1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009
Phone 202-332-9110 | Fax 202-265-4954 | Email cspi@cspinet.org
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“If New York comes to serve as a model, public health surveillance will take on a radical new form, entailing a reconfiguration of the relation between public health and medicine.” — Amy Fairchild, Columbia University professor of sociomedical studies, Science magazine
“He believes in what he’s doing to the point of arrogance, and as a consequence doesn’t really listen to outside voices.” — Charles King, president of Housing works, a nonprofit shelter service for New York City’s homeleses, New York magazine
“Your approach to public health shows contempt for the public, contempt for the marketplace, contempt for the principles of autonomy and choice. Our bodies aren’t yet the property of the state, nor yet the city.” — Audrey Silk, consumer advocate, reproaching Thomas Frieden at a public hearing on New York City’s trans fat ban
“We used to file all sorts of complaints with the government. Sometimes we’d get a response, but usually nothing happened. Now, when we have told companies that we’re going to sue them, they show up in our office the next week.” — Jacobson, quoted in The New York Times, January 19, 2006
“Jacobson, to put it mildly, is guilty of utter disregard for the truth and scientific facts, frequently exaggerating figures and claims to advance CSPI's own agenda.” — Frank Tate, writing in the online news site Scoop, March 2007
“Health claims or the converse, ‘un-healthy’ claims, of course, have to be backed by rational science. However, these are matters that CSPI, despite their grandiose and associative-scientific sounding name, would have difficulty in delivering. Throwing figures and ‘facts’ that would fail to pass muster for a secondary school science project, CSPI recklessly and with gay abandon, continues to launch fresh attacks ...” — Frank Tate, writing in the online news site Scoop, March 2007
“With animals, hundreds of studies show that if you give them 80 to 60 percent of their normal calories, they live much longer, with much lower rates of cancer. I know some people who fast at least one day a week to try to keep their calorie intake artificially low.” — Michael Jacobson extolling low-calorie intake diets, Washingtonian magazine
“They really should develop an alternative for people to socialize -- a real fun coffeehouse. Maybe a carrot-juice house.” — Washingtonian magazine
“The last thing the world needs is more drinkers, even moderate ones.” — CSPI's Nutrition Action Healthletter
“Because his overall diet is so exemplary he allows himself occasional lapses, he says: 'If I'm sauteeing mushrooms in olive oil, I'll throw in a little butter because it tastes soooooo wonderful.' But if he's writing about butter, he advises the public to stay away from it because most people don't limit those killer saturated fats.” — Stephen Schmidt, editor of CSPI's Nutrition Action Healthletter in the Los Angeles Times
“They want us in a state of perpetual Lent.” — Food critic Robert Shoffner on CSPI, in Washingtonian magazine, February 1994
“I’m not on the fence … about litigation [against restaurants]. I think it’s an extremely important strategy.” — Jacobson, speaking at the Public Health Advocacy Institute’s “Conference on Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic,”
“We could envision taxes on butter, potato chips, whole milk, cheeses, [and] meat.” — Jacobson, quoted in the Newark Star-Ledger, April 30, 2002
“The last thing the world needs is more drinkers, even moderate ones.” — CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter, November 1992
“CSPI is proud about finding something wrong with practically everything.” — CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, in Washingtonian magazine, February 1994
“The typical CSPI report takes one or two plausible concerns, blows them way out of proportion, and throws in several dangers that are trivial, unlikely, or highly speculative, all in an effort to scare people into the one course of action CSPI knows to be right.” — Jacob Sullum, writing in Reason magazine, June 2003
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