Please tell me this is you're idea of funny so I can point out that globally, the incidences of bad jokes have coincidentally increased along with population growth.

"The autism group had significantly higher levels of lead in their red blood cells (+41 percent) and significantly higher urinary levels of lead (+74 percent), thallium (+77 percent), tin (+115 percent), and tungsten (+44 percent). Lead, thallium, tin, and tungsten are toxic metals that can impair brain development and function, and also interfere with the normal functioning of other body organs and systems."

Coal power plants?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130225162231.htm

where do coal powered plants come into the equation?

when i was a kid, our trains were coal fired, our power stations were right there almost in the city all coal fired, back in the 40's to 60's. lots of kids in our satellite neighbourhood of the time, a few scratches and bruises, the odd broken bone.

no childhood diabetes, almost no obesity, no ADD/AHDD, then came modern chemical supported farming, they built new power plants further out, still burning coal still no health issues, and only a CO2 driven climate change fairy tale.

take care

len

Very good point. Thanks for adding.

It was a suggestion, I really have no idea where those heavy metals are coming from...

I grew up in the 80's and I never remembered another child with autism...i never heard of it until maybe the early 2000's... Obviously coal has been around for a long, long time... Britain burned so much coal that they almost ran out 100's of years ago... so yeah...its probably not the cause....

I guess the increase in "organic" food consumption parallels lots of other things, pos and neg, that have increased around the same time. Let's see, the Hispanic population of the US by percentage, for example.

Connection?

Those 2 facts...are facts.

The link between correlation and causation is what's being commented on...and how careful we should be about linking things just because we notice trends that match.

This writer explains it ... All values, whether for autistic children or non-autistic children, were in the very low range of reference values (often below detection levels), and they did some weird things with their data.

For reasons that are unclear, they converted the RBC values, which seem typically to be reported in micrograms/g into ng/g. This conversion has the effect of giving larger actual numbers ... things look way more impressive without all those zeros after the decimal point.

http://www.emilywillinghamphd.com/2013/02/autism-and-metals-not-lot-of -there-there.html

===========
greenthumbzdude: this is obviously a fake.....there is no correlation between autism and organic food.

It is not a fake. The correlation, as shown by the graph, is an extremely strong one. This is one way to demonstrate that correlation does NOT mean causation - just because two things are trending the same way does not mean that one of them caused the other to happen.

Here's the statistics: When you graph things that have a trend (as opposed to things that are wandering up and down) they can either be both trending up, both trending down, or be going in opposite directions.

You need much more than a graph to prove that "A" causes "B".

Use your PDF find commend with the keyword glyphosate to find references to glyphosate.

http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/1/372/pdf

Also, Entropy is a "journal" that publishes works that other journals won't publish. It doesn't mean that everything there is trash, but it's a dumping ground for business-funded studies that many printed journals won't touch. Some of the studies are little more than disguised press releases or agenda-driven research. It's a place where you have to fine-tooth-comb over anything you pick up from there.

This study was sponsored by a computer company...the one that produced the initial XO-1 "one laptop per child" project, btw.

Also...

Let's not forget the point of this whole post. Jumping to conclusions based on linked facts.

•Manuscripts regarding research proposals and research ideas will be particularly welcome.
•Comments on any related papers published in this journal and other journals can be published as short letters.
•Electronic files regarding the full details of the calculation and experimental procedure, if unable to be published in a normal way, will be deposited as supplementary material.
Subject Areas
•general aspects of entropy and information concepts as used in statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, etc.
•the second law of thermodynamics
•information theory
•system theory and cybernetics
•artificial intelligence, neural networks, complex systems, man-machine interfaces, self-organization theories, systems therapy
•pattern recognition
•chaos, complexity, self-organization, symmetry breaking, stability, reversibility and spontaneity
•quantitative relations of entropy (information loss) and other concepts (e.g., symmetry, similarity, orderliness, simplicity and complexity)
•molecular evolution, biological evolution and the evolution of the universe
•application of entropy and information studies in any natural and social sciences"

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/about
-------------------------------------------------
For the list of editors of the journal Entropy, see:

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/editors

It's set up in a system where you submit your work to be published under sub journals like...Land, Water, Religions, Healthcare, Metals, Plants, Laws, Arts, Future Internet, Molecules, Galaxies, and a bit less than 80 other subcategories. It's a catch-all "publishing" journal that's published as a single journal. Each issue can contain nearly 90 different subjects if enough submissions are there during the publishing period.

They make their money by making others pay to submit their work ($300-$1800), charging for English translations (only "printed" in English), and selling hardcopies to those that actually want the "journal." Not to mention that's a hefty price for a submission even for those that do charge submission fees (which is not many...and they have boards you know are going to properly peer review your paper rather than overseeing 80+ sub-categories they accept papers for).

Entropy doesn't have a good reputation for it's output or rejecting much of anything submitted to it.

It's not well respected. It's the "Who's Who of High School Graduates" yearbook of journals. I dare say you're going to find many people gushing over being "published" in Entropy.

It's a great way to "get published" or buy some credentials for your study.

That said...

You should "Google" some of the names linked to the study you posted. Stephanie Seneff seems to be a huge pusher of Sulfur supplements (including an interview with Dr. Mercola). Robert Davidson also seems to be a huge pusher of Sulfur supplements, too. They've co-written 6 papers together (and what do you know, 5 "printed" only in Entropy). Plus, this study was funded by a Taiwanese computer company's humanitarian arm. Even if this means nothing to you, the fact that their glyphosate writeup is full of "could" and "might" rather than "is" and "does" should mean something to you.

If that doesn't mean something to you...then this really should...

"In [133], it was proposed that impaired metabolism of aromatic amino acids might play a role in ASD. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular herbicide, Roundup is known to disrupt aromatic amino acid metabolism in plants [134]."

...now...this is the basis for the rest of their entire glyphosate rant. A link of the metabolism of aromatic amino acids IN PLANTS might link to the metabolism of amino acids IN HUMANS. I don't know how much you know about human vs plant metabolism...but...well...while metabolism is a sum of chemical reactions, we're in some very sketchy territory comparing the metabolism of a plant to the metabolism of a human. We do VERY different things with the same sunlight that hits humans/plants and VERY different things with the nutrients that humans/plants uptake.

...which brings us back to the initial point of the original post...correlation and causation.

This is all before getting into the CDC's stance on there being only a low level casual link at best (since they don't even link it, yet mention it's found in some autistic people) to encephalopathy and autism...which is the point of the paper...besides the fact the authors also seem to think sulfur/sulfation/sulfides are an underlying link to all of it.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/mitochondrial-faq.html

...which brings us back again to the initial point of the original post...correlation and causation. Who knew this thread de-railer could actually come full circle?

Plants, like animals, have a basal immune system that includes a small number of pattern recognition receptors that are specific for broadly conserved microbe-associated molecular patterns (MAMPs, also called pathogen-associated molecular patterns or PAMPs). Examples of these microbial compounds that elicit plant basal defense include bacterial flagellin or lipopolysaccharides, or fungal chitin. The defenses induced by MAMP perception are sufficient to repel most potentially pathogenic microorganisms. However, pathogens express effector proteins that are adapted to allow them to infect certain plant species; these effectors often enhance pathogen virulence by suppressing basal host defenses."
The above is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_disease_resistance#Plant_immune_sys tems_and_plant_defense_signal_transduction

I was trained to respect other scientists' viewpoints. That does not mean that I always agree with their conclusions. (We would not have to train future scientists if everything was understood.)

The following may be of interest (which I signed):
") Conclusion: When those with a vested interest attempt to sow unreasonable doubt around inconvenient results, or when governments exploit political opportunities by picking and choosing from scientific evidence, they jeopardize public confidence in scientific methods and institutions, and also put their own citizenry at risk. Safety testing, science-based regulation, and the scientific process itself, depend crucially on widespread trust in a body of scientists devoted to the public interest and professional integrity. If instead, the starting point of a scientific product assessment is an approval process rigged in favour of the applicant, backed up by systematic suppression of independent scientists working in the public interest, then there can never be an honest, rational or scientific debate."

Nancy

I do believe there are connections between less exercise, more sugars, less good fats [good ones are necessary] diet foods and drinks, and obesity.

I spent a lot of years learning about using raw numbers to run various process industry manufacturing projects. There was a plant that had the oddest6 series of process failures, some of us were certain that it was a raw materials issue, amazingly enough, a plant chem engineer who responsibility such things were, managed to draw the conclusion that every time a man access door, almost 300 feet from the nearest process access point and an additional 100 feet from the nearest process equipment, was opened, that the entire process would crash..... we put a recorder on the door..... turned out that the process would become very unstable, people would have to come through the door to investigate and react, and the process would then go down..... yes, he was absolutely right..... The door opened, and within 5 minutes the process would go down..... Turned out it was a process issue at the raw materials supplier that was the root of the problem.....

Y'all know that you can make a graph that shows that the increase in opiod overdoses in the US is directly related to the increase in the sales of artificial sweeteners in Canada, and that there is a direct relationship to the declining number of asbestos related illnesses and the cancellation of "Seinfeld"?

I'm a little shocked about the rise in use of GMO and how it is obviously causing our national debt in the US to increase.

It's also rather clear that as our mobile telephones get smaller, mass shooting occurrences keep going up.

Wake up sheeple! (tm)

Lloyd

Lloyd, so what else is 'new'?

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Organic food is just as healthy as conventional food, isn't it?