This blog is overrated.

Consumerist has some great advice on how to stick it to Big Pharma and save on medications: stop taking them! You may like taking “medicines that have never worked” and “medicines that were never needed” just for fun, but if you just stopped, you’d save so much money! And even if the drugs do work, the problem they’re treating is probably your own fault anyway and could be treated with “lifestyle changes” and “natural” approaches — you probably never even thought of that. We can only hope that insurance companies pick up on these revolutionary tactics too.

The Times’ food-nannying “Well” blog reports on an utterly perplexing study:

Half the women were sent a letter describing the survey as a study of fruit and vegetable intake. The letter included a brief statement of the benefits of fruits and vegetables, a Five-A-Day sticker and a Five-a-Day refrigerator magnet. The rest of the group received a general letter, without mention of fruits, vegetables, stickers or magnets.

Within 10 days of receiving the letters, the study subjects answered a food frequency questionnaire and were asked to recall how many fruits and vegetables they had eaten in the past 24 hours.

The group that had received the Five-a-Day propaganda reported significantly higher consumption of fruits and vegetables. The conclusion: people lie about how many fruits and vegetables they eat. “Because the two groups were randomly selected, average fruit and vegetable consumption should have been similar.” Really? Wasn’t one of the groups just told repeatedly about how important it is to eat fruits and vegetables? Why wouldn’t that make a difference in their eating patterns? This looks like some pretty incredible cynicism on the part of the nutritional establishment; the de facto admission seems to be that nutrition researchers regard the general public as a bunch of liars — and their own public health campaigns as completely ineffective.

Inside’s Higher Ed’s “Mama PhD” blog, a recent and somewhat dubious addition to the site,
today stirs up vaccination fears and expounds on the dangers of “sodium laurel [sic] sulfate.” The sources: unnamed “news reports” and a friend’s blog, respectively. “I read in another friend’s phenomenal blog (facebook reconnection again) about how she found sodium laurel sulfate in her face scrub and how it is not only a possible carcinogen but lends to the killing of marine life as well.”

Inside Higher Ed, if you’re not familiar with it, is home to many cranky academics who like to bemoan their students’ tendency to cite lazily or not at all.

Scientists have proved that the hormone oxytocin turns writers into spouters of inane pseudoscience and groundless speculation. Well, not yet, but it’s pretty likely that they will. First it was used to explain the now-debunked “fact” that women talk more than men. Now a science writer at the Times of London is waxing dystopian about a new study showing that the chemical may calm anxiety:

The potential uses of oxytocin could ultimately extend well beyond individual patients and into commercial environments. Restaurants, for instance, could spray a thin mist over customers to put them at ease.

It could be used as a benign form of tear gas, quelling any violent feelings among groups of demonstrators, or even to prevent extramarital affairs.

Lots of “could”s there. The reactions at Metafilter are mostly predictable (OMG SOMA!), whereas you can be fairly sure that if some writer mused that, say, salvia “could” be introduced into the water supply, they’d recognize the suggestion as the media-driven War on Drugs hysteria it is. At least one poster sums it up accurately: “It’s like [journalists] are amateur science-fiction writers.”