snake oil

[trisherina]

Use this thread to debunk your least-loved bullshit claims.

Not limited to products -- also include notions that are popularly believed to be true but do not stand up to the light of day.

Here's a good one. In double-blind testing, no better than hanger wire:

Monster cable

Complete snake oil, yet thriving commerce. Check out the prices! A good part of how they stay alive is to provide direct kickbacks to the end retailer for sales. At those prices, they can. But it's still complete bullshit.

Got one?

[trisherina]

19 views, and you all buy Monster cable, don't you?

[Frieda]

no i don't, i dont have a stereo set

i do know another big bullshit claim:

self-tanning lotion that doesn't leave stripes/smugdes (any brand). yea right on a tiger!

[trisherina]

Originally Posted by Frieda

i do know another big bullshit claim:

self-tanning lotion that doesn't leave stripes/smugdes (any brand). yea right on a tiger!

As another fair person who has occasionally yearned to appear tanned, I'm sure it's just because we didn't exfoliate enough beforehand.

[lostsadie]

The five second rule
(If you drop a food item on the floor and pick it up with in 5 seconds it doesn't get any germs or other cooties on it)

I know for a fact that it takes less than a quarter second for cat hair to permanently attach itself to the carelessly dropped sucker at my favorite cat lady's house.

[zero]

JOE: For the last time, I’m pretty sure what’s killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.
SECRETARY OF STATE: But Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.
ATTORNEY GENERAL: So wait a minute. What you’re saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.
JOE: Yes.
ATTORNEY GENERAL: Water. Like out the toilet??
Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn’t have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that’s the idea.
SECRETARY OF STATE: But Brawndo’s got what plants crave.”
ATTORNEY GENERAL: “It’s got electrolytes.
JOE: Okay, look. The plants aren’t growing, so I’m pretty sure that the Brawndo’s not working. Now, I’m no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.
SECRETARY OF ENERGY: Well, I’ve never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.
SECRETARY OF STATE: Hey, that’s good. You sure you ain’t the smartest guy in the world?
JOE: Okay, look. You wanna solve this problem. I wanna get my pardon. So why don’t we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?
ATTORNEY GENERAL: Brawndo’s got what plants crave.
SECRETARY OF ENERGY: Yeah, it’s got electrolytes.
Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?
SECRETARY OF STATE: It’s what they use to make Brawndo.
JOE: Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Cause Brawndo’s got electrolytes.

[T.I.P.]

Originally Posted by trisherina

19 views, and you all buy Monster cable, don't you?

"the difference can be heard"
- Michel Tremblay 10/2004

with reviews like that, how could I not buy Monster Cable ? It's indispensable.


edit: I've also noticed that when I wrap Monster Cable around my head, I can pick up my favorite radio station. It's really an amazing product.

[zero]

^

ME TOO!!

[lukkucairi]

^

ME THREE!!

[zero]

,

[trisherina]

I would feel very stressed thinking about the 300 bucks I'd spent on this machine.

These people are pure evil. A peddler of the products claimed out loud to my face that it diminished the effects of trisomy 21 abnormalities.

[lukkucairi]

I just spent a day among the multi-level marketers at the home and garden trade show...

excuse me while I go outside and scream

I'm sure the no-water cooking system cookware is good stuff, but when you say the interior of a chicken reaches 700 degrees fahrenheit after 10 seconds in a microwave oven, I just want to choke you and your entire audience.

[trisherina]

the diet industry

(may require registration: if so, go to bugmenot.com and do your thing)

Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.

The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.”

It began with studies that were the inspiration of Dr. Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont, who asked what would happen if thin people who had never had a weight problem deliberately got fat.

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

he assumption was that environment determined weight, but Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania wondered if that was true and, if so, to what extent. It was the early 1980s, long before obesity became what one social scientist called a moral panic, but a time when those questions of nature versus nurture were very much on Dr. Stunkard’s mind.

He found the perfect tool for investigating the nature-nurture question — a Danish registry of adoptees developed to understand whether schizophrenia was inherited. It included meticulous medical records of every Danish adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees’ biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their biological parents and their adoptive parents.

Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young — 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.

The scientists summarized it in their paper: “The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect.”

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications: “Current efforts to prevent obesity are directed toward all children (and their parents) almost indiscriminately. Yet if family environment alone has no role in obesity, efforts now directed toward persons with little genetic risk of the disorder could be refocused on the smaller number who are more vulnerable. Such persons can already be identified with some assurance: 80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight.”

The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.

The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss — the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more — that Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.

He published it in the journal Science in 2003 and still cites it:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”