Three big lies the so-called health and wellness industry tells you

Looking for more energy? Suffering from some terrible disease like cancer? Hoping for a better quality of life? Well, you and millions of others are ripe for the picking, in the eyes of snake oil salesmen and frauds within the so-called health and wellness industry. They rely on the average person's lack of knowledge, understanding, and unwillingness to research facts.

I should be clear, before I become demonized. I know there are several aspects of healthy living which are proven time and again. For example: Drinking water instead of soda, getting sunlight daily, and exercise has done me a world of good. As well, eating more leafy green vegetables, more raw fruit, and a lot less fast food crap has also proven to be beneficial. The common sense information isn't what I'm hoping to decry. I'm gunning for the folks hawking “miracle pills” and other bullshit.

While there might be some good information available, it's usually wrapped in a bullshit tortilla, battered in bullshit batter, and deep-friend in a vat of bullshit. Here are three of the big lies that have broken the hearts of those of us, who've come to realize the cold, hard truth about snake-oil salesmen and pseudo-science.

Oh. Before we begin, I feel it's necessary to tell you that I've no vested interest in the pharmaceutical industry and, noone is paying me for my opinions. I might also deduce the US Food and Drug Administration to be nothing more than a fascist drug cartel, designed to keep competition from cutting into the pharmaceutical companies' business. (Just look at which bureaucrats comprise the FDA and cross-reference that list, with executives of the big pharmaceutical companies in business today.) But that's still no excuse to push pseudo-science as the real deal.

Three big lies: Insisting every bite of food should be organically grown We Americans are the worst about this, by far. We've lived in such excess of good food that, some of us now feel we've the “right” to tell others what to eat. Firstly, there is no proof of strictly organically grown food being nutritionally superior. Secondly (and this is the big one for me), were all food production limited to strictly organic standards, the world could produce enough food to feed an estimated 5 billion people each year.

Tell me, which 1.5 to 2 billion people should be the ones to starve? Even if the food supply could feed all but one million of the world's population, which one million should be the ones to starve to death?

I should also add that I have also eaten my share of organically grown food. I'm not opposed to someone eating it of their own volition. What yanks my chain is the way it's marketed via fear-tactics and alarmism. Now, the organi-freaks of the world want everyone to be forced to eat the way they do, whether it's justified or not. If you wish to pay a premium for identical food, that's your choice. But I'll be damned if you have the right to stop people in poorer countries from feeding their children conventionally-grown, even genetically-altered food.

Three big lies: Claims of unbiased information Try this for yourself: Find one person on the planet who has a position on any topic, and is truly un-biased. It's impossible. At the very least, a person taking any position, on any topic, has a personal agenda. Just as soon as someone claims to offer “un-biased information” I know they're full of crap. This blog post, by the way, is heavily biased. I just hate being bullshitted, and have chosen to share these heavily biased thoughts with you.

Three big lies: Attacking real scientists and researchers At the very least, those who push for “all-natural” lifestyles possess questionable credentials. In response to the rigors of peer reviews, and other points of the empirical process, they resort to calling real scientific researchers “evil” or “murderers” since “little things” like evidence, experimentation, and reality somehow get in the way of them selling crap to gullible people. They loosely use terms to sound scientific to those who have no clue what they're hearing. Sometimes they claim “mystical knowledge” of some sort. But altogether, their claims are baseless, and sometimes fatal. But hey, here's a chance to give a hat tip to the brilliant mind of Brian Dunning, a real scientist. So it's not all bad.