Geoffrey Kabat

Scientific work

In 2003, Kabat, who then worked at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, co-authored a study in BMJ examining the association between passive smoking and tobacco-related mortality. The study concluded that its results "do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality." The study was partly funded by the tobacco industry and was heavily publicized by it, and was criticized for using a dataset that did not include an "unexposed" group. In his book Hyping Health Risks, Kabat describes the criticism of this study as scientific McCarthyism.

In 2011, Kabat authored a study which found an association between high blood sugar levels and an increased risk of colon cancer. In 2013, Kabat published a study which found that taller women were at an increased risk of developing all types of cancer after menopause. Kabat and the other authors of this study noted that height should not be viewed as a risk factor for cancer but rather as a marker for exposures that increase the risk of cancer.

Hyping Health Risks

Kabat is the author of the book Hyping Health Risks, published in 2008 by Columbia University Press. The book examines several alleged environmental health risks, such as the proposed link between artificial chemicals and cancer, and concludes that these risks have been distorted. In the book, Kabat also discusses the science relating to the adverse health effects of passive smoking, arguing that anti-smoking activists have manipulated the results of scientific studies to justify increasingly stringent anti-smoking regulations.

David A. Savitz reviewed the book and wrote "For the most part, the story of truth and misrepresentation of evidence on health risks [in the book] was engaging". It was also reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine, where Barbara Gastel wrote that "Kabat is at his best in the chapters in which he presents the case studies," but she criticized the book's first chapter, entitled "Introduction: Toward a Sociology of Health Hazards in Daily Life". In a more negative review, Neil Pearce wrote in the International Journal of Epidemiology that he "became more frustrated and less impressed as [he] worked [his] way through the book" and criticized the book for what he called its "lack of balance".

Columns

Kabat contributes a column to Forbes magazine, described as being about "the science and politics of health risks". In a 2009 article in Spiked, Kabat criticized promoters of a link between cell phone use and cancer for what he said was the "astoundingly selective and slanted presentation they give of the relevant evidence."