Skeptical conversation #3

Whilst my family was on vacation, I asked Siri for "healthy restaurants near me". Siri responded, "I found 8 organic restaurants near you". I said, "I said 'healthy', not 'organic'."

My mother overheard this exchange and noted, "You seem to have a fetish against organic food."

My irritated response was, "Well, I'm against paying more money for food that's the same as the cheaper stuff but they just grew it in a more expensive way. And I hate that 'organic' is assumed to mean healthy. A cheeseburger could be organic, but that doesn't make it lower in calories or higher in protein."

Here are a few interesting articles on the topic:

• The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations - Journal of Judgment and Decision Making
  
• Organic food ‘no healthier’ blow - London Evening Standard
  
• Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?: A Systematic Review - Annals of Internal Medicine
  

And one showing that organic food does have health benefits... to flies: Organically Grown Food Provides Health Benefits to Drosophila melanogaster. Not that surprising, since the organic food was likely to have less pesticides, which are usually designed specifically to harm insects and other pests. (The article is by a high school student. Take that as you will.)

Skeptical Conversation #2

I was reading and mocking part of the CAM textbook chapter to my mother yesterday. This particular part is about traditional Chinese medicine: stuff like qi/"vital energy", yin and yang, and meridians, which are all treated totally unskeptically.* That is to say, they were all treated as if they are actual things that have effects on the body. Phrases like "Disease results from the disrupted flow of qi" are stated as unambiguously accepted fact. (Never mind the other chapters of the book which cover ACTUAL disease causes and processes.)

Anyway, Mom seemed a little put off by me saying that these things weren't true or real. She remarked, "I guess it's just a different way of looking at things," and then, "There must be something to it, or else it wouldn't have persisted for such a long time." Since my whole family is atheist, it was a simple matter for me to reply, "Religion persisted a long time too, and it's not true." This seemed to resonate with her and so I followed up with, "Just because something has been around a long time doesn't make it valid." I refrained from using the phrase "argument from antiquity/tradition" because I thought it would sound jargony. (And, as Mike Hall explained in episode 47 of SWAK, it's better to explain by example than to simply name the fallacy. Geez, this is only my fourth blog post and I've already referenced Mike twice.)

Anyway, Mom said, "Huh, you've got a really good point there." I really feel good when I manage to help someone think logically in these conversations. Maybe it's just me, but it seems there are a lot of people who can think logically about religious claims, but somehow don't analyze claims relating to health with the same logic. Has anybody else experienced this?

* The spellchecker thinks that this should be either "skeptically", "antiseptically", "sceptically", or "aseptically".