Category Archives: Lying for fun and profit

The Five A’s of Empty Arguments

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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A common earmark of the misuse of science is trying to make the science appear conflicting and undecided (when it isn’t) by burying us in conflicting studies. Consider climate change research, and internal documents found at Fox News ordering staff to cast doubt when reporting on all climate change science news.

The very cheeky Dr. T over at Thinking is Dangerous reminds us that, unfortunately, these techniques can be quite effective in confusing the public.

This is particularly true when people don’t understand how to recognize a well-designed, strong study of merit versus a poorly-designed weak one. So to help us all better understand, he presents us with his Five A’s of Empty Arguments:

Continue reading →

News flash: food is better than supplements for staying healthy

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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You may wonder why anything this obvious even needs to be reported as “news” in the first place. Yet that’s what’s happened this week over the issue of whether taking vitamin supplements can ward off cancer and other serious diseases better than eating healthy food does. Pitching this supplement claim is like a dream fantasy for legitimate supplement manufacturers and snake oil salesmen alike, so both groups will be disappointed by this “news”.

Sally Scroggs, health education manager at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Medical Center’s Cancer Prevention Center, has announced in a news release:

“Researchers are still unsure about whether or not minerals, herbs and other plants taken in pill, capsule, tablet or liquid form actually prevent cancer.”

Researchers may be unsure, but luckily for the supplement industry, a gullible public remains profitably convinced that not only should we all take expensive vitamins and supplements, but that it simply is not humanly possible to consume the nutrients that we need with mere food alone.   Continue reading →

Why industry lobbyists and pseudo-scientists insist that the “meat and butter diet” is actually good for us

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Did you ever notice those little food pyramid guideline posters that are issued by the government to remind us how to eat healthy? Did you also notice how these guidelines have managed to change over the years? Turns out that industry lobbyists, front groups, special interest organizations, and a long line of pseudo-scientists are working very hard to demand official dietary guideline changes that will benefit their specific financial goals. And compared to other arguably healthier non-government eating programs like the Mediterranean diet or Harvard University’s Healthy Food Pyramid Alternative, one wonders just how good these processed carb-heavy government pyramids are anyway.

This year, the powerful lobby group called The Sugar Association, for example, is calling any official government recommendation to reduce daily sugar consumption “impractical, unrealistic, and not grounded in the body of evidence.” Continue reading →

How to set up your own phony non-profit as a front for Big Business

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Once upon a time, the beleaguered Brussels-based chemical industry giant called Solvay was sick and tired of all those big, bad environmentalists saying mean things about them. They didn’t like scientists criticizing what they were doing to the air, earth and water near their European chemical, plastics and pharmaceutical plants.

So Solvay set up their own agency called the GreenFacts Foundation to counter these mean things with some made-up nice things about the company. GreenFacts became what the Center for Media and Democracy described at the time as a front group.

Here’s how they define a front group like GreenFacts:  Continue reading →