So much fuckwittery, so little time. I took a fair amount of time out over the last year – to do some real writing, among other things – and came back to so much bookmarked insanity that a great cry went up to the heavens “Oh god, where do I start, for fuck’s sake?”
And lo, my prayer was answered. Amidst the plethora of more-or-less dangerous (but always brain-numbingly stupid) quackery touted on Twitter, I found and retweeted this:
Colloidal silver supports natural defense system of the body by attacking & killing more than 500 microbial #health bit.ly/W45mIW
— Organic Whole Foods (@OrganicLiveFood) 2 mars 2013
To which I added the following comment:
Complete bollocks @organiclivefood Oh, I see from your site you also flog herbal #detox. Which is also bollocks. — anarchic_teapot (@anarchic_teapot) 3 mars 2013
I was going to let it go at that; if I blogged at length about every loony website I see, I’d never have time to eat, sleep or drink and most of this crap makes me yearn for a very stiff drink indeed. Plus they don’t deserve the publicity, however minor. This one turned out to be different. I got a calm, measured, detailed response:
@anarchic_teapot Listen British limey cunt ass wipe, ur country fucked so many countries for 200 yrs now u fagot breath talk outa ur asshole
— Tom and Cindy (@TomCindyShow) 3 mars 2013
Yes, it was triggered by my first tweet. This was not immediately obvious, but fortunately Twitter lets you look up the history of an exchange. That delightful explosion of cerebral diarrhea Seattle Organic Restaurants. At first eyeballing it looks halfway sensible, although I’m prepared to bet the perfectly formed and magnificently coloured foodstuffs in the photo under ‘Healthy Food‘ are about as organic as a lump of quartz. Ah, our first solid sign of woofulness: “The subtle energy of your food becomes your mind”. Are we talking subtle calories or subtle flatulence? Anyway, we have raw vegans on our hands here, so there’ll be a lot of sanctimonious and inaccurate bollocks about the importance of detoxing through drinking raw vegetable juice and rants about all the alleged poisons in meat. There are good reasons for becoming a vegetarian or a vegan: those are not among them.
Further investigation will reveal the text to be badly written (it reads like Engrish in many places), full of “wisdom” seemingly cribbed from elsewhere and lots of SHOUTY CAPS. It’s interesting to note that the quackery is partly hidden. There seem at first sight to be no links to it from the front page; it’s all jolly stuff about organic veggies and herbs. Closer inspection, however, reveals some of the WTF lurking therein. In fact, the whole thing is crammed full of well-rotted bovine excreta, partially redigested by the scatophage that cobbled the site together, then used as a construction material. Like a baby scarab, the whole boilings is born out of pure shite. There is so much mind-boggling out-to-lunchism that I’m going to have to skim through it. Pass the HazMat suit please, dear.
Right. Let’s have a shufti at what lies behind those menus, shall we? Ah, this is going to be messy. Everything is interlinked to everything else. It will be difficult to take things in order, because there doesn’t seem to be any order. Doubtless the idea is to draw the unsuspecting mark in by one thing and, by dint of providing myriad links purporting to provide further info, inextricably draw him deeper into the trap until he buys something out of sheer confusion.
Under ‘Topics‘ we find ‘Superfoods‘, a concept rooted in pure diet quackery, and we note as we pass the ominous mention of ‘pH Balance‘, oft used in connection with cancer quackery, of which more anon.
There’s an ‘Obesity‘ section, which seems at first to be not too bad (I am typing though a screening haze of alcohol, a necessary armour against the soul-destroying stupidity of sites like this), apart from the very important failure to advise people contemplating a diet to consult a doctor and/or dietician beforehand, and the fact that it’s all so bloody vague that your average airhead can read into it exactly what he or she wants. Then you start clicking on the links – the whole site is stuffed full of incestuous cross-references to other pages - and come across gems like:
The calories from high fructose corn syrup consumed in most of processed food aren’t the type of calories that you can burn by exercising
What the ever-lovin’ fuck? Do these morons even know what a calorie is? Since when did we have the wrong sort of calorie? It’s a measure of energetic potential, to wit: the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. A calorie is a calorie, whether you get it from an industrially produced sugar cube or a dew-fresh organic raspberry plucked at dawn on the first Tuesday of the month as the sun rises over the east bank of the Swannee. Where’s my WTFometer? 3 points for that remarkable dollop of Stupid. Next!
More foody stuff: ‘Obesity in Children‘, ‘Nutritional Guide‘ – I’m skimming here, I… Wait, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? Does high dose of vitamin C fight and destroy cancer cells?. Bingo!
Many cancer patients in the last 20+ years decided to use the benefits of high doses of vitamin C instead of chemotherapy as the means for fighting cancer
Cancer quackery. This is not funny. These lies kill. So that’s the sort of thing the psychotic übercunt was trying to distract me from. No fucking wonder he didn’t want closer scrutiny of the webshite. This is pure, free-range WTF, worth at least 5 points and a punch in the face.
What other antiscience lies are this lot punting? Depression is due to a poor diet, insulin is a bad thing (+2 WTF points just for that). These morons haven’t a clue: “High level of insulin stores fat in the body” they state, poker-faced, adding “Insulin also boosts prostaglandins linked to depression“. Insulin regulates blood-sugar, you fucking irresponsible turd-brain; without it you’ll die. Horribly. Herbal teas and what-not are being flogged to combat this mythical problem. Well, while a wee cup of tea and a biscuit cheers you up, it ain’t no replacement for real treatment. Or maybe the pitch is aimed at people who just fancy they’re clinically depressed because it’s fashionable? Charlatanry either way.
What other lies are in there? Anti-fluoride scaremongering, of course. Presumably these pillocks benefited from fluoridation themselves and have barely a filling in their air-crammed heads. I grew up in the West of Scotland, pre-fluoridation. It’s a part of the world where granite rules and the water is incredibly pure: no natural fluoride, no calcium, nothing but H2O. I still recall the terror of twice-yearly visits to the dentist. I was one of the lucky ones: having spent some of my life in a hard-water area, I “only” needed a maximum of 4 fillings on each visit. Many of my friends required six, in spite of our being middle class and our diets reasonably healthy. At that time, 25% of the population needed dentures by age 16. Think about it. And these cunts would inflict that same suffering on their own offspring. Ours too. Fuck ‘em.
They also claim aspartame is poison, which is standard “Only Natural Is Healthy” bollocks. No, aspartame is not poison. Replacing your sugar-loaded soft drinks with sweetener-loaded soft drinks won’t kill you. It also won’t help you lose weight, according to recent studies. Cut down on sweet stuff, period.
Alkaline Water… You know, that doesn’t surprise me at all? We all know who hard-sells “alkaline water’ and “ionizers”, don’t we? Another cancer quack.
Ah, this is more like it: heavy metal detox. The claim that “you can detox your liver by hot yoga” is going to keep me chuckling for hours. although I think it really just means yoga in an overheated room. The page on lead poisoning contains scary stuff about lead and how it’s dangerous for your baby. Which it is, if ingested in sufficient quantity. The biggest risk to children is from lead based paints, not Mummy’s lipstick. There’s a shouty link to the FDA analysis of a number of popular lipsticks and their lead content. Oddly enough, they completely ignore the FDA’s conclusions drawn from these results, in spite of them being published on the same page in clear, easy-to-read print:
Is there a safety concern about the lead levels FDA found in lipsticks?
No. We have assessed the potential for harm to consumers from use of lipstick containing lead at the levels found in both rounds of testing. Lipstick, as a product intended for topical use with limited absorption, is ingested only in very small quantities. We do not consider the lead levels we found in the lipsticks to be a safety concern. The lead levels we found are within the limits recommended by other public health authorities for lead in cosmetics, including lipstick
Not that this stops the quacks under advisement insisting that you stop using your favourite lipstick and buy the one they recommend: an unknown brand, as far as I can tell, which costs significantly more (+50%) than a stick of L’Oréal from Boots. Presumably they get a commission. I hope so; it would be bloody stupid to recommend expensive cosmetics (that very carefully don’t tell you what’s in them) without getting a kickback.
Ooh look, there’s a section entitled ‘Enzymes‘. Shall we?
Boggle.
This wouldn’t get past a first year Domestic Science class, let alone biofuckingchemistry. Half-digested waffle gleaned by bad Googling. Cop this for an example:
…sucrose breaks down beet and cane sugar…
With its appalling syntax, grammar and spelling, the whole page reads like something lifted off an Indian homeopathy site. It’s sucrase, you doughball. There are more than two types of enzyme; it’s just that our bodies only produce two. It looks to me as if the notion behind this particular fuckwittery is that Enzymes Are Good And Healthy, in the same way that uneducated loons believe Natural Means Healthy. Enzymes are not necessarily a good thing to absorb. For a start, they are proteins and therefore potential allergens. See here for more details. Enzymes, faugh!
Next up, Herbs. There’s a wide choice of Stupid here, as you might expect. I notice that they can’t even get their quackery right, e.g.:
Arnica is a homemade remedy used to treat bruises, fractured bones and toothaches. Unlike other pain killers like aspirin, arnica doesn’t have any side effects.
No it fucking isn’t, you simpering moron. It’s a homeopathic remedy, not a home-made herbal infusion. It certainly doesn’t treat bruises, let alone fractures, or act as a painkiller. Want to know why Arnica, aka Leopard’s bane, is in the homeopathic pharmacopeia? Because the plant, when crushed, produces a dye that resembles the colours of a bruise. That’s it. As for the “no side effects” claim: Leopard’s Bane contains the toxin helenalin, which if ingested in large quantities can cause vomiting, palpitations, drowsiness and shortness of breath. Contact with the flowers and leaves has been known to cause dermatitis in humans. So you wouldn’t want a child get near the stuff or feed it to your pet rabbit.
Again there are anti-cancer and anti-AIDS properties implied for herbal remedies, although no specific claim seems to be made. On the other hand, this is complete invention: the existence of ‘herbal antibiotics‘. Yes, the moron responsible for the copy seems to have difficulty distinguishing between antibiotic, anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties, or quite possibly doesn’t care. Let us be clear on this, a nice cup of thyme tea (actually it’s foul, but there are always weirdos who appreciate that sort of bilge) will not replace antibiotics for that stubborn bacterial infection. It won’t disinfect anything either, not at that concentration. It might smell nice, but that’s your lot.
Oh look, they claim olive leaves can “improve the symptoms of heart disease, HIV infections, digestive problems, yeast and urinary tract infections, cancer chronic pains and arthritis“. Improve the symptoms of HIV infections, can they? While we digest the stupidity and ignorance of that claim, let’s see what they have to say about HIV, because there’s a link provided…
AIDS is the HIV positive virus that attacks the white blood cells and causes immune system disorder.
Not a good start. If you’re HIV positive it means you’re been infected with an HIV virus; Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome is what develops if the virus is not kept in check. I suppose we really shouldn’t be totally wrong-footed by the statement that follows hard upon that primary display of ignorance:
many researchers have been trying to find out the origin of AIDS, some believe that AIDS is a genetically modified engineering virus that has gone awry.
A genetically modified engineering virus? Is that like a computer virus, except it attacks machinery? What the fuck has this loon been putting in its herbal tea? Something seriously toxic, by the look of it. It reads like a scenario for a summer blockbuster that even Hollywood would hesitate to use. It’s the sort of insanity pop-eyed, froth-brained nutjobs like David Icke…
Just a sodding minute… [FX: sound of frantic Googling] Yes, it is indeed an Icke conspiracy theory. Is there any fantastic cobblers this site doesn’t buy into?
The answer seems to be “no”. Under ‘Physical and Mental Health’ , where the AIDS page lurks, there’s also an ‘Autism‘ section. You fear the worst? You’d be right. It’s anti-vax, uses the mythical ‘leaky gut syndrome’ to push supplements and encourages inflicting brain-dead, useless ‘detox’ therapies on the hapless child.
There is another unbalanced rant about ‘Aborted Human fetal cells for stimulating artificial flavors‘. I find that extremely unlikely. The story has also appeared on such reputable news sites as, er, Natural News and Life News, so I think we can safely file it under “antiscience lunacy in WTF sauce”. It’s likely as accurate as the old lie about certain vaccines being made using aborted fetuses.
The page on cholesterol is, if misinformed, relatively harmless. It erroneously suggests cholesterol problems are caused by obesity (not true, skinny buggers also suffer from it) but doesn’t try to discourage medication in addition to improved diet and lifestyle. However, I cannot pass it over without reproducing this glorious piece of typo’d fuckwittery.
The accumulation of plague in the artery can pinch off the artery or in most cases the plague will rapture and form a dark clot
Day = made.
Oh, buggery. I’ve already gone well over the 2,400 word mark and I still haven’t justified the title for this piece. I’m not changing it. How often do you get to mention Smurfs while discussing sciencey stuff? Now then, I’m having trouble finding the colloidal silver that originally drew my attention. Have they surreptitiously removed it from the main page links over the last day or so? The page still exists. I shall save a copy, just in case. This also makes me wonder what other nuggets of pure WTF are lurking on that site, ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting and gullible public. More in the next installment, “The Silver Smurfers“, coming soon to a browser near you…
anarchic teapot
Site owner. Opinionated bugger. Qualified accountant, IT bod and French-English translator. I swear a lot.
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