Where's an investigative journalist when you want one?

I spent my life in the media. Today, I'm retired. And today, I am filled with guilt. There were a number of stories on which I worked that I now know were wrong. Some, I doubted were true at the time. But there was one I knew was wrong right from the start and yet I still helped spread the lies.

Why the guilt? Because of the scale of the financial pain caused by the oh-so-very-wrong media-spread story. Tens of thousands of people were affected, some reportedly lost their homes and the overall financial losses totaled in the millions.

The story: The urea formaldehyde foam insulation, or UFFI, story. Please, don't stop reading because you know all about the horrors of UFFI. You read all about it in your local paper or saw the story reported by television news. Possibly a well-known investigative journalist was behind the local exposé. Maybe you caught the story on 60 Minutes or Marketplace.

But, I won't ask you to simply take my word. Please read what Michael T Newhouse, MD, MSc, FRCP(C), FACP, FCCP, Clinical Professor of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences - McMaster University, Hamilton, ON Canada - Chief Medical Officer and Dr Jeff Norman of the Dept of Epidemiology of the McMaster Health Sciences Faculty have said after spending almost a decade investigating UFFI complaints.

They revealed the UFFI story "for the nonsense it was" and they revealed "the pseudo-science surrounding the hypothesized adverse health effects of urea-formaldehyde foam insulation and of formaldehyde in plywood and broadloom carpeting." Note quotation marks.

I ask: Where's Randy Richmond, the investigative reporter at The London Free Press? Why does Marketplace, the CBC Canadian consumer affairs program, still brag about the part Marketplace played in the entire fiasco? And why are newspapers still referencing the completely discredited story as if it were true?

It is time to raise the bar for journalists and to open journalism to criticism.
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If you are a journalist and want to know more, here are some links. Forgive the writing. I need an editor but that's another story.

• Journalists should not be storytellers.
• What do Brian Williams brouhaha and UFFI have in common? Answer: Torquing.

CBC Marketplace and Busting Superfoods

Superfood: a term too good to be true? I thought so. I never bought into the hype. But I guess some folks do and CBC Marketplace set out to burst their bubble: Busting Superfoods.

For the most part, it seemed to be a good show but there were statements that I questioned and not because I am a believer in superfoods. For instance, the program presented a Canadian alternative to some superfood. And what was the alternative: the potato.

I was once a big booster of the potato. Hey, the Irish apparently got by quite nicely on potatoes until the potato famine struck. The lesson seemed to be: oodles of potatoes good, no potatoes, or anything else for that matter, bad.

Well, I was wrong. Oodles of potatoes are not good. One should have a balanced diet. No surprise here. But, and here comes the surprise, potatoes do not necessarily make up a large portion of a correctly balanced diet.

Read this article from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health: The problem with potatoes.

The article, to which I linked, warns "a cup of potatoes has a similar effect on blood sugar as a can of cola or a handful of jelly beans." This is something that I've been told during my visits to various doctors related to my fight against heart disease. Go easy on the potatoes, I'm told.

I'm 70. My body does not need more stress and potatoes, especially a good helping of potatoes without the skins, could put my body under stress as it struggles to cope with the resulting surge in blood sugar level.

So, do I avoid potatoes? No. Potatoes, especially with the skins, are a good source of potassium, vitamin C, fibre and magnesium, plus potatoes are low in fat and inexpensive. Just go lightly on the full fat sour cream and pats of butter. Berkeley Wellness, University of California, has a good article looking at the positive side of the potato debate: Don't Drop the Potato.

CBC Marketplace, like potatoes, not bad, but not super either.