food, trucks, autism, and salad dressing

Today I learned about organic coffee at McDonald's, organic beer from Anheuser-Busch, and alternative power supplies allowing Wal-Mart to stop idling their trucks during loading and breaks. Then I learned on the Boston Globe's Op-Ed page from two weeks ago that Robert Kennedy Jr. is pretty sure that it is mercury in kids' shots that gives them autism.

So far I learned that nobody can definitively say they know (here and here, for example) because everybody seems to have their pet studies that studied different things in different populations, so they're pretty hard to compare. Also each side thinks the other's studies were done by crackpots. Here's what I know for sure:

• Thimerosal is a preservative used in vaccines (in the US at least) that is 50% mercury.
• Mercury is bad for people.

This list was going to be longer, but I can't really find anything else people seem to agree on. I suspect the reason no one can agree is that there are a variety of things that cause autism. Some people were going to have autism anyway, and the rest of them had some environmental trigger, shots or pollution or whatever.

I'm not saying I'm right; I'm just saying it sounds a lot more reasonable than 'autism hasn't increased - we're just diagnosing it more,' 'it can't be vaccines,' or 'it's vaccines.'

In other news, changing the dates on and then selling 1.6 million bottles of expired salad dressing is not a good a way to make money. You can get 1000% return on your investment, but it looks like then you go to jail.