Another year, another round-up of the dangerous and the
daft. There was so much to choose from this year so this is just the tip of the
iceberg of nonsense on stilts. As ever, it’s divided into health, diet and
general craziness.
HEALTH
The Queen of Quacks, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop business has
spewed out some terrible old cobblers this year, some of which is potentially
very harmful. Here is her nonsense about toxic tampons debunked by the
excellent Dr Jen Gunter.
Advice given at her ‘health’ conference can be fatal and just in case you thought it couldn’t get any more
insane, she is now selling psychic vampire repellent. Yes, really.
Also in America, anti-vaxxers offered $100,000 for proof
that vaccines work. Oh dear. The fact that they’re alive to perpetrate such
arrant nonsense is proof enough, isn’t it? One word, anti-vaxxers: polio. Ever been in an iron lung? No. Why is that?
If further proof were needed, the tedious and notorious anti-vaxxer
Wakefield managed to cause a measles epidemic in the US.
Earlier in the year it looked like homeopathy would escape
an NHS prescribing ban despite cutbacks and despite the Chief Medical Officersaying it’s ‘rubbish’. But reason and science have for once prevailed. NHS England has
called for homeopathy to be blacklisted as a useless waste of money. Very well
done to the Good Thinking Society for their campaigning work on this.
Vets also joined the campaign against homeopathy and then later in the year the Royal College of Veterinary
Surgeons issued a new position statement on the veterinary use of complementary
and alternative medicines, homeopathy in particular, saying that vets must
offer treatments that "are underpinned by a recognised evidence base or
sound scientific principles." The new position statement makes it very
clear that homeopathy falls below this benchmark: "Homeopathy exists
without a recognised body of evidence for its use. Furthermore, it is not based
on sound scientific principles."
One of the newer health fads is turmeric. Eat it, drink it,
medicate with it. Harmless nonsense for people with more money than sense? Not
when a naturopath kills a woman with a turmeric injection or when claims are
made for it curing cancer.
I had an awkward conversation not so long ago with a woman
who swears by turmeric lattes every day and demanded to know how I dare
challenge ‘all the thousands of research papers’ that show it works. To her I
say: show me this evidence. It could be a long wait.
And while we’re on spices, cinnamon won’t help you magically
lose weight either. Sorry.
The long-enduring myth that women synchronise periods was debunked. There is no ‘dominant super uterus in a group of women that makes
everyone adjust their cycles’. So Super Uterus won’t be making an appearance in
the next DC movie, damn it. She’d be so much more interesting than Superman,
the most boring of all the supers.
As if UKIP wasn’t bad enough, one of their ‘politicians’ now
sells industrial strength bleach as a medical cure at £22 for 60ml. David
Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London, said “You
don’t absorb oxygen through your stomach. There’s not the slightest reason to
think it works for anything.” Assemble your own joke using the words UKIP,
toxic, liars and why is Farage constantly on the news when they have zero seats
in Parliament?
A wealthy autism charity is risking children’s lives, offering
to pay for them to attend clinics offering pseudoscientific treatments and
bogus diets, and it appears to endorse links between vaccines and autism. One
of the treatments promoted is MMS, which the National Autism Society describes
as a “bleach banned for human consumption”. There are claims it has been linked
to at least one death. The Food Standards Agency has warned about its use,
calling it an “industrial-strength bleach”. Yes, we’re looking at you, Mr UKIP.
There is yet more evidence that chiropractic is harmful and
potentially deadly, and now chiropractors trying to scare women about our clothes, saying skinny jeans, handbags and big fluffy hoods are wrecking our
backs. Dr Mary O'Keeffe, a back pain expert at the University of Limerick, says
their research is "complete scaremongering and there is no scientific
evidence to support any of it".
Earlier this year, a quack claiming to cure cancer by Skype
(for money, of course) was found guilty under the Cancer Act and is now facing
jail.
The spread of fake health ‘news’ is putting lives at risk.
Some of the claims may contravene the Cancer Act 1939: you can report any
claims that break the law to Advertising Standards.
DIET
I’m happy to report that the backlash against the vile,
smug, judgemental and dangerous clean eating movement is gaining momentum. But nature abhors a vacuum so as soon as one diet
fad dies, another rises to take its place. But calling them diets is so last
year. Now it’s all about Wellness. There are endless books, videos and
evangelists promoting their own brands of ‘better living’ which are really just
diets wrapped up in very expensive merchandising and ingredients. Because
wellness means thinness. There are no overweight Wellness gurus.
Celebrity-endorsed fad diets (sorry, Wellness programmes) are
nothing new. Lord Byron’s apple cider vinegar diet was taken up by his many
fans in the early nineteenth century and now it’s back. But without the poetry. Which is a blessing.
The low fat versus low carb battle
rages on with both sides claiming the other will kill you. Some of the research
is very flawed and the screaming headlines don’t help. There is more and more conspiracy talk about Big Sugar. The
sugar lobby is undeniably powerful but conspiracy theorists have attributed
it god-like powers to
ensure that we poor fools think saturated fat is the devil.
As Anthony Warner, aka the Angry Chef, says,
this would require ‘paying off the medical establishment, the World Health
Organisation, numerous charities, public health bodies and nutrition
researchers around the world, and keep producing systematic reviews that show
links between consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of heart
disease.’
The amount of rage generated by daring to question the low
carbers should set off the alarm bells that this is not just about food – as Dr
Margaret McCartney found out to her cost on Twitter when she dared to write this reasonable piece about the lack of evidence. This is my piece on the cult-like ferocity of the
low-carbers.
What no one has pointed out is that if we care about the
planet, we should be eating fewer animal products, not more. High protein/high
fat means more eggs, fish/seafood, meat and dairy when we should be aiming for
a more plant-based diet. And shouldn’t we give at least a moment’s thought to
the fact that there are still more underweight 5-19 year olds in the world than
obese ones?
There’s a myth doing the rounds that sugar and other carbs
‘feed’ cancer. They don’t.
Do artificial sweeteners cause dementia and strokes?
No.
Does sugar cause or worsen Alzheimer’s? According to the
tabloids, yes it does. According to the Alzheimer’s Society “What we don’t know
is whether changes in brain glucose metabolism play a role in causing or
worsening Alzheimer’s disease or whether the changes are just a by-product of
damage already occurring to brain cells.”
Another potentially dangerous diet fad is the Ketogenic
diet, which claims to cure everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s to pretty much
anything you can name. Here’s a good video explaining what it is and why it is
not a miracle (yes, he is a vegan but everything he says about keto stands up).
Yet another bit of dangerous garbage is the idea that
everything bad that happens can be cured with an alkaline diet. And while we’re
at it, you can’t cure cancer with ‘alkaline’ baking soda either.
Back to the Angry Chef who this time gets quite rightly
angry about PETA claiming dairy products cause autism.
The Pioppi diet has gained popularity this year. As the
British Dietetic Association commented: “the authors may well be the only
people in the history of the planet who have been to Italy and come back with a
diet named after an Italian village that excludes pasta, rice and bread – but
includes coconuts”. Here’s conclusive proof that coconuts have never been part
of a traditional European diet.
Do we need more protein in our diets? Only if you want to
make very expensive wee wee.
RANDOM NONSENSE
A Church says starve for three days to cure homosexuality
and that people are just claiming to be gay to get attention because they see
celebrities doing it. This really doesn’t help when nearly half of lesbian, gay,
bi and trans young people are bullied for being LGBT at school and when homophobic attacks in the UK rose by 147% in three
months after the Brexit vote.
On a more cheery note there’s the daftness of dopamine dressing – dress yourself happy with bright colours. Unless you’re me and hate them.
It’s yet another case of if you believe something you make it true, like
wearing lucky pants can make you feel more confident and so perform better.
For a change, a bit of abuse of history instead of science:
why lazy journos comparing Trump with Roman emperors are wrong.
Slimming pants! This
is hilarious. There is no way that any of these claims stand up – detox, lose
cellulite, lose weight, all the usual suspects. Plus, you look like a twat. No
wonder they're on offer.
Men are better at understanding projection and therefore
physics because they have to learn to pee standing up, according to three 'scientists'. “Playful urination practices – from seeing how
high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine
to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls
when it comes to physics,” the academics wrote. They said this is significant,
since the physics curriculum often uses projectile motion as the starting point
for more sophisticated mechanics concepts such as force, energy and momentum.
If only the average man's aim was that good. And I’m not
sure about the phrase ‘playful urination practices’. Oh, and correlation,
causation, yadda yadda.
Not so funny is this: the United Nations pulled staff out of
two districts in southern Malawi where a vampire scare triggered mob violence
in which at least five people were killed.
No werewolf sightings this year but belief in ghosts is on
the increase in America. Add your own Trump-based joke.
Eight out of ten UK water companies still use dowsing rods
to 'find' water. Yes, really. I often consult the spirits of the dead for
cooking tips. Who doesn’t?
A lot of the media and some skeptics have dismissed dowsing
as mediaeval. Here’s a good explanation of why that’s a lazy assumption. Have
they looked at a cathedral or an illuminated manuscript lately? Mediaeval
people were not morons, they just had less access to information than we do –
although some of us still choose to ignore it. What’s more, ‘records of dowsing
do not begin until the 16th century, and its popularity does not appear to have
peaked until the 19th and 20th centuries’.
DNA sampling reveals that nine yeti specimens were in fact eight bears and a dog. Damn.
Finally, an ancient fairy curse causes dips in the road in
Ireland, according to an Irish MP. I love this one and really wish it were
true. He said “if someone told me to go out and knock a fairy fort or touch it,
I would starve first.” The council’s road department said the dip was due to an
“underlying subsoil/geotechnical problem.” They’ll be sorry when their socks go
missing and their cows’ milk dries up.
That’s it for another year. To help inoculate yourself
against nonsense, this is a very good primer on how to read and understand a
scientific paper and this is a handy 12 point guide to spotting bad science.
Happy hunting.
Join us at London Skeptics in the Pub for a monthly dose of
sanity.
