"authoritative" writers owe their readers good reasons for their recommendations

This was a note i made to myself on the Low-Carb Cruise, and i meant to write on the subject when i became inspired.  The inspiration came yesterday, from the person who originally prompted the note.  She did it again!

This was the woman whose talk actually "put off" my husband during the seminars.  Her husband, a physician, came across very well both on the stage and off -- he gave me a piece of advice which impressed me with his insight and experience.  Apparently, before the two of them married she was in publicity ... and it shows.  She's probably been an asset to their professional success, but as the front-woman for nutritional educators, she leaves a good deal to be desired.

I read an article which she wrote -- one of those "x# foods you should never eat" kind of things.  I confess, that kind of article tends to annoy me in the first place because the style is so "cheap media hook-ish."  But when she was discussing the objectionable ingredient in the product being targeted, she threw in the logic-dismissing comment that this ingredient was also used in an industrial application -- after all, if they use THAT  to do this icky thing, you certainly won't want to EAT it!

Sorry, chickie, you just lost all the engineers in the audience, and probably a good chunk of the chemists, biologists, lab-techs, mathematicians, and other technical folks too.  You may win over the kind of people who think liver is "gross" with your kind of logic, but they're about all.

Anyone who makes recommendations to their fellow creatures from a position of "authority" SHOULD feel a responsibility to provide a sound and cogent reason for their point of view.  "Because they use ingredient X to do nasty-job Y" is not a sound and cogent reason.  Should i never cook with baking soda because it can also be used to clean toilets?  Should vinegar be off the menu because it will kill weeds in the cracks of my garden path?

Granted that a wax made from petroleum is probably not as good a choice for food use as one made by bees, that does not mean paraffin in certain applications is unwholesome.  There are an awful lot of neutral substances in this world, which are perfectly safe and reasonable to use in food applications.  The nutritional -- and chemical -- realms are NOT properly illustrated in black-and-white....

The same emotional illogic is used in the condemnation of sucralose and a lot of other products, the utilization of which may not be IDEAL, but is minimally problematic for most people.  This kind of thinking is behind why i had to buy my mother a special little soft brush for cleaning mushrooms -- "they're grown on COW MANURE!"  Uh -- no.  They're grown on COMPOSTED cow manure which is an entirely different substance.  Uncomposted manure has too high a nitrogen content to grow ANYTHING.

I hope this lady will learn that dropping buzzwords (natural! organic!) and scare/gross-out tactics (bugs! petroleum!) is not doing their nutrition-and-supplement business any good amongst thinking people.  At the end of her talk, as we were trotting off to the Red Frog Pub to get a drink during the break, J snorted, "we shouldn't eat THAT because it's used to de-ice airplane wings?  They spray beet-juice on roads to help de-ice them -- does that mean we can never eat beets again?"