Food Fads, Facts, and Fancies

THE MEDICAL or food quack is one of the most pernicious influences scientific nutrition has to meet. The food quack today uses many of the same devices, modernized, that the patent-medicine vendor used a generation ago. The quack of former days was so crude in his statements that the modern consumer wonders how people ever could have believed such buncombe. Even today there is plenty of flagrant chicanery, but the more scientific modern quack or the unscrupulous advertiser often couches his remarks in such technical language as to inspire false confidence. The typical quack food lecturer or pseudo health promoter usually has poise, personality, and persuasion, which assure him of a hearing and a goodly number of converts. The letters usually found after his name may represent a fake degree given by a third-rate institution, sometimes founded for the express purpose of conferring the degree, or a bona fide degree given by a reputable institution whose professional and ethical standards he has long since forsaken. His pseudoscientific explanations of nutrition and physiology abound in quotations from authentic sources, sometimes misinterpreted but sometimes used correctly along with misleading statements to give the whole an air of authority. The insidious mixture of the true and false is alwa3^s more difficult to interpret correctly than the glaringly false. The clever quack is well aware of popular interest in science and works accordingly. Of all quacks the food-fad promoter is the most prolific because he gets the biggest following and his is a profitable business. He makes converts faster than scientific knowledge can be broadcast, because the scientist is conservative and tries to be accurate, w^hile he is quite the opposite. Be skeptical of mail-order solicitations and cheap advertising of nutrition nostrums or disease cures. Reliable products will find a market through ethical channels. Be skeptical of extravagant claims.