Dr. Oz

Vandana Shiva: Quack

Vandana Shiva, Quack

Vandana Shiva, Quack

We’ve already looked at the promotion of pseudoscience to gain wealth and power by Vani Hari “Food Babe,” Mike Adams, and Dr. Oz. On the international scene, there’s an even more dangerous person: Vandana Shiva, wealthy promoter of food fear and anti-GMO pseudoscience.

Human beings have an innate fear of contamination (dirty or diseased food, for example.) Modern quacks play on this by targeting unfamiliar food ingredients or agricultural techniques for demonization; it is quite easy to make scientific-sounding allegations about unknown chemical names or genetic engineering techniques, present yourself as the heroic bearer of truths food businesses want to repress, and then reap the benefits of power and wealth that come from your skill at swaying the easily hoodwinked.

The New Yorker has a wonderful deep-dive story on Vandana Shiva by Michael Spector. If you don’t have time to read it all, here’s some good bits:

Shiva has a flair for incendiary analogies. Recently, she compared what she calls “seed slavery,” inflicted upon the world by the forces of globalization, to human slavery. “When starting to fight for seed freedom, it’s because I saw a parallel,” she said at a food conference in the Netherlands. “That time, it was blacks who were captured in Africa and taken to work on the cotton and sugarcane fields of America. Today, it is all of life being enslaved. All of life. All species.”

Shiva cannot tolerate any group that endorses the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, no matter what else the organization does, or how qualified its support. When I mentioned that Monsanto, in addition to making genetically engineered seeds, has also become one of the world’s largest producers of conventionally bred seeds, she laughed. “That’s just public relations,” she said. She has a similarly low regard for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has taken strong positions in support of biotechnology. Not long ago, Shiva wrote that the billions of dollars the foundation has invested in agricultural research and assistance poses “the greatest threat to farmers in the developing world.” She dismisses the American scientific organizations responsible for regulating genetically modified products, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture, as little more than tools of the international seed conglomerates.

At times, Shiva’s absolutism about G.M.O.s can lead her in strange directions. In 1999, ten thousand people were killed and millions were left homeless when a cyclone hit India’s eastern coastal state of Orissa. When the U.S. government dispatched grain and soy to help feed the desperate victims, Shiva held a news conference in New Delhi and said that the donation was proof that “the United States has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs” for genetically engineered products. She also wrote to the international relief agency Oxfam to say that she hoped it wasn’t planning to send genetically modified foods to feed the starving survivors. When neither the U.S. nor Oxfam altered its plans, she condemned the Indian government for accepting the provisions.

On March 29th, in Winnipeg, Shiva began a speech to a local food-rights group by revealing alarming new information about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on human health. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that in two years the figure of autism has jumped from one in eighty-eight to one in sixty-eight,” she said, referring to an article in USA Today. “Then they go on to say obviously this is a trend showing that something’s wrong, and that whether something in the environment could be causing the uptick remains the million-dollar question.

“That question’s been answered,” Shiva continued. She mentioned glyphosate, the Monsanto herbicide that is commonly used with modified crops. “If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it’s literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer’s.”

Hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat transgenic products every day, and if any of Shiva’s assertions were true the implications would be catastrophic. But no relationship between glyphosate and the diseases that Shiva mentioned has been discovered. Her claims were based on a single research paper, released last year, in a journal called Entropy, which charges scientists to publish their findings. The paper contains no new research. Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)

Shiva refers to her scientific credentials in almost every appearance, yet she often dispenses with the conventions of scientific inquiry. She is usually described in interviews and on television as a nuclear physicist, a quantum physicist, or a world-renowned physicist. Most of her book jackets include the following biographical note: “Before becoming an activist, Vandana Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists.” When I asked if she had ever worked as a physicist, she suggested that I search for the answer on Google. I found nothing, and she doesn’t list any such position in her biography.

“Shiva is lionized, particularly in the West, because she presents the romantic view of the farm,” Conway said. “Truth be damned. People in the rich world love to dabble in a past they were lucky enough to avoid—you know, a couple of chickens running around with the children in the back yard. But farming is bloody tough, as anyone who does it knows. It is like those people who romanticize villages in the developing world. Nobody who ever lived in one would do that.”

Everyone had a story to tell about insecticide poisoning. “Before Bt cotton came in, we used the other seeds,” Rameshwar Mamdev told me when I stopped by his six-acre farm, not far from the main dirt road that leads to the village. He plants corn in addition to cotton. “My wife would spray,” he said. “She would get sick. We would all get sick.” According to a recent study by the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, there has been a sevenfold reduction in the use of pesticide since the introduction of Bt cotton; the number of cases of pesticide poisoning has fallen by nearly ninety per cent. Similar reductions have occurred in China. The growers, particularly women, by reducing their exposure to insecticide, not only have lowered their risk of serious illness but also are able to spend more time with their children.

“Why do rich people tell us to plant crops that will ruin our farms?” Narhari Pawar asked. Pawar is forty-seven, with skin the color of burnt molasses and the texture of a well-worn saddle. “Bt cotton is the only positive part of farming,” he said. “It has changed our lives. Without it, we would have no crops. Nothing.”

The all-encompassing obsession with Monsanto has made rational discussion of the risks and benefits of genetically modified products difficult. Many academic scientists who don’t work for Monsanto or any other large corporation are struggling to develop crops that have added nutrients and others that will tolerate drought, floods, or salty soil—all traits needed desperately by the world’s poorest farmers. Golden Rice—enriched with vitamin A—is the best-known example. More than a hundred and ninety million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin-A deficiency. Every year, as many as half a million will go blind. Rice plants produce beta carotene, the precursor to vitamin A, in the leaves but not in the grain. To make Golden Rice, scientists insert genes in the edible part of the plant, too.

Golden Rice would never offer more than a partial solution to micronutrient deficiency, and the intellectual-property rights have long been controlled by the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute, which makes the rights available to researchers at no cost. Still, after more than a decade of opposition, the rice is prohibited everywhere. Two economists, one from Berkeley and the other from Munich, recently examined the impact of that ban. In their study “The Economic Power of the Golden Rice Opposition,” they calculated that the absence of Golden Rice in the past decade has caused the loss of at least 1,424,680 life years in India alone. (Earlier this year, vandals destroyed some of the world’s first test plots, in the Philippines.)

Note the pattern: a wealthy elite use populist politics (based on feeding the fears of the ignorant) to gain more power for themselves. If their programs (no trade or technology, local sources only, no intellectual property) were ever to be implemented, billions would starve and the world would revert to a static, repressive subsistence economy. The damage they do by preventing development of better crops and agricultural methods, as well as blocking trade and investment wherever they can, is already enormous. Can we call this evil? You could argue that such memes are well-meaning and continue to flourish because of a lack of understanding of complex economic systems and trade webs; for example, Gandhi’s emphasis on village self-sufficiency (“A free India for Gandhi meant the flourishing of thousands of self-sufficient small communities who rule themselves without hindering others. Gandhian economics focused on the need for economic self-sufficiency at the village level.”) was at the time motivated by antipathy to a British India’s mercantilist exploitation of poor Indian farmers. But to argue this today when only agricultural technology saved millions from starvation in the late 1960s (when Norman Borlaug’s improved wheat varieties doubled the subcontinent’s wheat production) is worse than irresponsible.

Reason’s science writer Ron Bailey decries her in a much quicker read. A few good bits:

I have long been tracking the career of lies and disinformation that constitute the anti-intellectual trajectory of virulent anti-biotech activist Vandana Shiva. For example, back in 2001, I reported:

Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left homeless when a cyclone slammed into India’s eastern coastal state of Orissa in October 1999. In the aftermath, CARE and the Catholic Relief Society distributed a high-nutrition mixture of corn and soy meal provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development to thousands of hungry storm victims. Oddly, this humanitarian act elicited cries of outrage.

“We call on the government of India and the state government of Orissa to immediately withdraw the corn-soya blend from distribution,” said Vandana Shiva, director of the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. “The U.S. has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs for GM [genetically modified] products which have been rejected by consumers in the North, especially Europe.” Shiva’s organization had sent a sample of the food to a lab in the U.S. for testing to see if it contained any of the genetically improved corn and soy bean varieties grown by tens of thousands of farmers in the United States. Not surprisingly, it did.

“Vandana Shiva would rather have her people in India starve than eat bioengineered food,” says C.S. Prakash, a professor of plant molecular genetics at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

Writer Mary McCarty famously said of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Nothing truer could be said of Shiva.

In a superb article, International Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology researcher Anand Ranganathan nicely summarizes Shiva’s legacy of dishonesty and outright fabrication. Below are some representative quotations from Shiva along with some analysis by Ranganathan:

Shiva: “Science and masculinity were associated in domination over nature and femininity, and the ideologies of science and gender reinforced each other. The witch-hunting hysteria which was aimed at annihilating women in Europe as knowers and experts was contemporous with two centuries of scientific revolution. It reached its peak with Galileo’s Dialogue…”

Shiva: “Scientific missions colluded with religious missions to deny rights to nature. The rise of mechanical philosophy with the emergence of the scientific revolution was based on the destruction of concepts of a self-regenerative, self-organising nature which sustained all life. Just as technology changes seed from a living, renewable resource into mere raw material, it devalues women in a similar way.”…

So she is also a Third-Wave feminist: appeals to emotion and victimhood replace reason and science, though she pretends to be a scientist. Technology is supposedly a tool of the Patriarchy and oppresses women!

This tide of unreason, funded by governments, foundations, NGOs, and academia, threatens the future progress of humanity.


Other posts on pseudoscientific quacks:

Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Mike Adams: Quack Suggests Murdering Monsanto-supporting Scientists
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Quack
More on Quacks: “Dr. Oz” Testifies He’s a Victim!
Vani Hari, “Food Babe” and Quack: Where the Money Comes From
Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack

Vani Hari, “Food Babe” and Quack: Where the Money Comes From

Vani Hari Food Babe

Vani Hari Food Babe

Via Virginia Postrel, just noticed an interesting investigative report in Ad Age (by E.J. Schultz and Maureen Morrison) on the financing of quackery. Vani Hari “Food Babe” is collecting large sums from marketers of fear-based foods and supplements. Taking advantage of innate aversion to “contamination,” her sponsors are hawking GMO-free foods and “natural” supplements for every ailment or problem. By raising paranoia and inflating reasons to fear GMOs and evil chemicals in food, she sets up her readers to buy expensive, sometimes useless, and sometimes harmful supplements, like Dr. Oz.

This is such a good read that it’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a few highlights:

… One thing is for sure: As she bashes mainstream food marketers, including Kraft Foods Group and Subway, Ms. Hari is emerging as a powerful brand herself, routinely appearing on national TV, where she is often presented as a food expert. In doing so, the Babe is positioned to capitalize on her growing fame with a burgeoning business model that includes making money by referring her loyal readers to several organic and GMO-free food brands via her website.

Under the program, known as affiliate marketing, she often posts editorial content praising these small brands, including links to their sites where readers can purchase the goods. She gets a cut of some of the transactions, according to the rules explained on some of her partners’ websites. Ms. Hari also sells “eating guides” for $17.99 a month and charges for speaking appearances.

Ms. Hari does not hold a nutrition or science degree, which leads some critics to label her an opportunist. “Historically, consumer advocacy has come from nonprofits,” said Maureen Ogle, an author and historian who has written about the food and beverage industry, in an email. “But the Babe isn’t an advocate. She’s an entrepreneur who clearly, obviously, is only in this for her own profit.”

Bloggers like her “know enough to sound credible, but they don’t know the real science [or] how to interpret peer-reviewed research to fully understand the issues that they might be preaching about,” said Julie Upton, a registered dietitian who runs a popular nutrition blog called Appetite for Health. “I stay awake at night worried that my profession is going to become a hobby because of these people.”

As Ms. Hari pursues her self-described mission of being “the person to carry the voice of millions,” she has also taken steps to form a viable business. She established Food Babe LLC on Aug. 1, 2011, according to filings with the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office. While her principal office is in Charlotte, her business is incorporated in Delaware, which is known for business-friendly regulations.

Part of her business model appears to be rooted in her affiliate-marketing partnerships. One of the companies she has recently plugged on her site is called Green Polka Dot Box, which sells home-delivered natural, organic and non-GMO foods. The company’s affiliate partners can earn 30% of the company’s annual $49.95 per-person membership fee for each person referred, plus $2 for every food purchase that person makes as long as they are a member, according to terms of the program listed on the company’s website.

The Federal Trade Commission requires that bloggers such as Ms. Hari disclose paid endorsements “clearly and conspicuously” on their websites.

Ms. Hari typically discloses her commercial partnerships at the tail end of her posts. Her disclosure states that “posts may contain affiliate links for products Food Babe has approved and researched herself. If you purchase a product through an affiliate link, your cost will be the same (or at a discount if a special code is offered) and Food Babe will automatically receive a small referral fee. Your support is crucial because it helps fund this blog and helps us continue to spread the word.”

An FTC spokeswoman declined to comment when asked if the disclosure met the “clear and conspicuous” threshold. Linda Goldstein, an ad lawyer and partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, said the rules are subjective and judged on a case-by-case basis. She said the FTC might favor a stand-alone message that does not include extraneous language, such as how the blog reader’s support is crucial.

Ms. Hari’s eating guides include meal calendars, recipes and grocery shopping lists with “approved brands.” Another revenue opportunity comes from speaking appearances, according to her website, which instructs viewers to inquire with her about availability and rates.

“I do have to support myself and I am very transparent about how I do that,” Ms. Hari said. “I don’t just put ads on my site to put ads. If I wanted to make a lot of money I could put a thousand ads on my site.” She added: “I can’t tell you how many people I turn away every single day. I only work with the brands I wholeheartedly support and they support my mission.”

Ms. Upton — whose site uses sponsored posts — did not disparage Ms. Hari for making money. “Running these blogs is not cheap … they have to be making some money somewhere,” she said.

But Ms. Hari gets more attention than most of her blogging peers as a result of her knack for drawing publicity (and page views) from her high-profile corporate takedowns. She often fires up her fan base, which she calls the “Food Babe Army,” on her Facebook page, which has more than 633,000 likes, and Twitter handle, which has more than 63,000 followers.

Traffic to her website is growing: Foodbabe.com averaged 310,000 unique monthly U.S. visitors in the first five months of 2014, up from 166,000 in the last five months of 2013, according to ComScore, which began tracking the site in August of 2013. By comparison, Ms. Upton’s Appetite for Health site — which according to her is among the top three for readership for dietitian-run sites — draws about 80,000 unique monthly views, she said.

Foodbabe.com’s web traffic surged in February and March, with 411,000 and 445,000 unique visits, respectively. The peak coincided with two posts she made: one about Subway in which she charged that the chain was using a dangerous chemical in its bread; and one in March, when she went after pizza chains with a variety of accusations.

Ms. Hari’s criticism of Subway focused on its use of azodicarbonamide, a chemical commonly used as a dough conditioner in bread baking. She described it as a “dangerous plastic chemical” that was also used to make yoga mats and shoe rubber and launched a petition for its removal on Feb. 4.

Is the chemical unsafe? Not according to the Food and Drug Administration’s website, which states that it is “not recommending that consumers change their diets because of exposure to [azodicarbonamide].” The agency notes that it approved the additive “based on a comprehensive review of safety studies, including multi-year feeding studies.”

John Coupland, a professor of food science at Penn State University, wrote in Popular Science magazine that to compare azodicarbonamide’s use in bread and yoga-mat production is not helpful. “To see the same chemical, particularly one with a scary name, in two such incongruous places is a sure way for a campaigner to trigger a disgust response but not a great way to decide if it’s safe,” he said.

Fergus Clydesdale, professor of food science at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said Ms. Hari is “very clever — she seems to know what buttons to hit” when it comes to stoking concern in consumers over what’s in their food. He noted, though, that many scary-sounding chemicals and ingredients occur in foods naturally. By her logic, Mr. Clydesdale said, one could argue that peaches are poisonous because they contain a high level of cyanide in the pit. He added that, in general, many of her claims contain “a misunderstanding of what dangerous levels are” in food. He cited a basic toxicology tenet popularized by scientist Paracelsus: the dose makes the poison.

In an interview, Ms. Hari countered that she is merely exposing issues that no one else is digging into. “The stuff that I am sharing is a lot about transparency and making sure people understand what is in their food and give them the choices,” she said. “I question what has happened because I was profoundly impacted by the way I was eating.”
She also expressed distrust of the FDA, alleging that “unfortunately the FDA approved a lot of these chemicals three decades ago or sometimes longer ago, and unfortunately we don’t know the [correct] dose.”

Mr. Clydesdale compared the responses by corporations to Ms. Hari and other activists bloggers to pleasing the mob. “The bloggers are the mob, and whatever it is they want, give it to them,” he said. “It’s bothersome because we’re dismissing science.”

She frequently uses her Facebook page to personalize the issues she covers. For example, on June 25 she posted about how she struggled with weight gain while in the corporate world. She then linked to an Oct. 2013 post from her website about how stress can cause weight gain. In that post she promoted and linked to a company called The Maca Team, which sells organic raw maca powder. On her site, Ms. Hari wrote that the Peruvian-grown plant can reduce stress and do everything from “improve mental clarity” to “treat PMS.”

According to The Maca Team’s affiliate program, partners can earn 20% on each sale they refer. Ms. Hari’s June 25 Facebook post drew 2,708 likes and 1,538 shares within 15 hours. One fan asked, “Can this be taken while breastfeeding?” Another fan wrote: “I just ordered some! Thank you also…for continuing to educate us.”

But some fans expressed concern about the post, including one person who wrote: “I love the exposure work of Food Babe so much, but if the direction is going to be the whole hearted advertisement of superfoods and supplements that actually have long histories of use by indigenous peoples to us western folks as universally good for everyone, sadly I shall have to be more judicious about my support.”

I’m also skeptical of the FDA’s regulation, but she clearly steps over the line recommending supplements for medical conditions without evidence and collecting money from their promoters for doing so. Free speech in commerce is limited to truthful speech, and untruthful speech to induce a commercial transaction is fraud; we have alphabet agencies supposedly policing such speech — the FDA, the FTC, the SEC, in areas of health, general commerce, and investments. Everyone should be free to express their thoughts on health-related issues, but when even cautious companies like 23andMe have had their truthful and disclaimer-laden speech limited by FDA threats, the ability of these quacks to bend the truth and make unfounded health claims for pay is distorting the public’s view of the science.

Rather than see her slapped down by the obtuse regulatory state, those of us who know better are countering her distortions by exposing her corrupt motivation. She may even believe everything she promotes is good, but being deluded is no excuse for promoting “natural” substances with unknown side effects and dangers to the general population with only the sketchiest warnings or proof of efficacy.

I’ve previously discussed the problem of the “Food Babe” here, and Dr. Oz here.

Bonus reading: Medical Student Wants to Bring Down Dr. Oz.


Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 


Other posts on pseudoscientific quacks:

Vandana Shiva: Quack
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Mike Adams: Quack Suggests Murdering Monsanto-supporting Scientists
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Quack
More on Quacks: “Dr. Oz” Testifies He’s a Victim!
Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack

For more on diet and weight loss with real scientific backing;

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Starbucks, Jamba Juice Make You Fat
Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat. Government Guidelines Did!
‘Fed Up’ Asks, Are All Calories Equal?
Fructose: The True Villain?
More on “Fed Up”, Sugar Subsidies, and Obesity
Another Study on Diet Drinks
LeBron James Cut Carbs for Lean Look
Why We’re Fat: In-Depth Studies Under Way
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
More on Diet Drinks: Best Studies Show They Aid Weight Loss
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Sugared Soft Drinks: Health Risk? (and What About Diet Soda?)
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Acidic Soft Drinks and Sodas: Demineralization Damages Teeth
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy
Bulletproof Coffee: Coffee, Oil, and Butter for Breakfast?

For more on good supplements and life-extending habits:

Low-Dose Aspirin Reduces Pancreatic Cancer
Daily Aspirin Regimen Reduces Cancer Rates
Lower Back Pain: Acetaminophen (Tylenol, Paracetamol) Useless
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Scams: Multi-Level Marketing, Herbalife
Vitamin D: Anti-Dementia?

More on Quacks: “Dr. Oz” Testifies He’s a Victim!

Dr. Oz testifies

Dr. Oz testifies

As a followup to my post on “Food Babe” Vani Hari’s quackery, media quack Dr. Oz was called up before Congress to explain how he could in good conscience promote 16 miracle fat loss solutions, none of which work. Consumerist excerpts:

Oprah’s favorite alternative medicine mouthpiece Dr. Oz got little love during Tuesday’s Senate subcommittee hearing on the misleading marketing of diet products, with the TV personality admitting that his use of terms like “miracle” for unproven treatments had provided fodder to scammers out to make a quick buck off people desperate to shed pounds. Last night, the Doc went on Facebook to give his fans his perspective on the issue.

“For years I felt that because I did not sell any products that I could be enthusiastic in my coverage,” wrote Doc Oz, who was chastised — most notably by Missouri Senator Clair McCaskill — for shows where he called certain weight-loss products “the number one miracle in a bottle” or “the magic weight-loss solution for every body type,” in spite of little to no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to back up such claims.

“I believe the research surrounding the products I cover has value,” writes Oz, without naming any particular studies. “I took part in the hearing because I am accountable for my role in the proliferation of these scams and I recognize that my enthusiastic language has made the problem worse at times.”

As he stated during the hearing, Dr. Oz defended his choice to air programs about these unproven products by saying that the discussion is going to happen anyway so it should happen on his show. “To not have the conversation about supplements at all, however, would be a disservice to the viewer,” he explains. “In addition to exercising an abundance of caution in discussing promising research and products in the future, I look forward to working with all those present yesterday in finding a way to deal with the problems of weight loss scams.”

A good chunk of the population wants to be believe there are easy solutions to medical problems being kept from them by evil drug and food companies. The primary solution to fat gain issuescutting back on carbs — doesn’t require purchase of a magic substance and so can’t be marketed as profitably. Having been partially protected by the FDA from some quack medical claims, the population is far less skeptical than it should be. “How could they say that if it wasn’t true?” — quite profitably, it turns out.

Althouse blog comments on this, noting Senator McCaskill’s statement “I know you feel that you’re a victim… If you would be more careful, maybe you wouldn’t be victimized as frequently,” which conflicts with “don’t you dare assign any responsibility to the victim!” arguments about female victims.

Other posts on pseudoscientific quacks:

Vandana Shiva: Quack
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Mike Adams: Quack Suggests Murdering Monsanto-supporting Scientists
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Quack
Vani Hari, “Food Babe” and Quack: Where the Money Comes From
Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack

Vani Hari: “Food Babe” and Quack

Vani Hari Food Babe

Vani Hari Food Babe

Our goal here at JebKinnison.com is to give you reliable and useful information about living a high-quality life. Unfortunately others have made a good living providing misinformation designed to scare you into buying their products or giving them further attention to sell ad space; this is called “yellow journalism,” or in the health fields, quackery. While much myth and superstition is harmless, some has very real and dangerous consequences; we’re now seeing epidemics of childhood diseases like measles and whooping cough that had been almost eliminated by vaccination because some people created scare stories about vaccines and persuaded millions of parents to avoid vaccinations. Meanwhile, genetic engineering has been used to increase yields, reduce use of insecticides, and create wonderful new products like rice with natural Vitamin A, which could help end a type of Vitamin A deficiency-caused blindness among the very poor. Pseudoscience and alarmism have combined to produce a paranoid sect that, if widely followed, will turn the clock back to an era where starvation and disease were much more prevalent.

Quacks like Dr. Oz have made fortunes misleading the public. The latest example of this is Vani Hari, the “Food Babe,” who has made a career out of misleading scare stories about chemicals in common foods:

Like Mark Crislip, who recently wrote about her about her mind-numbingly stupid antivaccine post, until recently I had no idea who she was, but unfortunately, I do now. She’s photogenic and also has a talent and penchant for making her utter ignorance of chemistry and science work for her as a powerful P.R. tool that has catapulted her from an obscure food blogger to a guest on television shows such as The Doctors and that repository of all medical crankery and quackery, The Dr. Oz Show, where The Great and Powerful Oz himself praised her activities as part of the “Oz effect.” Her name is Vani Hari, but she is much better known by her blog name, The Food Babe. She’s been featured on this blog before, not surprisingly, both by Mark Crislip and Steve Novella, who dismantled her claims that microwaving food somehow destroys its nutritional value and renders it full of “toxins” and her attack on Subway for using azodicarbonamide, which she dubbed the “yoga mat chemical.”

Read the whole post for a flavorful deconstruction of Vani Hari, skillful propagandist and media manipulator.


Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 


More on Vani Hari and other modern quacks:

Vani Hari, “Food Babe” and Quack: Where the Money Comes From
Vandana Shiva: Quack
More on Quacks: “Dr. Oz” Testifies He’s a Victim!
“Parallel Science Propaganda Machine”
Mike Adams: Quack Suggests Murdering Monsanto-supporting Scientists
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Quack
Progressive Neighborhoods: Low Vaccination Rates Create Epidemics

For more on healthy eating, diet, and weight loss:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Starbucks, Jamba Juice Make You Fat
Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat. Government Guidelines Did!
‘Fed Up’ Asks, Are All Calories Equal?
Fructose: The True Villain?
More on “Fed Up”, Sugar Subsidies, and Obesity
Another Study on Diet Drinks
LeBron James Cut Carbs for Lean Look
Why We’re Fat: In-Depth Studies Under Way
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
More on Diet Drinks: Best Studies Show They Aid Weight Loss
Sugared Soft Drinks: Health Risk? (and What About Diet Soda?)
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Acidic Soft Drinks and Sodas: Demineralization Damages Teeth
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy
Bulletproof Coffee: Coffee, Oil, and Butter for Breakfast?

For more on worthwhile supplements and life extension habits:

Supplements and Life Extension:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Low-Dose Aspirin Reduces Pancreatic Cancer
Daily Aspirin Regimen Reduces Cancer Rates
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
Lower Back Pain: Acetaminophen (Tylenol, Paracetamol) Useless
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Scams: Multi-Level Marketing, Herbalife
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Vitamin D: Anti-Dementia?
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy