Skip to main content

What the Top Nutrition Site Recommends

Happy St. Patrick's Day! For me, it's the day to plant snow peas, but for the site Eat This, Not That, it's the day to recommend Irish food. If you're thinking that the "world's #1 nutrition website and one of the top five food outlets in the U.S." whose "brand [is] comprised of an award-winning team of journalists and board-certified experts, doctors, nutritionists, chefs, personal trainers, and dietitians" might recommend healthy Irish food like corned beef and cabbage or Irish stew and suggest going easy on the Guinness, guess again. 




Their #1 St. Patrick's Day deal is a sugary drink from Starbucks topped with whipped cream and caramel. The rest of their 26 suggestions are just as bad: more liquid sugar, fast food sandwiches, doughnuts, cheesecake, and even cocktails. Yes, cocktails. How does a nutrition site recommend something without nutrients?

This isn't a one-off article written for a holiday. I was originally looking for their article where a registered dietitian says that if you must eat fast food, McDonald's fried chicken sandwich and a soft-serve ice cream cone were the best choices. I heard about the article from High Intensity Health--I'd never heard of the site Eat This, Not That before. But when I searched for McDonald's on their site, 1,311 results came up. 


The top hits looked like press releases from McDonald's.
  • McDonald's is testing a new, extra large chicken sandwich
  • McDonald's fans are going gaga over a new McFlurry
  • 8 Best & worst McDonald's burgers, according to an RD [registered dietitian]
  • McDonald's is launching a new happy meal
  • McDonald's is launching a new restaurant brand

Recall that the site has a medical expert board that includes doctors, dietitians and chefs. The doctors are MDs with degrees from mainstream medical schools. One is actually an endocrinologist; another is a past president of the National Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists. Other board members list their private practices, upscale restaurants and media gigs. 

Why would these people recommend junk food and cocktails to their readers? I'm just speculating, but the only explanation I can think of is that they're paid shills. Like just about every other site with "fact checkers," they're selling nonsense. The only award they should get is biggest whore on 5th Avenue.*

*Link to Maggie O'Hooligan's line in Caddyshack.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that  L. plantarum  may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with  Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color.  Special equipment Quar...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...