I think people need to take journalists interpretations of science with a grain of salt. Journalists are good at making stories interesting and persuasive. They are far less effective at expressing the nuances of science in general, research in specific, and the tool used to interpret results, statistics.
Two rules to keep in mind:
Beware of interpreting less good as bad, and slightly bad as a major threat. Life is 100% fatal, always. Nobody gets out of here alive. Yes, a fifth of whiskey a night and four pack of cigarettes a day will kill you ... eventually.
It also pays to remember that any research that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years to get results is not dealing with anything that might be termed an immediate deadly threat. If Phil eats the purple berries and falls over dead you definitely want to avoid the purple berries. If Phil tells you that after five years of intense research he found out that the purple berries people have been eating for fifty years might be connected with a problem you keep eating the berries but keep an ear open for the second and third study to confirm the linkage. When a majority reputable scientist comes out and says that after many good studies the preponderance of the evidence is that the purple berries are linked to some issue you start weighing how much you really like them.
After reading several reports linking aluminum with Alzheimer's I gave up my two rolls a day foil chewing habit. Now I find out I may have been premature. LOL.
In reality none of my daily use pans had exposed aluminum. A few I used regularly were aluminum but coated so even at the height of the scare I wasn't worried. I kept using my bare aluminum camping pot. I figured in the scale of things a few score meals with infinitesimal amounts of aluminum included weren't a big risk. I figure it has been in commercial use since the 1880s when it was considered a precious metal and more expensive than silver. Royalty had aluminum dinnerware as a status items. After better than 1130 years of use if aluminum was highly toxic the effect would be obvious. That it isn't tells you that if there is any negative effect it is subtle.
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