disaster. Newsom should let this bill die.

The post California Tries To Make It Illegal for Doctors To Spread COVID-19 'Misinformation' appeared first on Reason.com.