Consumer alert!

The Federal Trade Commission is offering two batches of tips to help consumers keep their cool this summer and save gas.

That seems an unfortunate juxtaposition. None of the keep your cool tips offers advice for when you become hot under the collar due to high gasoline prices.

For what it’s worth, though, here’s a link where you can find the tips.

Advandia, a widely prescribed drug to treat Type 2 diabetes, could cause heart problems in diabetes patients, according to recent studies.

The drug has been on the market since 1999. It’s an important development because diabetes patients already are at higher risk for heart problems due to their illness.

Consumers taking the drug should contact their physician.

The FDA’s safety warning is here.

Apparently, 28 kids have died from misusing home-made and store-bought soccer goals.

This has prompted the federal government to issue a safety alert.

A study released Wednesday raises questions about the possible link between taking multi-vitamins and the spread of prostate cancer. Government scientists turned to a study tracking the diet and health of almost 300,000 men. About a third reported taking a daily multi-vitamin, and 5 percent were heavy users, swallowing the pills more than seven times a week.

Within five years of the study’s start, 10,241 men had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Some 1,476 had advanced cancer; 179 died.

Heavy multi-vitamin users were almost twice as likely to get fatal prostate cancer as men who never took the pills, concludes the study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Here’s the twist: Overall, the researchers found no link between multi-vitamin use and early-stage prostate cancer.

The researchers speculate that perhaps high-dose vitamins had little effect until a tumor appeared, and then could spur its growth.

While similar but smaller studies have suggested a link, too, more rigorous research is needed, caution the National Cancer Institute scientists. This newest study involves men who voluntarily took vitamins, and those most at risk – perhaps because they had a family history of the disease – may have been more likely to take the pills in hopes of avoiding their fate.

Still, “the findings lend further credence to the possibility of harm associated with increased use of supplements,” Dr. Christian Gluud of Copenhagen University Hospital and Dr. Goran Bjelakovic of Serbia’s University of Nis wrote in an accompanying editorial.

After months of listening to testimony and a government study that found widespread abuses, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, has introduced legislation that he says would curb excessive fees and questionable practices by credit card companies that make it difficult for consumers to climb out of debt.

Consumer groups are hailing the plan. Learn more here.

Households are spending about $1,000 more per year for gasoline than they were just five years ago, an 85 percent increase according to consumer groups’ analysis in testimony prepared for the House Judiciary Committee.

More information is available here.

The government is assigning some senior citizens to Medicare Part D drug prescription programs that cost them much more than the cheapest plan available, according to a Consumers Union study.

The group found that in Dearborn, seniors are paying much more on the program they were assigned than seniors in Boston.

The consumer group’s information can be found here.

People deal with percentages every day: the performance of a stock portfolio, a sale at the department store, or the performance of a new hybrid car, are all often expressed as percent changes. As an everyday occurrence, calculating percentages should be second nature to the average person. “Not so,” says Akshay Rao, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.

In the paper “When Two and Two is Not Equal to Four: Errors in Processing Multiple Percentage Changes,” Rao and Haipeng Chen, a Carlson School doctoral alum and assistant professor at the University of Miami, show that consumers treat percentages like whole numbers, and this results in systematic errors in calculation. People simply aren’t coming up with four when they add two plus two. The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Numerical quantities such as price or product performance are often expressed in percentage form,” said Rao. “But when consumers have to deal with more than one percentage at a time, they make errors that can be costly. For instance, if a store offers a 25 percent off sale with an additional 25 percent off for a certain product, people assume they are getting a 50 percent reduction. In reality, they are getting about a 43 percent discount. On a $100 product, they pay $56.25, not $50. This phenomenon becomes even more interesting when a value goes up and then down. Imagine your stock portfolio went up 40 percent last period, and down 30 percent this period. You are not better off by 10 percent. Your portfolio is down 2 percent.”

Marketing and public policy implications for this phenomenon are significant, the professors say. The effects of consumer miscalculation when confronted by multiple percentage changes can benefit firms at the expense of numerically challenged consumers. In their paper, Rao and Chen tested the impact of offering a 20 percent discount and an additional 25 percent discount versus an economically equivalent 40 percent discount in a retail store. The number of purchasers, sales volume, revenue and profit were all higher when the double discounts were offered.

The FDIC’s official sign has a new look and new information that all insured banks and savings associations will be required to display at teller stations, ATMs and branch locations. First, the new sign highlights the fact that FDIC insurance is “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.” In addition, revised wording notes that each depositor is “insured to at least $100,000″ – that’s because certain retirement accounts now are insured up to $250,000, up from the basic FDIC coverage of $100,000.