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The May issue of Popular Science features and article entitled "Hogwashed: All the Science Baloney You Get Dished in a Day."

From the Washington Post:

William Speed Weed, a science writer with a sly wit, spent a day last fall recording every scientific claim he encountered in stores, in ads, in newspapers and on TV, radio and the Internet. Then he enlisted experts to help him evaluate their veracity.

… "Advertisers probably feed more science to Americans than anyone else," he writes. But learning science from ads is "like learning the fundamentals of automobile engineering from a used-car salesman."

Ouch.

There's probably an interesting science project here. For example, ask students to log all the scientific claims they are confronted with via ads and/or product packaging over the course of the week, then debunk (or corroborate) the claims as a group during class. (Or variations along those lines.)