{"id":742,"date":"2013-03-17T14:18:12","date_gmt":"2013-03-17T19:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/?p=742"},"modified":"2013-03-29T13:11:22","modified_gmt":"2013-03-29T18:11:22","slug":"2013-03-17-whac-a-mole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/2013\/03\/17\/2013-03-17-whac-a-mole\/","title":{"rendered":"2013.03.17: Whac-A-Mole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If there&#8217;s a group I&#8217;ve enjoyed ridiculing this year, it&#8217;s all those related to the quacktastic <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quackwatch.org\/01QuackeryRelatedTopics\/holisticdent.html\">Weston A. Price<\/a> Foundation, such as Sally Fallon and her book &#8220;Nourishing Traditions&#8221;, as well as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skepdic.com\/mercola.html\">Dr. Mercola<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>These are easy targets.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3 title=\"Setting the Stage\">I.<\/h3>\n<p>I&#8217;m not doing any original research here, I&#8217;m merely amusing myself by reading others critique or just bash them; and then their cult-like followers respond in comment sections with great indignity. Clearly, they reason, the original poster didn&#8217;t read the book in question, or it must all be true because my hundred-and-fifty-year-old grandmother ate lard and ghee every day and was as healthy as a horse and outlived all my other relatives who adapted to a &#8216;western diet&#8217; and so clearly saturated fat is good for us and anecdote anecdote anecdote.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s my <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Yada_Yada\">yada yada yada<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Yoda, Yoda, Yoda.<\/p>\n<h3 title=\"Quackery\">II.<\/h3>\n<p>[1] <a href=\"http:\/\/www.diseaseproof.com\/archives\/debunking-diet-myths-dietblog-looks-at-nourishing-traditions.html\">Diet-Blog Looks at Nourishing Traditions<\/a>. From the comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;my paternal grandmother, in india, has been telling me as long as i can remember about the wonderful nutritional properties of ghee (clarified butter) and coconut oil (a traditional part of the south indian diet) &#8211; both are valued highly in ayurvedic medicine.&#8221; It gets more anecdotey from there &#8230; but my quackmeter was already at eleven with &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ayurveda\">ayurvedic medicine<\/a>&#8216;. As they say &#8212; and I say, flippantly &#8211;, you know what you call &#8216;alternative medicine&#8217; that works? Medicine.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Your say against my say. Be practical, go on Sally Fallon&#8217;s diet for 6 months and proof her wrong!&#8221; Perhaps I shouldn&#8217;t dismiss someone for being unable to write, but it&#8217;s Saturday and on the weekend I&#8217;m no longer paid to be tactful. In any case, it&#8217;s more of the non-scientific &#8212; anti-scientific &#8212; all-views-are-equal, radical subjectivity approach. When I read drivel like this I want to force-feed people a little Hume, not because he was &#8216;right&#8217;, but because he&#8217;s a good place to start thinking critically about how, using empirical means, we may build up, stage by stage, more certain and more general (if not not universal) claims to knowledge. &#8220;I have my knowledge and you have your knowledge&#8221;, as this comment basically claims, is an exercise in vapid anti-intellectualism.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;She says to replace chemical fats (margarine, shortening, etc.) with real fats that are good for you&#8221; &#8230; someone doesn&#8217;t understand any meaningful meaning of &#8216;chemical&#8217; or &#8216;real&#8217;. In real life I hate this sort of magical thinking, which provides an interesting but batsh*t scale of &#8216;real&#8217; based on a supposed &#8216;natural = good&#8217; relation, along with some vitalism and so on; it&#8217;s the Early Modern Period thrust into the quackery of the 19th century. But from an academic and critical point of view I&#8217;ve always found this manner of &#8216;thinking&#8217; fascinating.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>[2] <a href=\"http:\/\/www.diseaseproof.com\/archives\/diet-myths-fanciful-folklore-is-no-match-for-modern-science.html\">Fanciful Folklore Is No Match For Modern Science<\/a>. Quotworthy:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;WAPF correctly points out that processed foods, sugar, corn syrup, and white flour are harmful, but nutritional deficiencies caused by \u201cjunk foods\u201d are not remedied by a diet high in meat and butter, animal products that are devoid of plant-derived phytonutrients, which promote health and slow the \u201caging\u201d process.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<em>Nourishing Traditions<\/em>, by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, is a smorgasbord of woefully outdated and potentially dangerous advice&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Circular logic: &#8220;Fallon and Enig perpetuate long-held nutritional myths by referencing the same people who started the myths in the first place.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course, alas, we&#8217;re also dealing with a post by Dr. Fuhrman, who is another one-man industry and who has a certain agenda. Thus we must use our critical thinking caps.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencebasedmedicine.org\/index.php\/your-disease-your-fault\/\">Your disease, your fault<\/a> at Science-Based Medicine: &#8220;And Joel <em>is<\/em> trying to sell you something. Like most so-called medical writers at HuffPo, he links directly to his website, where he sells all sorts of miracles.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.peertrainer.com\/tip_of_the_day\/2009\/01\/eat-to-live-diet-review.html\">Eat To Live Diet, Eat For Health: Review, Observations, Success, Doing It With Weight Watchers<\/a>: &#8216;celebrity&#8217; endorsement? Check. Dr. Oz endorsement? Check. Reads more like a paid advertisement than a review? Check.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anyway, back to the original topic, in brief:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9EOAREyN8ew\">SALLY. FALLON MEAT QUACK AND WITCHDOCTOR<\/a> (ooh, look, all-caps!)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.marlerblog.com\/lawyer-oped\/sally-fallon-morell-and-the-weston-a-price-foundation-you-better-get-a-very-good-lawyer-and-lots-o\/&quot;\">Sally Fallon Morell and the Weston A. Price Foundation, you better get a very good lawyer \u2013 and lots of insurance<\/a> (about raw milk quackery)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/sustainablesummer.wordpress.com\/tag\/sally-fallon-is-a-quack\/\">Nourishing Traditions is total Quackery<\/a> (that&#8217;s more like it &#8230; along with the cat fights in the comments)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/unreasonable.org\/node\/1642\">Weston A. Price Foundation: shills and quacks<\/a> (&#8220;The Weston A. Price Foundation is one of the primary groups responsible for spreading some of the FUD that you may have heard about soy products.&#8221; Indeed. And then you get the stupid comment by Biologist: &#8220;Veganism and vegetarinism [sic] are senseless when you consider predator-prey relations and when it comes to your need for omega-3s in balence [sic] with omega-3s. If you don&#8217;t listen to me oh well, you will be infertile as a result. Soy is nutriution [sic] deficient and a scam.&#8221; I love it!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s fun letting the quacks and cranks go at each other.<\/p>\n<h3 title=\"Digressions and Diversions\">III.<\/h3>\n<p>As for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.soya.be\/\">soy<\/a>, while I may not necessarily respect the groups I&#8217;m linking to (oh, <a href=\"http:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/cray-cray\">cray-cray<\/a> Animal Liberation Front &#8230;), but they can be used as anti-Mercola medicine:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.animalliberationfront.com\/Practical\/Health\/WhatAboutSoy.htm\">What About Soy?<\/a> (Plus, I love the 1990s color scheme, very Web 0.47)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.veganhealth.org\/articles\/soy_wth\">Soy: What&#8217;s the Harm?<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/jacknorrisrd.com\/?p=1778\">Response to Not Soy Fast<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.collective-evolution.com\/2012\/10\/05\/the-toxic-truth-about-soy\/\">Evidence Soy is Not Ideal to Consume<\/a> (the POST is pure Mercola-esque quackery copied-and-pasted cognitively from similar sources &#8212; see also &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/wellnessmama.com\/3684\/is-soy-healthy\/\">Why Soy is Not Healthy<\/a>, which is almost a carbon copy, or the anti-soy section of <a href=\"http:\/\/chriskresser.com\/9-steps-to-perfect-health-1-dont-eat-toxins\">9 Steps To Perfect Health &#8211; #1: Don&#8217;t Eat Toxins<\/a>, which is another clone &#8211;, BUT there&#8217;s the detailed and link-heavy comment by De Landtsheer that&#8217;s worth perusing &#8230; though it&#8217;s immediately followed by some sort of genius pseudoscience, &#8220;It is a fact that soy proteins are folded and cannot be broken down by the body.&#8221; Oh. Really. Oh, Joe Martino, you limp-brained nematode.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Going elsewhere &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>[3] <a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnrobbins.info\/blog\/grass-fed-beef\/\">What About Grass-fed Beef?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>As someone from the West I&#8217;m familiar with mile after mile of grazing cattle; the description here, however, of the extant policies make them seem so entrenched that hope for better West quickly turns to despair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If there&#8217;s a group I&#8217;ve enjoyed ridiculing this year, it&#8217;s all those related to the quacktastic Weston A. Price Foundation, such as Sally Fallon and her book &#8220;Nourishing Traditions&#8221;, as well as Dr. Mercola. These are easy targets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[496,495,492,493,278,494,491,497],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-2","tag-circular-logic","tag-nourishing-traditions","tag-quackery","tag-quacktastic","tag-soy","tag-soyl","tag-weston-a-price","tag-yoda-yoda-yoda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}