12 thoughts on “The Food Babe”

  1. I’ve been a “health nut” for decades now, and my rule-of-thumb on these is what Mark Twain said about jury trials: “If you do0n’t like the verdict, wait a while.”

  3. Um, it’s worth remembering that a typical Starbucks concoction has a boatload of sugar.

    They also taste awful.

  4. I’m pretty sure sugar does have deleterious effects, regardless what the safety data sheet says.

  5. I think her primary motivation was to sneakily attain the status of “babe,” when she is clearly no such thing.

  6. I’m sure there are as many studies out there that show sugar to be as deleterious to health as fat and I’m sure they’re all at least as rigorous as the anti fat studies.

    So chaps, feel free to berate sugar and soda and fast food and all the other dietary demons of the day, but remember just because ‘the science is settled’ it doesn’t mean that you’re free to interfere with other peoples choices and it especially doesn’t mean that it’s ok to lobby the state to impose your preferences on the rest of us.

    I’m really rather suprised at how quickly the very folks who were so ready to, (rightly), dispute the ‘fat is the food of the devil’ nonsense have jumped on the ‘evil big sugar’ train.

    2. That is a good point. However, (at least for myself) I am not recommending a sugar pyramid, nor recommending a massive government undertaking and panel to shift the behavior of millions of people, then institutionalize it for nearly 50 years.

  7. The problem in my mind with people like her, is NOT that they get some sort of ‘fame’ despite their lacking any real credentials in their chosen field of expertise.

    It’s that they get it from people who should KNOW BETTER!!

    Dr. Oz is a teaching surgeon [I had to look THAT up…all I knew was he has a TV show, zero idea HOW he got there…the Almighty placed her hand upon him…Oprah did it!!!] and as a teacher he should understand that anyone who disseminates bad info can be just as dangerous as people being uninformed, maybe more so.

    We are not by any means a health food, organic, locavore household. But we’ve always eaten a decent diet. Yes we order pizza, yes we eat at the Arches and the Bucket and such. But we also do LARGE baked potato and salad night, eat our fruits and veggies and we love rice or quinoa and most any kind of legumes with those. As with most things, cutting a wide variety and watching how much and WHEN you eat, eliminates 99% of the problems people like this nutcase babe says we need to do to have a better diet.

    If nothing else, and having looked into going full on organic…WhoTH can afford to eat that way all the time!? Given the choice between doubling my food bill and keeping the electricity on…I opted for lights, and heat and A/C and hot water and cooking our non-organic food indoors on the stove.

    I do think it’s funny that she didn’t believe that an appendix can just ‘go bad’ on you. I’ve not read anything she’s written, never heard of her before today, but I’ve got a C Note saying she thinks everything causes cancer.

    1. If she does, she’s right. Everything that generates calories by metabolism, anyway.

      Why? Simple. One of the routes to carcinogenesis is free radical damage to DNA. And one of the biggest sources, probably the biggest source in fact, of free radicals is oxygen. Some of the highly active radicals generated during oxidative phosphorylation escape and cause havoc, so anything that increases metabolic rate increases free radical damage.

      It so happens that the benefits of exercise outweigh this – but only up to a point.

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