I've written before about woos trying out different 'healing modalities' seemingly as the mood takes them. I think that the last time I wrote on this topic, it was a homeopath disseminating dietary advice that had caught my attention: Dr O. I received an email yesterday that included a link to this page: Sulis. The advice is Holford's, but why an NLP practitioner would feel the need to reproduce woo-ish dietary advice on their website is beyond me. I can understand someone believing in the value of NLP, but why assume other woo is true? Seems to be quite common to me. Instead of speculating wildly about the thinking of people who are into multiple (which is what I'd normally do at this point), I'm going to have a quick laugh at the advice.*
Eat three pieces of fruit such as apples, pears, bananas, berries, melon or citrus fruit [...] Avoid any form of sugar, also white, refined or processed food with chemical additives, and minimise your intake of alcohol, coffee and tea.
It works best with these two pieces of advice if you show them together in the same quote. According to the Sulis site, Patrick Holford is advising you to avoid all forms of sugar while, at the same time, advising you to eat fruit such as banana. Hmmm... I wonder if bananas contain sugar in any form? Why, yes - yes they do. According to the USDA database, bananas are about 12% sugar and this comes in the form of glucose, sucrose and fructose.
Supplement your diet with a high strength multivitamin and mineral preparation and 1000mg of vitaminC a day.
Well, the rest of his advice seems to fit in with the ideal of eating a balanced and varied diet - including advice to eat plenty of fruit and veg - so why would anyone following this advice need a high strength multivitamin and a 1,000mg vitamin C tablet? They almost certainly wouldn't. Which is what makes Patrick's advice so laughable - he advises people to eat plenty of foods rich in vitamin C and then tells them to add a supplement. Why? To make expensive piss? I can't think of any other reason.
Drink six glasses of water, diluted juices, herb or fruit teas.
Ah, water woo. http://tinyurl.com/draust will give you more info on that topic.
Eat whole, organic, raw food as often as you can.
Why? Is there any evidence that organic, raw food is better for you? Should we eat all foods raw or is it better to cook, say eggs to prevent Biotin deficiency [the avidin in raw eggs is a bastard for binding to Biotin, apparently] - or tomatoes to increase the bioavailability of Lycopene? Is organic food healthier than non-organically grown produce?
*I will say this: it?s bad enough that experts believe themselves to be more expert than they actually are [*cough* experts-versus-equations], but surely it?s worse when amateurs believe themselves to be competent in various domains when they haven?t, actually, demonstrated their competence in any or all of these domains?
Original source: http://jdc325.wordpress.com/?p=701
