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Showing posts with the label skepticism

The Beauty Blogger Challenge to Ask for Evidence

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Beauty and health product manufacturers are keen to open their doors to questions from users in order to get people on the web talking about their products ( If you're interested in following some of the chat then just look at #bblogs  on twitter). But with the doors seemingly opening there's still a lack of people asking the right questions about what product testing takes place to create the claims they put forward and the real scientific basis behind their formulations and potions. Beauty and health blogs are huuuuge business, many get numbers of hits that print newspapers would be jealous of. I'm tempted to mention a few products just to score myself a better ranking on google..  Beauty and health manufacturers know this, exploit it and often run events and send free samples just for beauty bloggers. Some blogs offer critical reviews of products, others just seem to like the freebies. Then there are the really shameful attempts at debunking that are just used to prom

Negative Calorie Food: Science Myths and Legends

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Celery Cupcakes: A dieters dream? A popular diet belief is that there are some amazing diet wonderfoods that contain negative calories, like celery . So if you eat lots of them, you will burn extra calories; without even lifting a finger. The theory goes, negative calorie foods contain fewer calories than they take to digest. Celery is a reported 'negative calorie food'. If one lump (this is a hypothetical example) contains 6 calories, but it takes 10 calories to digest then the body uses 4 calories and does not gain any. I had some faith in the principal of this idea, it seemed to make sense in my head. Maybe I had just turned my skeptical inquisitive brain off, or maybe, a part of me just wanted to accept that it might be a possibility.. A quick google search revealed a host of information, news articles and blog posts on this subject. Dr Stu posted a blog post summarising some of the literature about negative calorie foods  very recently. Sadly, but pred