In July, HRF President Rob McCaleb was interviewed by NBC Dateline as part of a story on garlic scheduled to air nationwide. McCaleb met with Tracy Vail of Dateline in San Francisco, where he was interviewed on the research supporting the health benefits of garlic. Camera crews also filmed McCaleb at work on HRF's Garlic Herb Information Brochure with staff at The Understanding Business, the publisher for the brochure series.
Dateline went on to visit the pungent, much-publicized Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, and the San Francisco restaurant, "The Stinking Rose." The resulting show should present an intriguing and informative mix of garlic science and popular culture. Dateline has yet to announce a definite air time for the show.
Also in July, McCaleb was a guest on Live! with Derek McGinty, the interactive talk show of Discovery Channel Online. The segment, provocatively entitled "Do Herbs Kill?," afforded McCaleb a chance to clear up misconceptions about the impact of DSHEA on the authority of the FDA to protect consumer safety as well as provide facts on the relative safety of herbs compared to pharmaceutical drugs. "It was a good opportunity to set the record straight," he said. The show will be accessible until July 1997 in a back issues archive at http://www.discovery.com/DCO/doc/1012/world/tlive/chat7-11-96/herb-trans.html. If you have America On-Line (AOL), you can go directly to Center Stage or Discovery Chat Room.
Article copyright American Botanical Council.