I subscribe to eHealthy News from Mercola.com. It's about natural healing, food, and homoeopathy. Dr. Mercola is into technology so he posts good technology articles. Most of the information is useful and verifiable but a fair amount treads into "loony" territory. I agree that the U.S. healthcare system needs major remodeling, Americans should eat less processed food and exercise more but the site loses credibility when statements like the following appear:
Are you among the millions of people everyday exchanging your health for the convenience of microwave ovens? Before you use your microwave one more time, you might want to consider some facts.
The Nazis are credited with inventing the first microwaves. Known first as radiomissors, they were used for preparation of meals on a mass scale during the invasion of Russia -- thus eliminating the logistical problem of cooking fuels. After the war, the Russians had retrieved some of these microwave ovens and conducted thorough research on their biological effects. So alarmed by what they learned, the Russians banned microwave ovens in 1976.
(The whole page: http://www.mercola.com/forms/turbo_oven.htm)
Dr. Mercola writes against the advertising tactics used by big pharmaceutical corporations but appears to have no problem with using similar tactics to sell products. The proceeds of the sales are used to advance his vision for a new health care paradigm. Sleazy advertising tactics to advance a noble cause does not make the tactics less sleazy nor really do much for the cause.
Actually, the pharmaceutical companies use more subtle tactics.
I'm not a fan of the pharmaceutical companies. I just want less bullshit in my life.
Bullshit is a natural product, perhaps it is appropriate for some to appear on a natural health site. I'm sure the bullshit that appears on Mercola.com comes from free-range, non-genetically modified, non-hormone treated, organic, grass fed bulls.
Still stinks.
2 comments:
maybe it was your comment about Nazis, but this reminded me of my continuing conflict when reading David Duke's "White Civil Rights" blog.
Granted, there are multiple bloggers on that site, but it just feels weird that I find myself agreeing with some of his stuff, then wondering what crack he's smoking in the next sentence. Oy.
I found your site looking for evidence to back up these dubious claims. The "highly regarded study done by Dr. Hans Hertel, a Swiss food scientist, who concluded that microwave cooking significantly altered food's nutrients" is complete BS.
Here's a good article that rebuts this so-called research and other fictions.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0813/is_3_32/ai_n13664949
The Swiss food chemist and seven fellow vegetarians confined themselves to a hotel for two months in the late 1980s. There, they consumed milk and vegetables prepared in the microwave oven and in other ways.
Hertel emerged with an astonishing pronouncement. Eating microwaved milk and vegetables caused changes in the men's blood that "appear to indicate the initial stage of a pathological process such as occurs at the start of a cancerous condition."
Hertel didn't actually find that microwaved food caused cancer. And his "study," which no researchers have tried to reproduce, was never peer-reviewed of published in a scientific journal.
"Without knowing more about how he conducted his study, what he measured, how he measured it, and what he found, it's impossible to even begin to evaluate his findings," says Barry Swanson, a food scientist at Washington State University in Pullman.
I will be unsubscribing from Mercola's BS newsletter now. I had various doubts before but this proves that his mailings are just useless spam.
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