NONSENSE ON STILTS 2018

Here we go again, then. The annual round-up of the good, the bad and the ugly in healthcare, nutrition and general daftness.

Let’s start with some good news: this is a great thread by Simon Singh on Skeptic successes in the past few years. 

HEALTH

Following a consultation, the Charity Commission has decided that charities must support their alternative medicine claims with good scientific evidence.

In other good news, homeopathy is no longer publicly funded on the NHS – and about bloody time too - but of course they won’t go down without a fight: homeopaths are going to take the NHS to court. 

Homeopathic vets also had a hissy fit because the RCVS demands its members use evidence-based treatments. Because science doesn’t know everything, right? Even though vets are scientists. 

Cancer patients using alt med rather than conventional treatments have a worse survival rate. And it’s not just people self-treating; research finds that ‘Doctors who are attracted to homeopathy despite a lack of evidence may be generally less good at keeping up to date on treatment guidelines and safety alerts or be less willing to work with colleagues to improve. Doctors who offer it to patients tend to do worst on scores for effective use of conventional medicines.'

Mixing alt med with real meds is like running an unsupervised and potentially deadly experiment.  Natural does not equal better. Or safe. Look at what happened to that great self-doser Dr Jekyll.

Twenty years on, the legacy of the MMR vaccine and autism scare lies continues to take its toll across Europe. Cases of measles have hit a record high, according to the World Health Organization. Experts blame the surge in infections on a drop in the number of people being vaccinated. Although, inevitably, it’s a bit morecomplicated than that.

There has been some interesting research on how anti-vax attitudes correlate with belief in conspiracy theories and how this may affect pro-vax campaigns. It’s not surprising that there would be cross-overs as the same mindset is transferrable from one false belief to another.

It wouldn’t be a Skeptic Round-up without some mention of La Paltrow. Don’t put coffee up your bum even if she tells you to. And don’t use live bee stings either, even if she says ‘I’m open to anything. I’ve been stung by bees. It’s actually pretty incredible if you research it.’ Probably not so incredible for the bees, though.

Paltrow says anyone who challenges the healing powers of her 'wellness' products is against the empowerment of women. As if that passive aggressive act would shut down all debate. Lucky for us, her main challenger is a woman.  The wonderful Dr Jen Gunter attended the GOOP conference and reported from the frontline of 'wellness' where she found that the Goop store is “90% quackatorium, and there was no evidence supporting Gwyneth Paltrow’s claim that Goop does not engage in pseudoscience as a commercial venture."

There is some good news. Goop has agreed to pay a substantial settlement over unproven claims about the health benefits of its infamous vaginal eggs.  ‘Under the settlement Goop is banned from making any claims regarding the efficacy of its products without reliable scientific evidence.’

Enough about her.

Plain packaging doesn’t decrease the number of smokers – quite the opposite. It’s also failed in France and Australia. It certainly wouldn’t have deterred me when I smoked. The intention may be to deter new smokers (children) but it's impossible to determine accurately whether any one factor has an influence on either current or potential smokers.

A naturopath treated a child with rabid dog saliva to cure behavioural problems, claiming he was in a ‘dog state’. She claimed that "The dog that bit him may have recently been vaccinated with the rabies vaccine or the dog bite in and of itself may have affected the boy with the rabies miasm … Either is possible and the phenomenon is well-known in homeopathy. A bite from an animal, with or without rabies vaccination has the potential to imprint an altered state in the person who was bitten, in some ways similar to a rabies infection."

A miasm is a homeopathic term for ‘the ghost of the disease state still rampant in the energy system.’  The non-homeopathic definition of the word is ‘noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere’. Pretty much sums it up. Just as well it wasn’t a werewolf that bit him.

Another naturopath is promoting peat tampons. Just don’t go there. 

DIET

Weight loss magnets – at last, what we’ve all been waiting for! Oh, wait a minute … This is why magnets don’t work like that.

Taking fish oil supplements for a healthy heart is nonsense says a Cochrane report.

Is sugar the new heroin? Normally everything ‘bad’ is compared with smoking these days. And ‘bad’ has become shorthand for ‘I disapprove of…’ Sugar is not addictive. Repeat. Sugar is not addictive. Sugar is not addictive.

The truth about Public Health England’s sugar reduction scheme: ‘The idea is to reduce sugar content in most foods by 20 per cent by 2020. The first target was a five per cent reduction by 2017 but this has not happened. It was never likely to happen. Instead, there has been a two per cent reduction across the eight categories that PHE is most interested in… Food companies need little incentive to shrink their products while keeping the price the same (Nestlé and Mars were frantically shrinking their products before the sugar reduction plan officially began - and before Brexit). But the government is now encouraging them to do it. Indeed, it is effectively compelling them to do it because that is the only realistic way of cutting sugar content in chocolate, confectionery and biscuits, which are the main sources of sugar.’

In some cases, the sugar content has gone down but overall calories have gone up. If you take the sugar out you have to put something in so that the product doesn’t taste like cardboard smeared in brown fat.

And other research states "We were unable to find evidence that any sugar tax actually implemented anywhere in the world has led to improvements in health." Sorry, Jamie Oliver. 

Water has become a big fad this year. There has been a new raw water craze. Mmm yummy poo and germs and bits of twig and insects and insect poo.

Need a mental boost? Try rosemary water. Only £4 a bottle. Check out the science section: ‘The herb features in Greek mythology, the New Testament, and Shakespearean drama’. Yes, it did say science.

Or there’s alkaline water that has been treated to have a higher pH level than the usual 6.5-7.5. The makers say it provides “better hydration” and is “designed to obtain optimum body balance” because it “uses specialized electronic cells coated with a variety of rare earth minerals to produce scientifically engineered water”.

Science says: “Your body regulates its [blood] pH in a very narrow range because all our enzymes are designed to work at pH 7.4. If our pH varied too much we wouldn’t survive… you’re literally just flushing money down the drain”.

GENERAL NONSENSE

A sceptical look at the long history of Personality Testing – including the bunk that is Myers-Briggs which is basically corporate astrology. 

Exorcism is on the rise. These truly are the Dark Ages.

A Mexican priest claims: ‘The vast majority of people who see him have normal problems or mental illnesses, and he says he has sent people to seek psychiatric help. But he says 2-3% show signs of demonic “vexation” … His subjects, he says, have problems that cannot be explained in normal medical terms. One, who he believes may have been cursed by her mother-in-law, feels an almost constant sensation of daggers entering her legs, knitting needles in her arms, and a clenched hand at her chin. Another was so obsessed by self-gratification that he masturbated 40 times a day. “Normally speaking it is humanly impossible … so that is a satanic thing”.’

I do like the term ‘vexation’ and will attempt to use it in general conversation. How does the woman know what daggers entering her legs actually feel like, or knitting needles in her arms? As a knitter, I can say that it would be bloody hard to stab with a knitting needle, they’re just not sharp enough. I’d use an embroidery needle.

It’s not just Mexico where exorcism is on the rise. A top Irish exorcist called for more exorcists because ‘there has been increasing evidence of the malicious activity of the evil one’. Pope Francis gave formal recognition to the International Association of Exorcists in 2014. According to Fr Collins, ‘it’s only in recent years that the demand has risen exponentially’ and he blames ‘a growing apostasy within the Church’. Scare tactics, then. Come back to Church or the Evil One will get you.

The ‘malicious activities of the evil one’ has a great ring to it. I shall be using it to refer to anyone I don’t like in future.

According to vets, the government is being very economical with the truth about the efficacy of badger culling: “Badger culling has not worked. They are issuing barefaced lies in this matter." The former head of DEFRA’s wildlife epidemiology unit who advised the department on its TB strategy for more than 40 years says: "Defra has been cherry-picking the science since they started culling. The fact that they are rolling it out on such a vast scale is a travesty of the available science." 

The Indian education minister says evolution is ‘scientifically wrong’ because no one has ever seen an ape turn into a man. He seems to be confusing science with shape-shifting. I have however seen a man turn into an ape on several occasions. Generally after the application of alcohol.

This debunks the myth that women talk more than men. Men of course have much more important things to say. At great length. Even when we’re the expert in the subject and they just read an article by Jordan Peterson and shut up or I’ll send you death threats on social media for daring to mention this. 

The ‘psychology’ of the power stance has also been debunked. Politicians should keep on doing it. So much of what comes out of their mouths is inane/terrifying/depressing that they might as well give us a laugh.

So-called ‘healing crystals’ often come from ethically and environmentally dubious sources. So they’re not just pretty shiny things.

Koko the gorilla’s language skills were not at all as we’d been lead to believe, more a mixture of wishful thinking and ignorance about how language actually works. Damn it.  Who doesn’t love a chatty gorilla with a pet kitten? 

There is no evidence that tech is as ‘addictive as cocaine’. Nor are cupcakes, ice cream, power, carbs, World of Warcraft, sugar etc etc. Claims are often based on a misunderstanding of what addiction is and an oversimplified description of what the brain chemical dopamine does, according to clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell.

Hunt’s screen time limits for kids is yet more evidence free policy, yet another moral panic: ‘the recognition of so-called gaming disorder by the World Health Organisation is premature.’.

Andy Przybylski, associate professor and director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute said: “The thing that is very, very important to understand about this is that these correlations are extremely small,” he said. “And 99% of a child’s wellbeing has nothing measurable to do with screens, no matter how you measure them.”

It turns out it’s a myth that Victorian doctors treated hysterical women with vibrators. Damn, that’s another fun one out the window then.

There are times when I so wish magic was real. A coven of New York witches put a hex on US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and, just to make the story even more fun, a Catholic priest and exorcist in California countered the spell by saying prayers for the justice at Mass, saying "This is a conjuring of evil - not about free speech."

They claim that similar hexes on Trump have been successful "We feel the rituals were a success as they sought to expose Trump for what he is, and that has happened on many levels; from the Russia probe to the exposé on his finances to Stormy Daniels."

It is of course impossible to tell without an unhexed control Trump whether they worked or not.

A real treat to end with– an archive of occult recordings. Everything from the voice of Alistair Crowley to voices beyond the grave to all manner of spooky shit. Enjoy.

For vaccination against nonsense, dangerous or otherwise, join us at London Skeptics in the Pub  or find your local Skeptics group. London is the original SitP and 2019 sees the twentieth anniversary of our founding. There will be celebrations and they will not be carb-free.

Modern Life Is Toxic

There are two narratives we’re being fed at the moment, scare stories that are essentially about how modern life is killing us. Everything we breathe, everything we eat, can either kill us or make us fat or damage our children. There’s an underlying message of nostalgia for ye olden days when food was safe and chemicals were safely confined to the periodic chart on the classroom wall. The days before Brexit and Trump and Facebook and everything going to hell in a hand cart.

A study has found that the chemicals in cleaning products can cause serious lung function decline in women.

It says that ‘According to new research, women who work as cleaners or regularly use cleaning products at home experience a greater decline in lung function over time than women who do not clean.’

And of course the effect is being compared with smoking, because everything is these days, including sugar.

The phrasing is odd: ‘The effect of occupational cleaning was thus comparable to smoking somewhat less than 20 pack-years’. ‘Somewhat less’ is meaningless. Does it mean a bit less or a lot less? The effect of smelling a lovely flower is somewhat less than smoking.

The hydra of chemical versus natural is rearing its ugly heads again. In this vision of the world, natural (ie unprocessed) is always better even though cancer, ricin, deadly nightshade, botulism and many more things are natural. And a chemical is a chemical whether it comes from a lab or from a plant. The cleanest mountain air or spring water are made of chemicals.

The point is not whether these chemicals are harming us, it’s that the reporting is gleefully playing on our fears. At a time of national and global insecurity, people are more vulnerable to scare stories, we’re hyper-alert to yet more things that are threatening Life As We Know It.

The Evil Chemicals narrative ties in with the Ultra-processed Food narrative, the other monster that is crawling out of the night to stalk us.

The report the media has picked up on says that ‘a 10% increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diet was associated with significant increases of 12% in the risk of overall cancer and 11% in the risk of breast cancer’.

However, Professor Linda Bauld, Cancer Research UK's prevention expert, said: 'It's already known that eating a lot of these foods can lead to weight gain, and being overweight or obese can also increase your risk of cancer, so it's hard to disentangle the effects of diet and weight.'

Dr Ian Johnson, from the Quadram Institute in Norwich, said the study had ‘identified some rather weak associations. The problem is that the definition of ultra-processed foods they have used is so broad and poorly defined that it is impossible to decide exactly what, if any, causal connections have been observed.’

And Professor Tom Sanders at King's College London said that mass-produced bread would be classed as ultra-processed, but a home-made loaf or bread from a posh local bakery would not. 'This classification seems arbitrary and based on the premise that food produced industrially has a different nutritional and chemical composition from that produced in the home or by artisans. This is not the case.'

This study is highly critical of the classifications used for ultra-processed food too.

There's a significant point in Professor Sanders’ comment about bread; there's a lot of food snobbery and smuggery going on, with the foods that are identified as being mostly eaten by lower income people being demonised whereas middle class food is more 'wholesome' and 'virtuous'.

The moral high ground food police probably don't count craft ale or artisan gin as highly processed and don’t seem to have noticed that even porridge made with soya milk and honey counts as 'ultra-processed'.

The smugness is about doing things more simply or more traditionally, buying food that doesn’t come in packaging. Yes, plastics are destroying the environment but food packaging extends the shelf life of products, causing less wastage and less environmental harm from producing (even) more than we need. It’s also a great boon to people too busy to shop for fresh produce and ingredients every day. It’s a complex problem not solved by ill-informed moralising or nostalgia.

Toxins (aka chemicals) have taken the place of diphtheria, polio and smallpox as the Invisible Evil (and plague if you go back further). But never fear, you can buy a detox from a wellness guru because your fear is their marketing opportunity.

It's not like things were any better in ye olden days when people breathed in coal or wood smoke or smog, and lots more people smoked. Sitting around in the cave or wooden houses before chimneys were invented during the long winters didn’t just make people smell like kippers, it caused serious lung damage.

Employment was much more lung-unfriendly too - mining, dyeing and tanning, the cloth industry or industrial scale laundries just to name a few.

Has there ever been a time in human history when our lungs were pink and flawless since we first learnt to make fire? It’s not modern life that’s killing us, being alive has always been dangerous. We just have more media to scare us about it now.

In ye olden days food was full of germs and poo and parasites as well as adulterants – for example alum, plaster of Paris and ash in bread.

In 1872, adulterants in food were found to include ‘strychnine, cocculus inculus (both hallucinogens) and copperas in rum and beer; sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in mustard and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime sulphate, and turmeric in chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate; lead in wine and cider; all were extensively used and were accumulative in effect, resulting, over a long period, in chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often fatal food poisoning. Red lead gave Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue.’ Ice cream was found to contain ‘cocci, bacilli, torulae, cotton fiber, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hair, and cat and dog hair’.

Yum. So much for hipster nostalgia.

 Of course we need to avoid harm where we can but we need to separate real harm from hysteria, conspiracy theories and marketing opportunities. Headlines about city air being as bad as smoking don’t help. We’re never going to live some bucolic idyll in the Shires like hobbits.

Fear and guilt make for good headlines and clickbait but things are not getting worse. They’ve always been bad. The history of humanity is about processing, ingesting and inhaling stuff that's bad for us. Sometimes for fun.

Nonsense on Stilts 2017

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. 

Don't Put That In Your Mouth!

There have always been fad diets and people making money out of them, like Atkins or the grapefruit diet or swallowing tapeworm eggs. It’s getting harder to know who to trust as the diet messiahs compete for our money, harder to hack through the jungle of lies, empty promises and dangerous bullshit to find the truth. And lately the diet world has been getting vicious.

Weight loss means that using more calories than you consume. As simple as that. Cutting out a whole food group restricts calories, weight loss happens, but as soon as you go back to eating a healthy balanced diet or back to your unhealthy one, the weight comes back.

Nature abhors a vacuum so as soon as one fad loses its shine, another is spawned to take its place, along with all the expensive accessories – courgette rice, gluten free everything, spiralisers. That’s the marketplace in action.

The current crop includes paleo, LCHF (low carb-high fat, sometimes called low carb-high protein), ketogenic, clean eating.

Some messiahs are alert to public weariness with diet books and have rebranded their Gospel as ‘wellness’. Every single Wellness lifestyle is really a diet in disguise. All the Wellness messiahs are skinny and glossy and young.

Why are these diets a problem?

If dieting worked, there would only need to be one diet, everyone would do it and no one would put the weight back on. But that doesn’t happen. We have a short attention span. We want a quick fix, we all want to feel shiny and special. When one diet doesn’t work, we move on to the next one that promises us salvation. Life as a diet messiah is short. There’s always another one waiting in the wings so you have to make big claims to get attention and excommunicate the competition as heretics.

 The problems start when essential nutrients or dietary elements are being missed – vitamins, minerals, fibre – or an excess of fat/protein raises risks of conditions like kidney stones, osteoporosis, heart disease, liver disease and so on.

Fibre is the orphan child of many current diets. Without fibre it is very hard to poo. Pooing should not be under-rated as long-term constipation can have serious consequences. It’s also a natural detox, along with peeing. So regular trips to the loo will save you buying all those detox products and laxatives (but not prunes as the European Food Safety Authorityruled that they do not have a laxative effect). 

And of course carbs are cheap. Baked beans on wholemeal toast is a balanced, poo-friendly meal but it has no swank factor. Your Instagram followers will not be impressed.

How to tell crap from Christmas?

There’s a link between fad diets and fake news – they look plausible, they use science words, they fit with what you would like to be true and it takes an effort to research if they are genuine. It’s getting harder to tell crap from Christmas.

Once you’ve invested in something financially and emotionally, you’re likely to defend it whatever the evidence. Cognitive bias means you’ll ignore the evidence against your beliefs and cling onto anything that appears to confirm them.

You’re part of a tribe. You read the book, buy the products, join the online forums, identify with skinny glossy, hench celebs doing the same diet, Instagram your meals and get thousands of Likes, worship at the church of your chosen messiah. And your tribe hates all the other tribes, especially the Science Tribe who will insist on pissing on your chips (which are made of lard if you’re on the low carb diet).

Do not dare to question the Chosen One or we will smite you with the wrath of social media. It’s all gone a bit Old Testament.

I’ve been harangued by women for daring to question their proselytising of paleo and of turmeric as a miracle ingredient in everything.

Margaret McCartney, who is a real medical doctor (unlike me), had the temerity to point out that fad diets like LCHF are not a miracle fix and received a shitstorm of hatred on Twitter.

Where’s the harm?

The risks of the LCHF diet are not hard to find despite the fact that its advocates can get pretty vicious. 

Clean eating advocates are particularly vocal with their loathsome conflation of moral value and food which, in some cases leads to orthorexia and other eating disorders. 

Sometimes dietary claims get even nastier, like the claims that dairy products cause autism and anyone feeding their child dairy is risking their lives. 

Then they get nastier still, like the claim that the ketogenic diet can cure cancer.

It can’t.

  

Who can we trust?

Just as with other forms of fake news, it can be hard to know who to trust. The Pioppi diet is best described as ‘a superficial lifestyle guide based on distorted evidence’ even if one the authors of the diet book is a cardiologist. Most people would think it’s safe to believe a cardiologist. But as the author of this article points out: ‘Pasta is as central to the Italian diet as potatoes are to Britain’s. So too is bread. This is the elephant in the room for anyone trying to pretend that Italians eat a low carb diet’.

There’s another cardiology scientist recommending eating a lot of salt against all expert advice. Trust me, I’m a doctor? Maybe not. 

Sometimes the boundary between saints and sinners is blurred. For example, in this video, a vegan looks at the evidence for the dangers of the keto diet. One of the experts he cites is called Paleo Mom. They both have an agenda but the science is right – keto can be very dangerous, especially for children. Because it’s not just middle class adults wasting their money and messing with their bodies.

Other fake news tactics the diet messiahs use include taking evidence and distorting it, making the false link between correlation and causation, cherry-picking data, using facts out of context, ignoring confounding factors that don’t suit them, picking an arbitrary period in evolution for which the evidence is obscure and declaring that is our most ‘natural’ diet.

It gets crazier

The next step is the conspiracy theory. 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 Antony Warner, 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.’

Once a conspiracy theory gets going, any evidence against it is taken as part of the conspiracy. The believers think that they and they alone know the truth. They feel powerful and clever and smug. And presumably constipated.

Yes, the parallels with religion are all there, the In Group and the Out Group, the access to privileged information, the righteousness, the smiting of enemies, feeling persecuted, the Gospels (the lucrative book deal is the Holy Grail of the Messiahs), the Way, the Truth and the Life. There’s no point being Saved unless others are Damned. Preferably on Twitter.

What’s the answer?

How are people to know what is a healthy diet and what isn’t? It’s so much easier to join a tribe and buy the book/watch the videos/follow a messiah on social media than to go and see a clinical dietitian.

Basically, if a diet involves eating less saturated fat, cutting out processed carbs but keeping whole grains, fruit and veg, reducing salt and sugar, reducing portion size and getting some exercise, it’s a good one. Basically, it’s just common sense. Which doesn’t make anyone any money.

Most people aren’t stupid but society puts pressure on us all to be thin and healthy. Desperation can lead us to make bad choices. The Internet should make it easier to get access to good information but the proliferation of messiahs makes it so much harder. They are all false prophets of diet salvation. We need to become diet atheists.

Doctor Jesus - Curing Cancer With Ribena

Ofcom has ruled against the evangelical channel Believe TV for promoting Ribena and an olive-oil soap as a cure for cancer and other diseases, including heart disease, ovarian cysts and a bit of an achey back. The soap can also 'grow new kidneys'.

There's no need for a scientific analysis of why these things can't cure cancer or anything else. There's no need for randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, peer reviewed testing. Whether it's olive oil, Ribena or any other substance, these are just props. They have no inherent curative properties, which is why they are not cures for specific problems. Paul Lewis of Believe TV has also claimed that a bath with Miracle Olive Oil Soap can help if you're behind with your mortgage. What really cures is faith - it's the active ingredient. God can work through anything if you believe. If they don't work, it's because of a lack of faith.

It's the products' USP and a marketing ploy that must be the envy of all advertisers - if a product doesn't work, there's no money-back guarantee because it's the consumer who's faulty, not the product.

What's more, if a tumour or a bad back does disappear, it can't be proven that it wasn't cured by faith even if the patient was receiving conventional treatment at the same time.

This is where miracle cures are different from other forms of alternative medicine, which always have some sort of pseudo-science theory behind them.

Many adverts involve an element of faith, which could be described as the triumph of hope over reason. We believe that products will make us more successful, more attractive or thinner, that they will make us live longer. We have faith that the companies will do what the adverts say they will. If they don't work, we often have legal recourse or we can switch to another brand.

Paul Lewis and others like him are not selling a lifestyle, they're selling life. The stakes are much higher than promising shinier hair. And there is no other brand, he has a monopoly.

There is a kind of transformative magic at work like the one that changes the communion wine and wafer into the real body of Christ. Any bit of bread or bottle of wine will do. It's the same process that shamen and witch doctors have used for millennia, an infusion of magic.

As cultural norms evolve, so does who we trust and believe. Miracle workers are culture-specific; the shaman evolves into the tele-evangelist. Their props are also culture-specific; Ribena wouldn't work in a culture where it wasn't a known brand, for example. The transferable commodity between cultures and down through history is faith, the human propensity to believe the unbelievable.

Paul Lewis knows that people who buy Miracle Olive Oil Soap wouldn't rub a toad on themselves because that's not the current cultural practice. He and others like him know that they can operate only within certain cultural parameters using culturally familiar artefacts and familiar practices like taking a bath. Olive oil is a benign substance (with Biblical connotations) and while Ribena may seem an odd choice, it's comfortingly familiar with overtones of childhood nostalgia. It's just good marketing sense.

With culturally-embedded practices and a clause to prevent claims for refunds, it's a win-win situation. It's also why, no matter how many times Ofcom or the Advertising Standards Authority ban the promotion of a cure, there will always be another one.

The Doctor Jesus series is here, here, here, here and here.

Vatican Causes Cancer? Part 2: The Verdict

The Vatican has been ordered by Italy's Supreme Court to pay compensation to the town of Cesano near Rome after a long court battle over whether or not Vatican Radio's 60 masts have caused cancer in local children.

The court has found the evidence 'coherent and significant' that children in the area are six times more likely to develop leukemia.

I covered this story last year and all is not what it appears to be.

To sum up what I wrote before:

1. The Italian Navy also has masts in the area

2. The data submitted to the court is highly flawed.

3. There is no good evidence that masts cause cancer or of how cells are damaged by radio waves (see my original article for links to Quackwatch).

4. Italy has one of the highest rates of childhood cancer (leukemia and lymphoma) in the world.

5. There is insufficient data on the Cesano region to compare with Italy as a whole to tell if the rates really are higher.

The consumer association backing the residents' claim has said that 'Finally justice is done'. Vatican Radio has said that it is 'disappointed' by the ruling.

Parents with sick children can't be blamed for looking for someone or something to blame, some way of making sense of what has happened to them to restore a sense of order in the world. Compensation may make them feel they have more control over the situation and are not so much victims. But blaming the wrong cause means that the real cause goes unexplored.

While there may be a certain irony in the Vatican being called to account for something it didn't do while (so far) getting away with something it did do (sanction the abuse of thousands of children), irony's gain is science's loss.

Vatican Causes Cancer?

The Vatican has been accused of giving children cancer. Highly amusing as it is to think of a radioactive Pope spreading Vaticancer, he's too busy with all the child abuse cover-ups and conning the UK taxpayer into spending up to £100 million on his visit to waste energy emitting Papal Death Rays. He is getting on a bit, after all.

Professor Andrea Micheli has written a 300 page report focussing on 19 deaths from leukemia or lymphoma between 1980 and 2003 in the Cesano area north of Rome. Vatican Radio has 60 masts nearby in Santa Maria di Galeria. Micheli's investigation was ordered by a Roman court five years ago after concerns were raised about an increased incidence of cancer in the area. It's not clear exactly who was concerned.

He claims that children under 14 living within a 7.5km radius of the masts have a raised cancer risk. As a result of his research, six Vatican Radio officials are under investigation for manslaughter.

The charges mean that this is not just yet another lame conspiracy theorist attempt to link masts or electromagnetic waves and cancer or the usual Daily Mail cancer scare.

Quackwatch has very thoroughly shown why there is no conclusive link.

Moreover, the Italian Navy also operates masts in the area but Micheli insists that it's the Vatican masts that are to blame. Perhaps there is some added toxic ingredient being emitted because of what they are broadcasting. As Quackwatch says:'what they emit is not understood by the public. Nor can they be felt, tasted, seen or touched. This makes them mysterious, easily portrayable as threatening'. Temptation to draw a parallel with certain aspects of religion will be resisted.

There are other problems with Micheli's findings. Firstly, the research was submitted to a court, not for peer review. The contents were leaked.

A research paper that is available without leakage in the American Journal of Epidemiology called Adult and Childhood Leukemia near a high-powered radio station in Rome, Italy finds that rates were higher than expected but that 'The study has limitations because of the small number of cases and the lack of exposure data.' It adds that 'no causal implication can be drawn'.

And the Lancet finds that: 'In the European population, about 1% of all malignant neoplasms arise in patients younger than 20 years. This low frequency represents a major difficulty for studies of putative risk factors'.

An article in The Hematology Journal called Expected number of childhood cancers in Italy from 2001 to 2015 states: 'The total number of children with incident cancer in Italy has never been specifically estimated. Specialized population-based Childhood Cancer Registries have only been operating in Piedmont (CCRP) and in the Marche region, while general population cancer registries cover about 20% of the Italian population'.

This means that there is insufficient data to tell if cancer rates have gone up above the expected rate compared with other mast-free parts of Italy. It's hard to gauge what's higher than expected when there is no accurate definition of 'expected'.

Leukemia and lymphoma are the commonest childhood cancers. Italy has nearly the highest rate of them in the whole world.

In Europe, the overall incidence increased by 1% a year from 1970-99 in children and by 1.5% in adolescents. The average incidence in Europe is 140 per million for children up to 14. That's 1.4 children per ten thousand. According to the American Journal of Epidemiology research, nearly 50,000 people live in a 10km area around the station.

[edited 22/3/11: In the Perugia region, about 150km north of Rome, for example, around 1.3 children in ten thousand get leukemia or lymphoma every year.

Nineteen children got leukemia or lymphoma in a twenty three year period in the Cesano area. In the Perugia region in the same period, you would expect just under 30 children to get them.]

While the data from these various sources are not directly comparable, it looks very much like nineteen deaths is not a suspicious figure.

This is probably the one and only time I will ever defend the Vatican.

Doctor Jesus The Franchise - The Diagnosis

Following the post I wrote in November about the Healing Rooms, I have now heard back from both Halifax and East Renfrewshire Trading Standards. The Advertising Standards Authority were not interested in this one and passed me on to TS.


The results are not exactly pleasing.


Halifax TS (where the Healing Rooms English HQ is) said: ‘Having examined these websites I do not consider that they contravene the provisions of the Cancer Act 1939 nor the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008.’


East Renfrewshire TS said: 'In response to your complaint I can confirm the following.

East Renfrewshire Council Trading Standards do not enforce the Cancer Act 1937.
Healing Rooms have indicated that they will make amendments to the website as follows:
Include a disclaimer re not a substitute for medical advice/treatment
Ensure testaments are directly from individuals

I trust this deals with the points raised.'


Well no, not exactly.


The man from East Renfrewshire TS rang me a couple of times to discuss the complaint. He was sympathetic but explained that the laws were a little different in Scotland and that he was only allowed to act within a narrow remit of consumer protection.


He also said that it was a rather 'subjective' matter when it came to beliefs. I tried to explain the difference between evidence and faith but he said he could imagine what would happen if he took such a complain 'to the fiscal'.

The claims the Healing Rooms are making are exactly the same as those made by the Body of Christ International Ministries as I posted not long ago and the ASA did uphold a complaint against them so I don't know what went wrong here.

I'll be back.

Doctor Jesus - The Franchise

Coming soon to a town near you – healing through the power of prayer.

A group called The Healing Rooms is spreading its tentacles across the UK. The Starbucks of faith healing, their mission statement is:

We have a vision to see every town and city in England with at least one Healing Room and many Healing Rooms in larger cities. This is part of a wider vision to see Healing Rooms set in around the world. The first IAHR Healing Room in the UK opened in Halifax, West Yorkshire at the end of January 2003. There are now 50 registered IAHR Healing Rooms in England and if you include those in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland the total is 79 Healing Rooms in the UK. Worldwide there are just over 1,000 Healing Rooms in 47 nations all linked together through IAHR.

The parent organisation, the International Association of Healing Rooms is based in America.

They were brought to my attention at work by someone who had seen the glowing article in his local paper, the Wee County News, on 7 October 2009, about a branch opening in Moncrieff Church, Alloa.

IAHR claims include the usual gamut of minor afflictions as well as curing cancer, HIV, ME, asbestosis and restoring a liver. Testimonies from the London branch include these cancer cure claims:

I am giving a testimony on behalf of my sister who received her healing from cancer. I used to come to the Healing rooms every week to pray for her when she was diagnosed and to the glory of God she is healed and completely free. I believe that God answers prayers, all we have to do is to ask and I am living proof. There is nothing too difficult for Him and with Him all things are possible. All the doctors in South Africa where she was receiving treatment were completely amazed by her recovery. She has gone for several other check-ups and no tumor is found.

and

I was diagnosed with cancer over 11 years ago. In Dec 2005 I had a body scan and was told that there were 3 tiny nodules in my left lung and many lesions throughout the vertebral bodies and pelvis. I have been going to the Healing Rooms for nearly a year and I am very pleased with the result I have today. God is good to me and has answered my prayer. The last report I had was really good and my consultant is very impressed. He told me the body scan showed no evidence of bony metastases. I feel very well in myself and praise God daily. Thank you Jesus, for you are the same yesterday today and forevermore. You are the greatest healer. A big thank you to the Healing room staff for their patience and love.

There is also this oddity:

I came on Wednesday evening and the welcome was very loving . I had prayer and my lower back and crushed disc was healed and my right leg grew 1.5 inches and I no longer have any pain. It is so wonderful, no pain, peace at last. God is wonderful, thank you Jesus. I have been so blessed my family relationships have improved and my brother phoned me after 2 years.

Doctor Jesus made this man’s leg grow one and a half inches. That's an observable and quantifiable effect. There is no mention of whether the leg was measured by a doctor before and after prayer, of course. And how nice that Doctor Jesus also got his brother to call. They must have been praying extra hard that night.

Healing Rooms also have something called a Prayer Cloth:

In Acts 19:11-12, it speaks of how cloths (aprons and handkerchiefs) were touched by Peter and Paul and taken back to the sick who were often cured of their ills. It says that "God gave Paul the power to do unusual miracles, so that even when handkerchiefs or cloths that had touched his skin were placed on sick people, they were healed of their diseases, and any evil spirits within them came out." (The New Living Translation) The cloths are anointed with oil and prayed over by our intercessors before we mail them out to you.

Testimonials for this include:

A prayer cloth was sent to a man in Australia who had Asbestosis, for which there is no cure. When he received the cloth he put it on his chest. On his next visit to the doctor, he was told that all traces of Asbestosis have now gone - he is completely healed.

If these cloths worked, the NHS would be mighty interested as it would save them an awful lot of money. In fact, why not get rid of all the doctors and nurses and just hire Healing Rooms to service the entire UK? Oh right, you only get healed if your faith is sufficiently strong. That rules out all the non-Christians. Doctor Jesus is a private practitioner. Or maybe it's not part of His Great Plan to cure you. Who knows? He moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.

From the Scottish branch claims include:

Danny was waiting to go to hospital to have an arm amputated from the elbow as he had no feeling or movement in it and nothing could be done to save the arm. After prayer his hand began to tingle and move and he can now clench his fist and move all his fingers. No amputation will now be needed!

He will no doubt be using that hand to put against the other one in prayer.

And there are many more testimonies on the American site.

Not only do IAHR claim to heal any number of problems through prayer, they also train people to heal. So if you want a new hobby, pop yourself along to one of their centres and you can set up your very own franchise. I'm not sure why you have to go along to the Healing Rooms to get fixed - does Doctor Jesus not make house calls?

As I mentioned in my Doctor Jesus post about Body of Christ International Ministries, as soon as a claimed cure for cancer is spotted, the alarms go off because such claims are in contravention of the BCAP code of practice 50.27 viz Marketers should not falsely claim that a product is able to cure illness, dysfunction or malformations and also the Cancer Act 4.1.(a) 8:

No person shall take any part in the publication of any advertisement—

(a)containing an offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof;

(8) In this section the expression “advertisement” includes any notice, circular, label, wrapper or other document, and any announcement made orally or by any means of producing or transmitting sounds

For this and other reasons detailed in the Doctor Jesus post, I have reported them to Trading Standards and the ASA.

For every group making a claim that the ASA rules against, more spring up. They are hydra-headed and the more canny ones make no actionable promises or claims. But it's important to keep chipping away and to publicize the facts about faith healing - that there is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that it has anything more than a placebo effect at best. That's NO EVIDENCE AT ALL.

Of course, if you have faith, then evidence is nothing. Proof is nothing. Facts are nothing. It's a miracle, praise Jesus and pass the collection plate. You can't put a price tag on the Love of God but there's no such thing as a free miracle.

It doesn't take long to fill in the Advertising Standards Authority complaints form or to send an email to your local Trading Standards office.

In the words of eco-campaigners: think global, act local.

And if you'd like to know more about the Alloa branch, you can ring local director Elaine McDonagh on 07742 175 453 or email alloa@healingrooms-scotland.com.