“Science can’t explain it!” – Insubstantial. If someone claims his therapy A heals condition B because of theories C and D, then it must first be shown that A actually DOES affect B. If it does not, then a failure to “scientifically explain” C and D is meaningless.

“Universities are sponsored by the drug industry and there’s no money in homeopathy anyway” – The former is wrong (I’m still waiting for the big cheques) and the latter is too. Alternative medicine is a billion-dollar business and while “Big Pharma” spends way more on marketing than on research, “Altie” companies spend almost nothing on research at all.

“We are all so sick and conventional medicine does not help!” – Think again. When was the last time you had polio, TBC or hepatitis? Why is it that you grow old enough to actually develop serious CVD and cancer? Hm?

“Be open-minded!” – We are. We are waiting for positive results. They are simply not coming. All we get from the altie camp is lame excuses, cherry-picked reviews and their very own narrow-minded “but-I-know-it-works.” It is so dull, they are falling for the same mistakes over and over again and are then deadly insulted when one points that out to them…

Daniel

PS: Yes, I know that this comes 2.5 years after the last comment here…

“Effects of excess. Excess vitamin C, even though water-soluble and so not stored in large amounts in the body, can be harmful to your health. Problems include destruction of red blood cells; irritation of the intestinal lining; kidney stone formation; interference with iron, copper, vitamin A and bone mineral metabolism; interference with the reproductive tract, causing infertility and fetal death; diabetes; and, believe it or not, scurvy. Intake of excess amounts of vitamin C, as with most vitamins, is only possible when pills or crystals are taken.”

Assuming that this is at all reliable, I wonder how Mr. Holfod would reply to this.

Cooking foods changes the bioavailability of various nutrients. For example, vitamin C is destroyed by heat, whereas starches such as potatoes are undigestible raw; lycopene in tomatoes is around 4 times as bioavailable from cooked fruit.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way a scientist: the above information is plucked from Harold McGee’s Encyclopaedia of Kitchen Science.

I don’t have a spare lifetime to wade through that rawfood website. On the surface, the advice to avoid supplements and eat good food looks OK. But why not just say that instead of publishing hundreds of dense, unreadable web pages? Food quackery thrives on bamboozling and trying to appear cleverer and more technical than things really are. That makes me very suspicicious. Use of some terms too looks dodgy, like ‘pure food’ and then followed by over inflated promises for a better life. All good signs of quackery.

Now the reason I have liked it is because it is based on physiological data, and it agrees with my experiments with food.

I am not posting this comment because I am a proponent of it – in fact I discovered it a week back, and would like to hear your views on it (since I do read your blog regularly).

cheers,
vishal