The Snake Oil Bulletin: Girl Scouts are Literally Satan

Welcome back! Are you ready to cure all your coughs, lumps, phlegms, and bumps? Is your tummy grumbling with a great big helping of artisanal herbal quack pie? Then have we got a Bulletin for you. Strap in, tuck in your bib, and prepared to be served a steaming plate of whatever these All Natural Idjits can plop out. It's time for the Snake Oil Bulletin!

Food Babe hates Girl Scouts cookies, everything you hold dear

[contextly_sidebar id="8mpsT1q84sFY9GNJNlAtNUwqZl07Fxv1"]Our favorite cotton-headed ninny muggins has returned! Yes, it's our old friend, Vani Hari aka the Food Babe, back again to brew up a fresh pot of outrage.

For today's target, Vani pulled out her "Things People Love" dart board, covered her eyes with a preservative-free blindfold, and launched her vegan pool darts directly at the Girl Scouts of America. Rubbing her talons wickedly, Vani asked herself how she could best smear such an illustrious organization for the sake of driving up web traffic and depositing delicious ad dollars in her free-range piggy bank.

Er, we mean, how she could best inform people of the awful health concerns, yeah sure. To Photoshop we go!

This thing here is crap. Supremely polished, expertly gilded crap. Nonetheless, because it is on the internet we have to address it. Let's go through them one by one.

Her first bullet point is needless scare-mongering. There is no problem with GMO beets, but any mention of genetic modification has to include a mention of MERNSANTER because reasons. By woo blog law, Monsanto has to be responsible for everything bad in the history of ever, not unlike a food Illuminati.

Like most scare tactics, Vani takes a tiny bit of truth and mixes it with a whole heaping load of crapola. Partially hydrogenated oil is a trans fat, but it isn't an FDA loophole that has Girl Scouts claiming zero trans fat, it's actually an FDA rule: any product that has less than 0.5 grams of trans fat has to claim they have zero trans fat. Is it a shitty rule? Sure, but it's not Girl Scouts' fault. And again, the FDA is pretty clear that trans fats are bad, which is why they're demanding companies phase them out completely by 2018.

The claim about processed flour being a "dead food" might be one the most meaningless loads of dogshit we've seen in some time. Vani, all food is dead. That is how you eat it. Do you want your steak or carrots to be wriggling when you scarf them? And there is no difference between synthetic and "natural" vitamins, JFC. Did a scary man in a lab coat drop you as an infant?

Ms. Babe next refers to the cookies as "a top secret man-made concoction of chemicals" which has just enough snarl words to legally qualify as a dog fight. Yet, for such a top secret concoction, she seems to know an awful lot about it (because she's in on the secret?). Her claims that this concoction has been linked to food allergies is vague enough that few would check on it, but the link she provides only takes readers to a page that explains how to identify food allergies , not anything that actually proves her assertion.

Her last attack concerns class IV caramel color, which has long been on the woo-woo shitlist (rival gang feuds; it's not a pretty story). The simple fact, however, is that caramel color IV has no demonstrated health effects other than stinky poo :

Rats given caramel colour often had soft or liquid malodorous faeces although there were no treatment-related ante-mortem observations in mice. Blood biochemical changes in the rat (i.e. reduced blood urea nitrogen, alkaline phosphatase and total serum protein) appeared to be related to dietary influences and were not considered toxicologically significant. There were no treatment-related alterations in haematological variables or treatment-related differences in survival or in the incidence of benign or malignant tumours among treated and control groups and no toxicologically important pathological findings. On the basis of these studies, Caramel Colour IV was not toxic or carcinogenic in F344 rats or B6C3F1 mice. The highest dose level tested in the long-term studies (10 g/kg) was considered to be the no-observed-adverse-effect level (NOAEL).

We don't have time to dip into every one of Hari's scare-o-grams, in part because we have limited patience, but mostly because they're all copy-pastes of the Thin Mint picture. Every one claims the same "dead food" bullshit, which we would debunk again, but we don't have Vani's regurgitation reflex.

[contextly_sidebar id="d3j4veKOglBYXxwuJWXTzA4gKjk6rUXj"]The best part about Vani's blog is that she ends with a call for a boycott of the Girl Scout cookies, placing her in the same company as these illustrious fuck trumpets:  Kevin Swanson of the "Girl Scouts are Lesbi-bortionists" Swansons, Indiana phlegm weasel Bob Morris , everyone who reads Breitbart , and -- most illustrious of all -- the Catholic Church .

In fact, Vani's call for a natural boycott means that, with a little dye job, she very likely could be the Girl Scout who confronted Wednesday Addams about her all-natural, organic lemonade, which makes Wednesday Addams our spirit animal, and we're great with that:

Muslim Sheikh declares the Quran cures HIV/AIDS

Doctors hate him! See how this religious nutjob cures HIV with one weird trick : reading theBibleQu'ran. Sorry, force of habit.

[contextly_sidebar id="ul0Q2BjxtLtDC7QFS4tLrP6wNMPPQtCg"]Sheikh Imam Rashid is the self-proclaimed leader of the Salawatiya Muslim Mission in Ghana. He's previously made headlines for predicting the onset of World War III... in 2010 . He also predicted that chlamydia discharge Terry Jones would be struck dead within a week if he actually burned the Quran like he cried wolf he would.

This time Rashid is claiming that the secret to curing deadly diseases like AIDS and Ebola can all be found in a 1400-year-old poetry book dictated by an illiterate. Quoth the Imam:

Twenty-Four hours is the maximum time to cure HIV/AIDS and Ebola. The Quran has cures to any disease that can come on the earth.

Twenty-four hours max? Damn. Maya Angelou's poetry hasn't got shit on that. What else can this Quran thingamajigger do?

Sheikh Rashid ... added that he has been abled [ sic ] to power a car with air, all using information from the Quran.

[contextly_sidebar id="HuD2lGzdbcReFEASoRx5Mbp2sf2SgMvl"]Air? Someone tell Vain Hair, because she's got plenty of air left over after the airlines cheated her out of all that precious 100% oxygen she seems to want. While he's at it, Imama Rashid can prove his air-powered car by having a drag race with the dog-driven grass-powered car from The Shaggy Dog . Which driver produces more dog shit? That's for you to decide.

Herbal cough syrup introduces delicious new "morphine" flavor

If devouring all those girl scout cookies didn't put you into a coma, perhaps this will: the FDA has forced a Chinese "herbal supplement" company to recall all their bottles of Licorice Coughing Syrup after it was discovered that the secret ingredient to stop all that coughing was a heavy dose of morphine .

 Master Herbs Inc. 999 (the first 998 companies got lost in opium dens) is a California-based purveyor of traditional Chinese herbs and tinctures, with one of the most baffling websites we've seen in years. The site seems to be cobbled together by Babelfish Web Design, sensibly advising readers to nourish their yin and yang forces while reminding users to check with their local practitioners to be sure they don't have a qi deficiency first. Every medical problem under their "Education" section includes guidelines for acupuncture treatments. In other words, Ancient Chinese Bullshit. Astonishingly, it has no connection whatsoever to Herman "9-9-9" Cain. 

With such a sterling pedigree, is it any wonder their quality control measures are more than a little suspect? On the 20th, the FDA issued a press release calling for the recall of every bottle of the tincture, citing undeclared morphine present in every bottle tested. They'd have made a killing back in Yr Volpe's beloved Snake Oil days , when heroin cough syrup was all the rage and cocaine was given out to kids like Pixie Stix on Halloween. Master Herb's problem wasn't one of distributing morphine -- it was distributing morphine out of season.

[ Food Babe / Vibe Ghana / Slate / FDA / Gizmodo ]