9) If It’s Natural It MUST Be Healthy

Nature is actually pretty bloody and violent, I’m not sure we should trust it at all. You’ve watched animals killing themselves and each other on nature documentaries haven’t you? Nature is evil.

Plants don’t like being eaten and they’ve developed a vast array of chemical defenses. Click here if you want to read about the most poisonous of the poisonous plants, they’re pretty amazing.

So although eating things that are grown in the soil is a good idea, just because the label says “all natural” don’t expect it to be necessarily more healthy. A deadly nightshade shake could be 100% natural but it’ll still leave you hallucinating blue penguins wearing crash helmets as you deal with the squits session of a lifetime.

10) Detoxification Clarification

Any avid watcher of TV adverts knows that we simply must get toxins out of our bodies. Oh Lordy, we must purge ourselves of toxic build up in our poor aching systems. Nobody ever seems to ask what toxins exactly? Yes, it’s a good idea to stop boozing so much because alcohol is a poison and you should knock the fags on the head because they’re carcinogenic. But that’s not what these adverts are talking about is it?

Our livers, guts, enzymes and the like are adept at removing toxins of their own accord without consuming a vat of blueberry tea each and every day.

Currently the buzz word is “antioxidants”, they’re are cooler than a Bee Gee in the 70’s, but what are they? Oxidants are natural byproducts of breathing oxygen. There is no way to avoid oxidants and free radicals, unless you plan on switching from oxygen to helium which I don’t recommend. The body has natural mechanisms in places that reduce the amount of oxidants on the prowl in your system, but it does not clear them away entirely as they are in fact useful for some physiological processes.

In a petri dish in the lab oxidants have been seen to interfere with DNA and damage cells. But that’s in lab worms, not in a human living body. There is no evidence that antioxidants even get rid of oxidants in the human body, and it’s not clear whether we would want to get rid of all of them any way.

Wikipedia puts it quite nicely in the driest of terms:

…there is considerable doubt as to whether antioxidant supplements are beneficial or harmful.

So there we go, a little snap shot of the general ignorance of alternative and holistic medicine. We all believe in daft things, it almost seems like it’s part of the human experience. After all, the world is a pretty complicated place to understand, it’s not surprising we get stuff wrong literally all of the time.

As a general rule though, if you hear something mentioned on an advert you can guarantee that it’s either made up or a straight out lie. If we all remembered that little factoid the IQ of the entire Universe would leap up a couple of notches.