What Our Love Affair with Nutritional Supplements Tells Us About Our Regard for Science.

Unlike the science underpinning evolution and climate change, the science surrounding nutrition is fractured, contentious and far from settled. Yet people, who ignore the real and overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and climate change, will swallow without reservation the bogus science behind the claims for nutritional supplements.

Is this the most poorly named product ever?

Even in the halls of serious nutritional science there is discord. Is salt bad or benign? Is saturated fat actually good for you? High carb – low carb, which is better? Whole grains or no grains? Paleo? You get the idea.

However, while the scientists are duking it out – this decidedly non-scientific pundit has one opinion. There is no magic-bullet food. There is no single fruit or vegetable that will magically give you health and the figure of a super model or Mr. Universe. (And if it did exist, why does it always come from some exotic place. Exotic is a human value – nature doesn’t have an opinion.) Regardless, people continue to belly up to the nutritional supplement bar.

This easy acceptance of bogus science does not extend to real science. Curiously, while  anti-climate change activists accuse climatologists of cooking the scientific books to make a buck, they give the manufacturers of nutritional supplements a pass, even as those companies are raking in billions from the credulous.

(Note: If climatologists were in it for the money, they would deny climate change. The fossil fuel industry would shower them with millions of “research” dollars.)

Vested energy interests would have us believe that we cannot afford to stop doing this.

So why the resistance to real science and the rush to accept junk science? It has to do with our human frailties – like self-regard, laziness, and selfishness. Real science asks us to take action and takes us to uncomfortable place. We don’t like that.

Climate change demands that we do things differently. But vested energy interests think doing things differently would hurt their bottom line. They don’t take that lying down. They, and their congressional poodles, direly warn that doing what is needed would collapse the economy. Deniers warn that the cure is far worse than the disease. It is an easier path to dismiss the science – so many chose it. Everybody is happy.

Evolution insults some human vanity, especially some American human vanity. Some view themselves as exceptional people living in an exceptional country. It insults their ego to be considered just another animal, who – even worse – got where he is by chance. “No way my grandpa was a gorilla” rail the evolution deniers. Succinctly getting evolution wrong in the act of denying it.

Lipozene – your money just melts away.

(Note: I wonder why it is such a blow to be considered just another animal – we have achieved a lot after all. And why care who or what your antecedents were? Why is it so bad have a chimpanzee be your cousin? After all, there are many of us with a relative or two, who make apes look well-behaved and smart by the comparison.)

On the other hand, look what nutritional “science” promises us. Youth, beauty and (implied) sex – all without getting off the couch. It doesn’t matter that we “know” it’s crap. We pop those pills because we cannot resist the easy promise. Cooking good food and going to the gym is too hard.

So there you have it. If it’s easy it must be true. If it takes effort it’s either bogus or too hard to take seriously. If it promises to make us a better person it’s valid. It it seems to diminish us it must be rot.