Nutrition news is ripe for overstatement. You might say there are fruit flies of hyperbole swarming many popular reports on select health benefits. Take this example from a site I won’t name (not naming my source would be in keeping with many health reports): “In parts of China where people eat a lot of vegetables such as garlic and onions, villagers have one-quarter as many cases of cancer as people in the rest of the country.” Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the health claim the writer makes in using this example is true or as strong as he says it is. There are likely many combined reasons that guard these Chinese from cancer.

In popular news, nutrition reports can be maddening. Often, the news will simplify a report too far, like saying coffee is linked to hallucinations when the report is actually inconclusive. Or a report may be accurate and the study reported on simplistic. So when I began reading Ty Bollinger’s book, Cancer: Step Outside the Box, I hoped for sound-mind descriptions of alternative cancer treatments and the health benefits of various food products. I fear, however, it has too many fruit flies.

The first thing Bollinger wants us to believe is that pharmaceutical companies and certain medical groups do not want us to heal from cancer or find its cure. They want to make money off of our disease, so they have stifled real cures like apricot seeds in favor of their money-making treatments: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. He argues that the FDA and other agencies are pressured by lobbyists to ban nutrition and promote manufactured drugs. Some leaders are pressed to promote something regardless of clinical evidence and others are steeped in a groupthink that prevents them from questioning the promotion. Continue reading Review: Groupthink Can Run Both Directions →