Bronze-level articleFood woo

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==Specific foods==
 
==Specific foods==
 
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Science knows that some foods can bring about some healthy benefits beyond just eating well.  Food woo takes these slight benefits of some foods, and turns them into all out marketing schemes of '''[[Superfoods]]!!!!'''.  Generally, there is some slight truth to all the woo, but why pay for the expensive pills, drinks, and super teas, when you can just eat the food if you happen to like it?
*[[Coconut oil]]
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* [[Açaí berry]]
:A trans-fat-free, cholesterol-free shortening, and just about the healthiest option other than palm oil (or coconut mixed with a lighter oil)... for ''shortening''.  Adding ''shortening'' where not needed, using ''shortening'' in place of <s>lighter oils</s> '''[[canola oil|rape oil]]''', and ''spooning it from the can'' may not be the way to perfect health.
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* [[Apple cider vinegar]]
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*[[Chlorella]]
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*[[Chlorophyll]]
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*[[Coconut oil]] - A trans-fat-free, cholesterol-free shortening, and just about the healthiest option other than palm oil (or coconut mixed with a lighter oil)... for ''shortening''.  Adding ''shortening'' where not needed, using ''shortening'' in place of <s>lighter oils</s> '''[[canola oil|rape oil]]''', and ''spooning it from the can'' may not be the way to perfect health.
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*[[Rooibos tea]]
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*[[List of herbs and spices|various other spices and herbs]]
  
 
==People (woomeisters)==
 
==People (woomeisters)==

Revision as of 15:32, 6 December 2011

Deliciously edible!

Food and Diet

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Dubious diets
Food woo
Style over substance

Pseudoscience

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Popular pseudosciences
Random examples

Food woo is the promotion or prohibition of any particular food as "healthy" or "dangerous" or "great for weight loss" for reasons that have little to do with anything scientific. Often, there are real scientific studies to suggest that there *might* be "something" to various foods to make us more healthy. However, Woo takes those basic, preliminary and correlative studies and turns them into a dieter's best friend of "Science has proven that X will make you lose weight".

As food is an important part of everyone's life, and as more and more people are struggling to maintain a healthy weight, everyone is susceptible to food and diet woo, whether it be a health scare like the dangers of plastic or a fad diet like green tea, or a health craze like cinnamon helping with blood sugar. It sometimes takes a lot of thought to determine what advice is genuine and healthy and what is just someone pulling ideas out of their rectum in order to sell more books. Even health food woo is plagued with lack of good information on how much, how often, and for whom.

Contents

Fad Diets

See the main article on this topic: Fad diet

Some of the more popular woo associated with food are the fad diets, which as the name suggests, are pop-culture diets which tend to come and go, and like most food woo, are based on sketchy science. These diets are either supposed to cure you of all that ails you, or magically make you lose weight without all that icky exercise. Some examples fad diets include:

  • Raw foodism - The belief that cooking or any kind of processing "kills" the nutrients in food.
  • Macrobiotics- Expanding the concept of "ying" and "yang" to food and is all about "balance".
  • Alkaline diet - Foods effect the blood pH level, really, really, they do.
  • Fasting - Starving the body, especially if combined with cleanses is a wonderful way to not only lose weight but stay healthy!
  • Jesus Diet - What Would Jesus Eat!
  • lemonade diet - Drinking lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and water will cure all your ills
  • Low-carb diet - Carbs are more evil than Satan. Low-carbing ranges from a more healthy approach like South Beach, to a truly heart attack generating approach like Atkins.
  • Paleo diet - Obviously, modernity sucks. We should live like our caveman ancestors and we will all lose weight.
  • Weigh down diet - Pray yourself thin.

Specific foods

Science knows that some foods can bring about some healthy benefits beyond just eating well. Food woo takes these slight benefits of some foods, and turns them into all out marketing schemes of Superfoods!!!!. Generally, there is some slight truth to all the woo, but why pay for the expensive pills, drinks, and super teas, when you can just eat the food if you happen to like it?

People (woomeisters)

See also nutritionists
Referred to as "the awful poo lady" by columnist Ben Goldacre, she was recently told to stop using her titles as "doctor" and "PhD" because they were worthless.
Purveyor of an awesome haircut and a few books that question current scientific consensus on AIDS.
Hilariously self-pwned by taking his own products until he was sick.

Sheer lunacy

Food is good to woo with.
Breatharianism states that one can just live on air. The stupidity and dangerousness of this notion cannot be overstated, and most people who claim to be able to live on air actually cheat and eat lots of food. The only fair, scientific test done on breatharianism was terminated early because the subject (who claimed it was possible) was going to die.
While there is some evidence that good food will help children in school (in reality, it's just that bad food is detrimental), there is no evidence that vitamin pills or certain foods are able to "cure" autism or ADHD.
Some form of weird fungus (not the algae the name suggests) food. Mentioned in the System Of A Down song Sugar, which, judging by the lyrics, was probably written shortly after consuming the stuff.

Scares

An artificial sweetener that is considered safe to use, but it has promoted some cancer scares. Televangelist Pat Robertson, of all people, is one of Aspartame's most vocal critics. He claims that the human body converts Aspartame into formaldehyde, that it will make you obese (because many diet soda drinkers still get fat),[1] and that it will damage your memory and may give you Alzheimer's disease.[2] What it definitely does for many people is cause a suddenly violent expulsion of the substance from the mouth and often a vocalization sounding much like the phrase "What the Hell is this?! Diet?!"
The subject of a very successful scare campaign by various groups, most of them related to the anti-nuclear movement. Food irradiation was repeatedly confirmed to be completely safe, but the backlash prevents it from being more widely used to prevent food poisoning.
Urban legends and myths that canola oil was dangerous were spread, the oil is actually no more dangerous than any other oil; i.e., if you eat too much of it, you'll get sick, if you manage to set it on fire, you'll get burned, if you inhale it... etc. etc.
Glutamates (or glutamic acid) occur naturally in many foods, and can be manufactured artificially and stabilised with salt to form MSG, which is widely used to enhance the flavour of processed foods, and in Asian cuisine. In recent decades, MSG has been the subject of repeated food scares in the west, and blamed for various ailments ranging from headaches to asthma to depression to hyperactivity. These reports usually rely on anecdotal evidence, while objective tests have usually concluded that MSG is harmless at the levels contained within foods.[3]
There is an overwhelming fear in some quarters of cured meats like ham and bacon from nitrosamines, which are mild carcinogens derived from the reaction of nitrites with amino acids. Although sodium nitrite and its relatives aren't the healthiest thing in the world for you, considering how nitrites ward off botulism poisoning, there's some screwy risk assessment there.

Packaging propaganda

Food manufacturers often dedicate large portions of their packaging labels to sell you on the premise that their box full of salt and sugar is somehow better for your health than their competitor's box full of salt and sugar. Some examples are:

  • "Whole grain": The dietary difference between whole grains and "polished" (white) grains is that the former contain a small amount of dietary fiber and B vitamins. This doesn't prevent food manufacturers from implying that whole grains, because they're natural, have some mystic nutritional property that fiber and B vitamins from other sources lack. Furthermore, the amount of whole grains in the package may be vanishingly small; you might want to question just how much you're getting if it says "Made with whole grain" on a box of Froot Loops. Even if it's true, junk food doesn't stop being junk food because it has extra vitamins in it. "Partial" grains also are required by US law to be "enriched" adding in most of the vitamins that are lost in the refinement process. In addition, whole grain corn is actually less nutritious than hominy, which have the hull stripped away using an alkali like lye or calcium hydroxide in a process called nixtamalization.
  • "Less sugar": If the manufacturer reduces the sugar in a kilogram of food from 400 grams to 300 grams, they can claim a 25 percent reduction in sugar. But the total sugar content of the food (by weight) is still 30 percent.
  • "Boosts immunity": This label started appearing on boxes of Kellogg's Krispies cereal line[4] in October, 2009. No doubt, this was in response to the swine flu panic that had been building all year.[5] Paraphrasing one nutritionist interviewed about this, you could add those vitamins to bark dust and make the same "immunity" claim.
  • "Trans fat free": Indicate a very low amount of "transfats" which are unsaturated, non-essential fatty acids. They naturally occur in small amounts and are a product of partial hydrogenation. The reason this label seemed to suddenly spring up on almost everything is because word got out that it's transfats that cause coronary heart disease and everything that already didn't include them had the label slapped on it to boost its popularity. Competitors followed suit, and it's been the best thing since "new and improved!". Also of note is that since transfats occur naturally, food producers are able to label their food as having 0g of transfats so long as the transfats levels are lower than 0.5g per serving (however small the manufacturer defines a "serving" to be); yay for legally being able to lie!
  • "Made with real sugar":The jury is still weighing the risks of high-fructose corn syrup, as it has been for over 20 years now. It wasn't until recently that people noticed HFCS is in like, everything, and its health effects were considered. The reason it's in everything is because it's a cheap sugar because corn's cheap in the U.S. thanks to government subsidies.

Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism is not woo in and of itself, but is a component of a great many woo-based food plans, and as a result has long had a reputation for being an eccentricity. It's widely accepted that vegetarians tend to be healthier, although this is not due to the lack of meat as is claimed, particularly by those who do it for animal rights reasons. The health effects of a vegetarian diet is an example of confounding variables, where cause and effect are difficult to derive because of the number of possible causes. Vegetarians, as the name suggests, tend to eat far more vegetables and fruits (which are good and healthy foods, recommended for everyone) and won't be tempted to scarf down anything that claims to be "meat" from the kebab van at 2 AM while drunk. Thus, health benefits are most likely to arise from this, and such healthy effects can be seen in meat-containing diets if they are properly balanced. People who avoid meat, but substitute for it with other fatty (although vegetarian) foods like cheese or oil soaked products experience the same poor health as meat eaters who rely on McDonalds for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And conversely, those who are not vegetarian, yet eat a healthy balanced diet, essentially eating just as a vegetarian would, but with a reasonable amount of lean meat for protien, instead of lots of nuts and beans, are just as healthy as those who eschew all meat. In short, vegetarians are more likely to be eating a balanced diet, since most of the most unhealthy foods (excluding snack-food) are meat products.

See also

External links

  • "Health Food ... or Health Fraud?" Discusses packaging propaganda for foods that are not really healthy. E.g. "Is Frankenberry really a whole grain cereal?" (MSN reprint of a Men's Health article.)

Footnotes

  1. Diet sodas may play a role in the obesity epidemic. But what about the other chemically processed, hormonally enhanced "foods" that obese people eat?
  2. "Sugar Substitutes: Healthy or Deadly?" CBN News website, 17 July 2009, accessed 6 November 2009.
  3. Alex Renton, ["If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?"], The Observer, 10 July 2005.
  4. I.e., Rice Krispies, Cocoa Krispies, and Frosted Krispies.
  5. "Kellogg's Immunity Claims Draw Fire" CBS News website, 3 November 2009, accessed 6 November 2009.


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