However, in recent weeks we’ve seen celebrities starting to stand up to what former supporter Khloe Kardashian recently called PETA’s “lying bullies.” It’s not just a reality television phenomenon: The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence said in no uncertain terms: “Screw PETA.” Rap superstar Kanye West even taunts PETA his latest album.

PETA’s tactics are even costing the group allies. Khloe Kardashian’s remark was prompted by reports that a “flour-bomb” attack on her sister Kim was aided by the animal rights group; previously, she had appeared in PETA campaigns. Her decision is understandable; the flour bomber was reportedly a member of PETA whose sister is a high-ranking PETA official, and PETA has offered to pay the activist’s legal bills if charges are filed.

While Ms. Kardashian may have turned on PETA in large part due to family ties, we can think of many reasons that celebrities pressured by the animal rights fringe to join up shouldn’t. Beyond the hypocrisy of some prominent PETA supporters, there is the lethal hypocrisy of PETA itself. We’ll welcome any who see the light on this noxious activist group.

Today, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is calling out People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) latest hypocritical advertising campaign in New York City, which features actress Penelope Cruz giving the “cold shoulder” to wearing fur. While PETA lectures New Yorkers with a half-naked celebrity and phony “animal rights” message, it also continues to run a slaughterhouse in its own Norfolk, VA headquarters.

Despite years of public outrage over PETA’s euthanasia program, the notorious animal rights group has continued to kill adoptable animals in its shelter at an average of 42 pets every week. According to public records made available by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), a total of 25,840 pets have died at the hands of PETA workers since 1998.

“PETA is far more concerned with funding its media and advertising antics than finding suitable homes for these dogs and cats,” said J. Justin Wilson, CCF’s Senior Research Analyst. “It’s about time PETA’s ‘shelter’ is reclassified as a slaughterhouse.”

Though the group rakes in millions of dollars a year, a recent audit of PETA’s operation found it did not even meet its own published guidelines on running a good shelter. The VDACS inspector astutely described the shelter, which is allegedly open to the public, as a “euthanasia clinic.” A review of 290 of PETA’s animal records found that 245 animals taken in – 84 percent – were euthanized within 24 hours.

“If they did their own research, celebrities like Cruz would turn a cold shoulder to PETA’s media stunts. The animal rights group’s brand is about as toxic as its so-called shelter,” Wilson continued. “Over 25,000 euthanized pets and counting? That’s a lot of fur.”

The passage of time also doesn’t mean that Kennedy hasn’t continued making a fool of himself (he said that hog producers were “a greater threat to the United States and democracy than bin Laden’s terrorist network” only a few months after 9/11), this time by peddling dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines and hypocritically trying to keep the “green” energy he professes to love from getting too close to his family’s estate. (Most of us have houses—it must be nice to have an “estate” or a “compound.”)

The latest target of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s lawsuit machine is the poultry farming community on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, who (like hog farmers) were treated to a “summit” complete with insults from Kennedy. Unfortunately, the Waterkeepers have the ear of Maryland’s Attorney General, who encouraged the assembled Waterkeeper supporters to step up the citizen lawsuits that could bankrupt family farmers.

In keeping with this new targeting, a local Waterkeeper accused the Hudson family (fourth-generation poultry farmers) of allowing runoff from a pile of chicken litter to enter the Chesapeake Bay. The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) investigated the allegation and found improperly stored treated fertilizer, not poultry litter. Indeed, MDE inspectors reported that “no animal manure piles were observed outside.” The Hudsons promptly complied with an MDE directive to move the fertilizer. Case closed, right? Wrong.

That didn’t stop the Waterkeepers from suing the Hudsons (and Perdue, whom the Hudsons supply). Even more outrageously, the Waterkeepers have used taxpayer-funded law clinics to do grunt work for their campaign against these family farmers, drawing an objection from Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D).

Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stands by an article alleging widespread collusion to cover up a link between vaccines and autism (a theory based on junk science) for which Salon.com issued multiple corrections and later retracted. In addition, Kennedy and Louis Moore Bacon, a hedge fund baron Kennedy called the Alliance’s “single largest supporter,” publicly advocate to keep the “green” energy the Alliance promotes away from their estates.

Want to see more? Head over to our updated ActivistCash.com profile.

He writes:

Implicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a “relocalized” food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.

Sexton’s estimates are more staggering than his arguments, which rely on widely accepted economic theory about the division of labor and efficient production. He estimates that “a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals.” We knew modern industrial agriculture had strong economies of scale, but the degree of efficiency in modern agriculture is notable. The land saved by doing things the non-locavore way, by Sexton’s estimate, is larger than the total land area of Utah.

So locavorism may not be wonderful for preserving wild lands or green space, but it’s at least less carbon-intensive, right? Wrong. Sexton cites a Harvard economist who suggests that “going local” would not reduce emissions from transportation (the supposed environmental justification for the “100-mile diet”). That doesn’t even include any emissions from producing an additional 2.7 million tons of fertilizer and 50 million pounds of chemicals, or the emissions from the tractors and combine harvesters tending additional farmland.

Reducing the land-productivity of agriculture is bad not only for the environment but also for people. Sexton says that “experts estimate that in the next 50 years, the global food system likely needs to produce as much food as it did in the previous 10,000 years combined.” It is only thanks to agricultural innovators like the late Norman Borlaug that Sexton can write, “From roughly 1940 to 1990, the world’s farmers doubled their output to accommodate a doubling of the world population. And they did it on a shrinking base of cropland.”

With the world’s population passing 7 billion on its way ever higher, now is not the time for trendy activists and first-world foodies to “turn back the clock” on agriculture. The world’s poor can’t afford it.

In 2007 two PETA employees went on trial in North Carolina for felony animal cruelty and littering (they were convicted of the latter). But it came out during trial that PETA killed healthy, adoptable, “adorable,” even “perfect” animals.

Those “adorable” and “perfect” quotes are from trial evidence: A PETA defendant’s notebook contained both those words as descriptions of the condition in which the animals PETA killed were obtained. Witnesses testified that they were told that PETA “shouldn’t have a problem at all finding homes” for dogs they handed over to PETA. Those dogs, of course, were killed. And PETA ignominiously tossed the bodies in a dumpster.

Skeptical? Look at the photo below and decide for yourself whether the animals PETA employees killed were on death’s door or perfectly adoptable. You can see more here [Warning: Images are graphic and disturbing]. As for Rose, she would be better off finding a trustworthy advocacy ally.

Dressed in protective gear, Ahoskie Police Detective Sgt. Jeremy Roberts prepares to bury one of the dead dogs found in an Ahoskie, NC dumpster. The Ahoskie Police made two arrests in the case, individuals employed by PETA. A total of 31 dead dogs were discovered. Photo Credit: Cal Bryant/Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald, Ahoskie NC

So, in light of this, here's what you can do. It turns out Ruby Rose fancies herself as a social media darling. Perhaps she heard from you on Twitter and Facebook, she might reconsider her position.

Tweet @rubyrose1: @PETA killed "perfect," "adorable" dogs and cats. Maybe you should rethink working with PETA. http://bit.ly/tRXQND

Or alternatively, leave that message on her Facebook wall.

Bittman hints that snack foods’ tastiness is the result of a vast conspiracy on the part of food companies rather than evidence of taste preferences on the part of consumers:

[T]he engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.

We’re sorry, but what a pile of (processed) bologna.

That Scripps study confuses a few key points about addiction. Namely, it trivializes real physiological addiction by likening cookies to cocaine. No one goes into withdrawal (including but not limited to insomnia, aches and pains, vomiting, the shakes, and a host of other unpleasant symptoms) if they go a day or two without French fries or pizza. Yet Bittman is deliberately using inflammatory language to send his readers into a panic about getting hooked on hamburgers.

We’re not denying that food produces a physical need in living beings, but those who go without it entirely experience starvation, not withdrawal. Confusing the two is not an effective way to convince people to choose healthier meals, though it is a novel way of pursuing restrictive regulations that limit consumer choice in supermarkets and drive-thrus (while whetting the appetites of trial lawyers). And somehow we think that’s more along the lines of what Bittman is truly getting at with his hyperbole.

In a recent episode, Oz reports results from apple juice samples his show sent to a laboratory for testing. He states that some of the samples contained arsenic in levels surpassing the FDA’s maximum contaminant level for arsenic in drinking water.

Sounds scary, right? Read on.

The FDA wrote The Great Oz to take issue with his presentation. One senior FDA science advisor told Oz (before the show aired): “The FDA believes that it would be irresponsible and misleading for The Dr. Oz Show to suggest that apple juice contains unsafe amounts of arsenic based solely on tests for total arsenic.” That’s because there are two forms of arsenic—organic and inorganic—and only the latter is toxic to people.

Moreover, the FDA later performed its own testing—from the same lot that yielded Oz’s highest levels of arsenic—and got much lower results. “In short, the results of the tests … do not indicate that apple juice contains unsafe amounts of arsenic,” the FDA told Oz in a second letter.

Oz went forward with the show anyway, despite the FDA’s initial warnings. (The juice industry didn’t feel like going on Oz’s show—who can blame them, given Oz’s past anti-business tone—so Oz brought on an environmental activist. Classy.) To be fair, Oz gave a mealy-mouthed disclaimer on air that parents shouldn’t worry about one box of apple juice. Um, okay, then why all the hype?

Fortunately, Oz is still taking heat. ABC News’s Dr. Richard Besser told Oz that this reminds him of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater.” And Stanford’s Dr. Henry Miller had this to say: “Unless there is evidence that a substance is present at sufficient exposures and levels to cause harm, warnings about its presence in food (or in our bodies, for that matter) is irresponsible alarmism. This is the same sort of rubbish peddled by radical environmental activist organizations about pesticides.”

Ah yes—the mere presence of a substance doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily harmful. That’s the big con of the environmental movement in particular, which ignores the centuries-old adage that “the dose makes the poison.” Ignoring this also apparently makes for good, but irresponsible, TV drama.

You’ll probably recall that this maxim applies to seafood, too. There are trace amounts of mercury in fish, but despite the blusters from environmental and animal-rights groups, we’re generally not eating enough to be at a legitimate risk. In fact, we could often be eating more and enjoying more of the well documented benefits of omega 3s for hearts and brain development. (Check out our handy seafood calculator for more information.)

Congrats to Dr. Oz on producing a modern-day Alar-in-apples scare. Anytime Oz wants to cut out the nonsense and strive for credibility, though, he’s welcome to. In fact, we’d dance and be merry, and life would be a ding-a-derry.

The movie’s official website boasts that the documentary “examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods.” But such a laughable assertion deserves its own examination. (We couldn’t help but notice the filmmakers do not address the fact that a vegan diet can have serious health risks of its own, particularly for pregnant and nursing mothers.)

First of all, quite a few members of the documentary’s cast and crew have landed in our crosshairs at one point or another for being on the fringe. No vegan documentary would be complete without Neal Barnard, the founder of the PETA-linked “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and author of multiple vegan self-help books. His good friend and fellow PCRM board member T. Colin Campbell is also a star. There’s vegetarian activist Rip Esselstyn, who wants restaurants to have meat-eating sections so that he doesn’t have to watch people enjoying their cheeseburgers. And then there’s Caldwell Esselstyn, who is Rip’s father and another advisory board member for PCRM.

That should be enough to convince most people that Forks Over Knives is little more than a PCRM propaganda piece. And yet, the filmmakers are already trying to get the Oscar buzz going.

Need more evidence that PCRM is a scam with a stethoscope? Check out our article “7 Things You Didn’t Know About PCRM.”

On FoodConsumer.org, he writes:

There are times when supplements can be quite useful, and I believe that some supplements, such as a high quality animal-based omega-3 supplement, for example, are essential for nearly everyone. This is because the main source of animal based omega-3 fats in your diet comes from fish – most of which is now so grossly polluted with heavy metals, PCBs and other environmental toxins I can no longer recommend eating fish for optimal omega 3 levels. Another supplement that many people need is vitamin D3, unless you can get sufficient amounts of safe sun exposure year-round, or use a safe tanning bed.

We couldn’t agree more that omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D3 are essential parts of the human diet, and many Americans are lacking in both. But to advocate taking expensive fish-oil supplements over getting these nutrients from a diet rich in oily fish – which is an excellent source of both – is both elitist and incorrect.

For starters, mercury scaremongering in the early part of the 2000s caused approximately 4.4 million U.S. households earning $30,000 or less to completely eliminate their consumption of canned tuna. And it’s no coincidence that during those years, the nearly 260,000 children born to those families were 29 percent more likely to have abnormally low IQs. That’s because inexpensive canned tuna was the only source of omega-3 fatty acids their mothers could afford to buy.

Overblown warnings of mercury in fish have had a direct and lasting effect on these children’s development, and all over a hypothetical health risk. Mercola is doing no one any favors by continuing the mercury charade.

Most unforgivable of all? His advice seems calculated to lead his audience directly to the line of fish-oil supplements bearing his name. That is shameful behavior for a doctor. It’s also worth noting, separately, that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has previously warned Mercola to stop making illegal claims for products sold through his site. And that’s not the only time he’s been in trouble with the FDA, either.

There are plenty of ways that concerned consumers can ensure they are getting enough omega-3s and vitamin D3 through seafood without putting themselves at risk for mercury poisoning. Our website HowMuchFish.com is an excellent place to start.

In Bittman’s August 2 column, he espoused heavy regulations against food makers for the audacity of selling a product that people want to buy. As the author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, James McWilliams should theoretically be Bittman’s comrade-in-arms. However, McWilliams sees a slippery slope:

Sure, highly processed junk food doled out by Big Food is horrible for our health. But so are the pork bellies doused in rich cream sauce and the scallops poached in goose fat promoted by fancy restaurants as “local” and “sustainable.” Should the government regulate these items as well?

I agree in spirit with Mr. Bittman, but the regulation game strikes me as a Pandora’s box that is better left closed.

But it’s not just fancy restaurants that make their money in serving up rich fare.

Bittman’s own cookbook series, How to Cook Everything, is hardly a calorie-free picnic. His website publishes recipes of his creation that pack a whallop in fat and calories, including crunchy corn guacamole, stir-fried pad Thai, baked macaroni and cheese, and chocolate mousse.

Surely Bittman is not suggesting that he himself deserves to be regulated for coming up with gourmet goodies, right? Because he knows no health-conscious person would dare to eat all those delectables in a single night. They would use moderation for such treats. Which, wouldn’t you know it, is exactly what the rest of us are able to do without busybodies like Bittman trying to sic the government on us.