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Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience
__roo writes "Many Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It's all pseudoscience — so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others? That's the question the author of this article tackles: 'From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort ... Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. ... The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.' He points out his local Whole Foods' clientele shop at a place where a significant portion of the product being sold is based on simple pseudoscience. So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
Don't 90% of Americans still believe in God? Why should their believe in any other myth be surprising.
Go to Safeway or any other supermarket and take a look around. Or do you really think that post cereals promote heart health? Hell, it took a law suite to stop "vitamin" water from claiming health benefits from their sugar water.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
Because so many of you are idiots? The left is just as full of religious whackos as the right is.
While Whole Foods does sell a lot of homeopathy items, that is *hardly* its entire character as a store. I, along with no doubt many others, go there because it's a specialty grocery store that has a lot of interesting foods that you can't find other places, including (and especially) a big variety of craft beers and vegetarian stuff. Their produce and bulk sections are also hard to beat for variety and freshness, and the prepared-foods section is great when you're on your way home and don't feel like cooking.
I'm no Whole Foods shill, and it does have its share of silliness. But comparing it to the Creation Museum is completely ridiculous and has no place in serious discourse.
so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule
...but THAT is what makes it so effective!
Looks like Dice and _roo are in teh pockets of big pharma and big grocery !!!1!
Here's another alarming trend: people are starting to use "homeopathy" to mean "holistic, nature-based, alternative medicine". When you tell them what homeopathy really means you will get "well that's not what it means to me! i mean in the more general sense" or "meanings change over time!".
THL phish sticks
AFAIK, Whole Foods main business is not quack snake oil - it's organic produce. (Or is it? I mean, it's been so long since I entered one of these over-priced supermarket...)
Here is another example: a lot of newspapers have an astrology/horoscope section - or even a religion section - does that make them entirely anti-science? Nope.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Whole Foods has many products that regular grocery stores do not. I go there, buy the product I want, and leave. Yes, there are some aisles full of oddness, but I just skip those ones. In the end, it's just a store; buy what you want, leave what you don't.
It's kind of like Best Buy; just because Monster cables are such a stupid overpriced quasi-religion doesn't mean I shouldn't go to Best Buy; it just means I shouldn't buy those cables.
As a person with many dietary restrictions, I shop at Whole Foods for their Wheat/Milk alternatives. Not everyone shopping at Whole Foods is covering their babies in fish oil.
Creationists brainwash school children into believing fairy tales.
Climate change deniers prevent necessary environmental laws to be passed.
Homeopathy only hurts gullible people.
Some evils are just more evil than others.
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... no one, even well educated people, have the time to sift through all the bullshit. Many well meaning people confuse terms marketers came up with to purposefully obfuscate the product with "healthy food". If you don't keep up on that stuff (which most people dont), it would be trivial to be mislead by healthy sounding words through relentless advertising and association.
When you name yourself something like "Whole foods" you give yourself a different aura, you project "healthy food" not pseudo-science. Not to mention we've had vitamin/mineral half pseudo-science for a while that kind of gave hucksters an in to sneak their bullshit in under "healthy foods". The science for a lot of stuff is difficult/vague and takes a long time to do studies and companies can't wait to exploit the health conscious aspects of peoples brains by confusing them with marketing speak and over promoting the benefits of marginal "health aiding" products.
Either you're a troll, or you're very very stupid. Or possibly both. Who am I to judge?
Creation museum: customers tend to be poor, relatively uneducated, and don't understand basic science.
Whole Foods: customers are almost exclusively well-off, expensively educated, and don't understand basic science.
Everyone's stupid about something.
Does it smell of the orifice it was pulled out of?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
These days people have "faith" in "science"..and if that so-called science goes along with their worldview (which Whole Foods is self-selecting in that a certain worldview makes someone more likely to become a shopper there), then they may blindly accept it. Very few people have the skills and motivation to actually analyze the claims of these manufacturers and just go with their biases when making a decision.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
1) Whole Foods is a grocery store, the Creation Museum claims to be a museum.
2) Certain states aren't trying to teach children the "controversy" surrounding dandelion root extract supposedly curing my ailments. There isn't a national debate surrounding gluten-free pancake mix. Politicians don't get elected to office by appealing to the "this organic sea salt is only 4000 years old" crowd.
It's the entire existance of the Creation Museum. To be fair I would like to see them get rid of that one aisle.
Whole Foods is doing a lot of really good initiatives, see:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.co...
And they don't just say blindly yes God said so to questions like "Is Organic better for you?:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.co...
And probiotics after taking antibiotics makes logical sense.... I remember a study that showed that our natural bacteria wasn't at the same level 1 year after taking antibiotics (please don't use this as an excuse to not take antibiotics). If we have the right probiotics available to us is a different story. My wife just got antibiotics and the hospital recommened probiotics...
*Disclaimer: I own a small bit of Whole Foods stock. I'm sure this post will greatly increase it's value....
Look at who is vehemently perpetuating this pseudoscience. People like Orrin Hatch have neutered the FDA in regard to dietary supplements.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...
If whole foods was pushing to include their advertising/propaganda into the Health Education school curriculum under the banner of teach the controversy I think you see an equal reaction.
Everyone and I mean EVERYONE simply believes what they want. No, really. We all have a world view that makes sense to us.
Hate Republicans? Then you believe in socialism, you know, for the children. Hate commie bastards? You probably believe that God gave the deed to Israel to Jews.
Purely rational? Not like those other dumbasses that believe in that goofy shit? Then you probably believe you really see the world completely, no limitations, no illusions, no misunderstandings.
If so, you're the most obnoxious of them all.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
If the Creation Museum starts stocking the same selection of beer and cheese that Whole Foods does, I might swing through from time to time if I'm in the neighborhood.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Dumb question: it's about the actions of the believers. That's why the anti-vax kooks (whotends to skew left) gets a similar reaction to the creationists and climate wackos.
Granted that homeopathy stuff is ridiculous pseudoscience, but the difference is that nobody is trying to push it as a driver of public policy. When I shop at Whole Foods, it's for the tasty, tasty bread and local salsa and nobody minds that I walk right past the snake oil. I don't have a problem with creationism, I have a problem with it being forced on others. That's why we perceive it differently.
What is really repugnant is people with medical degrees hawking snake oil and "alternative" therapies. I cringe every time I see Dr. Oz legitimizing some quack idea posited by a guest and he never challenges them on their BS. Then there's the MD quack Dr. Richard Becker who's show is effectively infomercial for his noni juice and vitamin supplements. These type of doctors are even more evil than traditional snake oil salesman because, rather than outright lying, they string together a series of unrelated/uncorrelated facts to influence their viewers into believing something that isn't true. You can't assail them on any one statement because taken piecewise everything is true.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
But he spread his fire much too wide, and seems to make a lot of assumptions himself. I wonder if, in the part about bread processing, he could have confused organic bread with gluten free bread. Mere crumbs of regular bread can indeed make people with Celiac disease sick. I have a few friends and relatives that shop at health food stores specifically for gluten-free products; and the last time I checked, autoimmune disorders are very real and not just cooked up by a bunch of hippies.
I have never heard of Whole Foods. If people want to eat some organic stuff, why would I care?
"So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
Because Whole Foods appeals to the liberal crowd, while the Creation Museum appeals to the fundamentalist conservative crowd. The former is the base of the main-stream media, while the latter is the former's target of ridicule and derision. So which enterprise do you think is naturally going to be cast in a better public light by most media reporting?
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?
Have you ever taken a bite of the Creationism Musuem? Now try some of this Whole Foods bread with a little cheese. Do you understand the difference now?
Whole Foods is treated differently because of the moral and intellectual double standards which prevail on the left. Leftists and rightists both treat things differently when they are done by people on "our side" and so practice double standards. The left, however, is particularly bad in that regard.
One example of this was the extremely widespread holocaust denial (or something akin to holocaust denial) which is rampant on the left and has always been. I am not talking about the mass murder in Germany. I am referring to the mass murder in the Soviet Union in the 1930s through the 1950s and even after; the mass murder in Cambodia in the 1970s; and the ongoing mass murder and severe political repression in almost all explicitly "socialist" countries which until recently were the darlings of far leftists everywhere. Those mass murders were denied or disputed by considerable numbers on the left. What's more, the denial of mass murder is ignored by a great many other leftists who do not deny that those murders occurred. There is a double standard. Whereas most leftists would vehemently protest (and rightly so) when someone disputes the Holocaust, they are strangely silent when one of their own disputes the mass killings of leftist regimes.
The denial was especially severe with regard to Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge murdered 1/4th of the population of that country within a few years. A whole industry of professors and leftist figures exist to deny the mass-murder there. Even Noam Chomsky tried hard to deny the killing fields, and tried hard to dispute the reports of massacre emanating from that country. The reason for this denial (I suspect) is because the mass murders followed a socialist revolution and were orchestrated by far leftists who had been educated in Paris, and who had been supported enthusiastically by the far left. The fact that it resulted in mass murder is difficult to accept for people who are convinced of their own ethical superiority. Thus, a double standard evolved.
If Noam Chomsky had been a Nazi sympathizer and had denied the Holocaust, he would be a forgotten figure by now, as he deserves to be, for various reasons. However, he spent his time denying the mass murder in Cambodia, so it was forgotten.
These double standards prevail everywhere. My leftist friends cannot stop laughing at young earth creationism, but are in thrall to pseudoscientific nonsense which makes creationism look sophisticated in comparison. There are all kinds of T-Shirts meant to mock creationism, with a "Teach the Controversy" byline beneath a Triceratops attached to a plow. There are not, however, T-Shirts worn by my leftist friends mocking homeopathy, or all kinds of ancient medical quackery, or "energy medicine", or "multiple chemical sensitivity", or the recent widespread belief that vaccines are dangerous and aren't worth it. Granted, these things are not practiced by most people on the left. However, they are ignored by people on the left who have a scientific understanding, who reserve their vitriol for the pseudoscience of the other side.
There are also double standards with regard to doomsday groups. Each side of the political spectrum mocks the doomsday groups of the other side. People who are waiting for "the end times" are mocked by those on the left. However, peak oiler doomers (almost all of whom were on the far left) who assured us that civilization certainly would collapse before 2008 are largely exempt from that mockery.
I suppose double standards are easy to fall into. It's difficult to condemn one of your own.
He gets all wrought up over things like Ezekiel bread, as if it were some kind of plot to slip Christian doctrine into us via our alimentary canals. In reality it's no different from Dogfish Head's line of historical beers. People buy them for the interest value. And most people who buy Dr. Bronner's soap because it smells nice; the gibberish on the label only gives you something to read in shower.
The issue with probiotics is that the food industry has got ahead of the science -- as usual. This kind of thing is everywhere you look. There's a difference between making scientifically unproven claims and claims that are actually *against* science. Once you discard the insufficient evidence stuff and the stuff that is meaninglessly vague, you're pretty much left with nutritional supplements and homeopathic nostrums, which are sold everywhere. "Insufficient evidence" and "meaninglessly vague" cover practically *everything* sold that makes some kind of health claim, right down to low fat milk which has been sold for its health properties for fifty years with no supporting evidence.
What Whole Foods is, is not a health food store; it's a high end grocery chain. Just look at their cheese department. Whole Foods is to the old time city gourmet food shop what the modern supermarket is to the neighborhood grocery store. It caters to high incomes. The health food thing is part of the clever packaging, like the high color temp lighting in the stores. It's meant to evoke the kind of food co-op many highly educated people may have shopped at in their college or graduate student days, but it's selling convenience packaged foods, not bulk.
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