Reason Video

"Government made a big mistake with the dietary guidelines," says Nina Teicholz, author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. "Given the track record that they have so far, you can really make a plausible argument that they've done more harm than good."

Reason's Alexis Garcia sat down with Teicholz to discuss how decades of faulty nutrition science can be traced back to the flawed research of a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys.

Do customers need to be told that coffee might give them cancer? According to the state of California, they do.

Thanks to Prop 65, enacted in 1986, businesses are required to post a warning about the presence of any substance known by the state's environmental hazard office to "cause cancer or reproductive toxicity."

The list is updated yearly and now contains more than 800 substances.

A recent ruling from a Los Angeles judge orders major coffee chains such as Starbucks and Peet's to post explicit warnings that chemicals in coffee might cause cancer.

Acrylamide is a byproduct of roasting coffee beans and appears on California's list because studies show that lab rats are more likely to develop cancer when administered extremely high doses of the chemical.

A human being would need to drink approximately 16,000 cups of instant coffee, or 35,000 cups of regular coffee, a day for life to reach the lowest levels of acrylamide that increased cancer risk in mice.

The World Health Organization has said that there's "inadequate evidence" that coffee drinking increases cancer risk.

We stationed ourselves near a coffee shop in Los Angeles and asked people how far they think labeling should go.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello.

On April 16, 2018, two free market economists debated a topic that has long divided libertarians. Fractional reserve banking refers to banks' standard practice of keeping only a portion of their depositors' money on hand and loaning out the rest. In The Mystery of Banking (1983), the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard called fractional reserve banking "a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts." Other libertarian economists, such as Larry White and Steve Horowitz, have argued that the practice is perfectly defensible.

At The Soho Forum, a debate series in New York City that is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, Robert Murphy debated George Selgin over the following resolution: "Fractional Reserve banking poses a threat to the stability of market economies."

Would you eat a hamburger or a chicken nugget made of meat grown in a laboratory?

Joshua Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of JUST, is betting that you will. The San Francisco-based company has been producing and selling non-animal versions of food, like mayonnaise, since 2013, and it's raised more than $310 million in venture capital.

Tetrick and his team have created products like Just Mayo by identifying plant-based alternatives to common animal products, like eggs, using a combination of lab experiments and machine-learning.

JUST is one of a handful of tech companies working to disrupt the meat production industry.

While many of its competitors are pursuing better plant-based meat substitutes, JUST is pushing ahead with so-called "clean meat," or lab-grown animal tissue that requires no farming, no feeding of livestock, and no slaughterhouses. Only a single sample from a single animal that's duplicated endlessly.

JUST and companies like it are poised to disrupt the livestock industry. So established players are turning to the government to help protect their turf.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alex Manning.

During a rally in New Hampshire last month, President Trump promised that the federal government would "spend a lot of money" on a new anti-drug campaign that would scare kids "from ending up like the people in the commercials."

We'll make them "very, very bad commercials," Trump told the crowd. "We'll make them pretty unsavory situations."

Yet research on the effectiveness of past anti-drug campaigns, including a 2014 meta-analysis of 19 studies, concluded that these efforts had little to no effect on use of illicit substances. A 2008 study published in the American Journal of Public Health looked at the effectiveness of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, which ran from 1998 and 2004 and cost $1 billion. It found that the program may have had the opposite of its intended impact, actually encouraging drug use.

Isn't it time to just say no?

Written, produced, and shot by Meredith and Austin Bragg. Edited by Meredith Bragg.

Mexico's most notorious drug kingpin, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, has been awaiting trial in the United States since his dramatic capture in 2016. Federal prosecutors have filed charges of drug trafficking, murder, money laundering, and kidnapping against Guzmán, who ran the notorious Sinaloa cartel for more than 40 years. El Chapo gained notoriety for his daring prison escapes, and for his controversial 2016 interview with Hollywood star Sean Penn while hiding as a fugitive from the law.

The U.S. and Mexican governments have declared Guzmán's capture a major win in the drug war. Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks his story better demonstrates the folly of prohibition.

Produced by Alexis Garcia.

If libertarians are bold, impulsive, quick witted, adventurous, analytical, and willing to ignore social norms, is that because we have especially active dopamine and testosterone systems in our brains?

That’s the hypothesis of the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has developed a pioneering framework for classifying human temperaments. She spoke at the Reason Foundation’s annual donor weekend in West Palm Beach Florida.

Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin. 'Sphunx' by Sk'p is licensed under CC BY NC ND 3.0

Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.

John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

"The movement and struggle to win rights for corporations," says UCLA Law School Professor Adam Winkler, "[is] one of the least well-known, yet most successful civil rights movements in American history."

An important chapter in that history was in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government to restrict corporations from spending money on political ads right before an election. Many liberal advocacy groups were outraged over the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Last year, U.S. Senators Tom Udall (D- N. Mex.) and Martin Heinrich (D- N. Mex.) introduced a constitutional amendment that would overturn the decision.

In his new book titled We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Winkler challenges conventional wisdom about Citizens United. He even complicates the narrative about the founding of America.

Interview by Paul Detrick. Edited by Detrick.

Aourourou by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Azalai/Aourourou

Artist: https://www.sessions.blue/

Toothless Slope by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Azalai/Toothless_Slope

Artist: https://www.sessions.blue/

In light of President Trump's missile strike on Syria, Reason has put together a quick refresher on a few of our many questionable interventions in the Middle East.

Written and performed by Andrew Heaton. Edited by Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton.