There is no shortage of health fads and nonsense on the Internet, but when it comes to women’s health, actress Gwyneth Paltrow seems to lead the charge on the wackiest and most dangerous woo. Her lifestyle website and newsletter, called GOOP, recently promoted (and began selling) a dangerous and implausible practice for improving female genital health and sexual performance: the vaginal insertion of egg-shaped pieces of jade.
Jade eggs for use in Kegel exercises. Via Wikimedia
Posted in Alternative Medicine / Consumer Ripoffs / New Age / Pseudoscience / Uncategorized
Tagged in gwenyth paltrow / Stephen Propatier / vaginal jade eggs / vaginosis / Woman's health
So many of my article ideas come from social media. “You Can Lose Up To 5 Kg in 3 Days With Potatoes & Yogurt!” the headline on the shared post declared. Well, naturally that got my attention. I write a lot about my own efforts to lose weight, so both food science and food woo are a topic of interest for me. So, gritting my teeth, I clicked the link. The new page informed me that:
The main ingredient of the potato diet, as you can conclude is the potato. This diet also includes low-fat yogurt.
Potatoes will keep you full for a longer period of time and that way you will consume less calories. While you are on this diet you will need to eat only cooked potatoes and to drink yogurt but only the one with low fat.
Varieties of potatoes. From Wikimedia
Tagged in diet / education / fad diets / food / health / Richard Gant / starvation
I’m ashamed to admit that, recently on Facebook, I failed as a skeptic.
Here’s how it went down: I logged onto Facebook as I do, checking my feed to see if anything interesting had been posted. And I saw the following image:
Wait! Come back! I promise this isn’t about politics!
Without stopping to think about it, I hit the button to share the image. Yes, I have certain political leanings that may be safely inferred from that statement. Relax. This isn’t about those political leanings, and I’m not trying to turn this site into a soapbox for any specific political agenda. This is about a failure in critical thinking. Because I failed to think critically, when I shared that image. Because there’s a single, important question I should have asked first.
Posted in TV & Media
Tagged in critical thinking / logical fallacies / skepticism
Recently, I logged onto Facebook and found the following article in my feed:
Screen capture from www.washingtonpost.com
I was in a bit of a sour mood at that moment, so when I hit the share button I wrote a vitriol-filled post to accompany it. To my surprise, it got shared quite a bit—meaning 15 or 20 reshares compared to my typical two. Honestly, I was a little surprised. And then, I got my very first screed from anti-vaxxer troll, a self-described “old school hippie, loving mother and proud grandmother, happy and joyous and free” who “studied at the School of Hard Knocks”:
richard, please let me inject you and your babies with mercury ok?
I replied, of course. But the response got me thinking, and it got me wondering, and it got me asking questions.
Tagged in anti-vax / critical thinking / education / health / medicine / Richard Gant / science / skepticism / vaccines
Originally, I hadn’t planned to write a second part to this “birth certificate bond” thing. I figured it was a “one and done” deal, and I’d move on to trying to decide what to write for the next week. But then, a reader named Menzo made this comment about my article:
Rich,
You truly are a financial geek. TMI to the extreme. What I wanted to know almost immediately, but never got answer to, is what is the motivation for a person to post a website about “birth certificate bonds”? Is this a scam or some kind of a silly joke or a conspiracy theory?
I’ll cop to the charge of being a “financial geek.” But, in retrospect, I have to confess I’m not geek enough. It never occurred to me to ask why someone would believe what is, on the surface (as well as after a deeper dive), patently obvious nonsense. But now, thanks to Menzo, I can’t stop wondering. So fasten your seatbelts: we’re about to wade deep into the woo.
This simple chart explaining a “birth certificate bond” somehow overlooks the why of this scheme.
Posted in Conspiracy Theories / Consumer Ripoffs
Tagged in birth certificate bond / conspiracies / Consumer Ripoffs / finance / freeman on the land / Richard Gant
If you’re like most people, you read that title and scratched your head in confusion. “Rich,” you may have said, “what on earth are you talking about? Of course my birth certificate isn’t a bond. It’s a birth certificate.” And now you’re reading this, because you’re wondering what sort of foaming madness I’m spewing forth onto your screen.
I work in the financial sector in my day job, and I come into contact with a broad slice of the general public on a daily basis. That’s how I first encountered this nonsense. About six years ago, I received a call from a gentleman who said he wanted to redeem his bond. So I got the particulars of his account, looked it up, and scratched my head in confusion. There were no bonds. There weren’t any bond-based mutual funds. He had nothing that even looked like a bond. All he had was a checking account, and that held less than a hundred dollars.
“Sir,” I said, probably sounding extremely confused, “did you mean you wanted to take a withdrawal from your checking account?”
“No,” he assured me. “I’ve got a bond, and it’s worth a million dollars, and I just need to get enough out to buy a new car.”
Posted in Conspiracy Theories / Urban Legends
Tagged in conspiracy / education / history / international bankers / Jews / pseudolaw / Richard Gant
Many of my friends and colleagues often criticize me for refusing to embrace the popular anti-fracking rhetoric — or, as some like to fallaciously describe it — my “pro-fracking stance”. There’s a reason I refuse to condemn fracking, and it’s the same reason I wouldn’t jump on the ultra-fashionable anti-pipeline bandwagon; and I believe it is an important reason. Getting off of fossil fuels should be one of our highest priorities as a species. To persuade those who disagree, we need a bulletproof argument. Invented boogeymen like fracking and pipelines, when presented as reasons to get off fossil fuels, weaken that argument. When our loudest messages are so weak that they collapse under the slightest scientific scrutiny — as do the pop criticisms of fracking and pipelines — we are gravely harming the process of moving away from fossil fuels. / read more…
Posted in Education / Energy / Nature
Tagged in climate change / fracking / global warming / piplines
I was on Twitter on Christmas Eve, wasting time that should have been spent working out what my very first blog post should be, when I saw the following tweet:
sorry to bother you @BrianDunning -& plz forgive me if it’s been covered- but people butchering occam’s razor needs to be addressed i think
Well, there was my inspiration. Sure, Brian Dunning responded to the tweet by pointing out that it will be addressed in Principles of Curiosity (go fund it on GoFundMe), but it got me curious. And indulging my own curiosity is why I write. So, let’s start with the obvious question:
What is Occam’s Razor?
Not so much this, really. Via Wikimedia.
Tagged in critical thinking / education / Occam's razor / Richard Gant / skepticism
Over the last few years, I’ve occasionally written posts on some myth or another. Every time I accumulate enough interesting ones, I tend to write a short article. So here we go.
References to religious facts were gathered quickly. If I haven’t nailed all the subtleties of your particular belief system, I ask for understanding that it is not a knock on your belief system. Corrections are welcome in the comments, but please reference them if you do.
Menorah photo © 2006 by Tomasz Sienicki via wikimedia
Posted in Cool Stuff / History / Urban Legends
Tagged in christmas / Hanukkah / Holiday Myths / myths / Stephen Propatier
Brown University put out a press release this month about some of its soon-to-be-published research. The study, named “Alcohol Intake and Risk of Incident Melanoma: A Pooled Analysis of Three Prospective Studies in the United States,” appears this month in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. It looks at the drinking habits of more than 210,000 participants, and found bad news for those who enjoy a glass of white wine: the findings suggests that drinking white wine will significantly raise your risk for melanoma! Or so the media reports would have you think. Regular Skeptoid readers will be familiar with the paucity of such science reporting: sensational headlines with unsupported conclusions often dominate such news. Let’s take a close look at this research and determine if this pop-science flavor-of-the-week is in fact science, or just science fiction.
Posted in Health / TV & Media
Tagged in cancer / Melanoma / Poor science reporting / Stephen Propatier / White wine
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