weapons-grade foolishness from the ‘food babe’

Today, we move on to just plain, flaming, weapons-grade foolishness. Foolishness that is, unfortunately, spread to a rather wide audience. 

Vani Hari is the self-described 'Food Babe', on a mission to 'make America's food safer'. According to Ms Hari, if you can't pronounce a food item's ingredients, you shouldn't be eating it1. I guess she's never seen information like this, then (graphic by the wonderful James Kennedy).

Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana

But I digress. Recently Ms Hari wrote a piece giving her advice around flying. (It's since been removed from her site, but the internet has ways of ensuring that things don't just disappear, so you can read the post in its entirety here – for as long as it remains there, or there's a screen cap here.) The nature of some of her comments do not inspire me with confidence.

A few facts about what airplanes do to your body –

When your body is at seriously high altitude, your body under goes [sic] some serious pressure. Think about it – Airplaines thrive in places we don't. You are traveling in a pressurized cabin, and when your body is pressurized, it gets really compressed!

I am still trying to get my head around the idea of inanimate objects like aeroplanes 'thriving'. That aside, our bodies are not placed under greater pressure when at altitude. Yes, plane cabins are pressurised, but that pressure's still less than what we're exposed to at sea level.

Compression leads to all sorts of issues. First off your body's digestive organs start to shrink, taxing your ability to digest large quantities of food. Secondly, this compression reduces the ability for your body to normally circulate blood through your blood vessels. Sitting down for long hours while this is happening, exacerbates these issues, leading to what they call "Economy Class Syndrome." Economy Class Syndrome results the action [sic] of sitting in a cramped space for a long period of time, thus resulting in blood flow loss to the legs.

Yes, aeroplane passengers are subject to increased risks relating to poor circulation, but they've got nothing to do with 'compression' due to supposedly high cabin pressure & everything to do with simply sitting still in cramped conditions for prolonged periods of time. In fact, air travellers are advised to use compression stockings to help mitigate those risks. (Ms Hari does give some sensible advice on combatting this.)

The air you are breathing on an airplane is recycled from directly outside of your window. That means you are breathing everything that the airplanes gives off and is flying through. The air that is pumped in isn't pure oxygen either, it's mixed with nitrogen, sometimes almost at 50%. To pump a greater amount of oxygen in costs money in terms of fuel and the airlines know this! The nitrogen may affect the times and dosages of medications, make you feel bloated and cause your ankles and joints to swell.

This is such a basic science fail. Passengers don't breathe in 'everything the airplane gives off' (details of where cabin air comes from are here). And Earth to Vani: the air you breathe has never been 'pure oxygen', whether you're at ground level or 11,000m up in the air – probably just as well, really, given the reactivity of the pure stuff. This is so easily checked (image from geocraft.com): 

Now, this may seem laughable. Someone is ill-informed & shares that lack of knowledge rather widely. But that's not doing any actual harm, is it?

Except, I think it is. Why? Because the Food Babe is encouraging and pandering to chemophobia and scientific illiteracy (and, sad to say, has a wide audience for this nonsense: several hundred thousand followers on FB, for example). And when you're also spreading anti-vaccine misinformation to that number of followers then yes, you have real potential to do harm.

 

1 Sad to say, one of our local NZ companies has bought into the 'no long words' meme. It's worth remembering that some 'nasties' have very short names, while the names of many important proteins are multisyllabic.

4 thoughts on “weapons-grade foolishness from the ‘food babe’”

  • herr doktor bimler says:

    The air you are breathing on an airplane is recycled from directly outside of your window.
    Oddly enough, that is also true here at Maison d’Etre, from which I deduce that I must be living in an aeroplane

  • Herr doktor bimler,
    I remember covering the wild banana in an old post of mine trying to make the general point that the foods we eat aren’t ‘natural’, that in cultivating plants (etc.) we’ve genetically modified them. You’re right, they’re not very appealing — small fruit, almost entirely full of hard, bitter seeds. One way to see how ‘artificial’ modern bananas are is that they have *no* pollen or seeds – they’re infertile and dependent on man to reproduce.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *