Skinny Bitch

A Quackenfriend gave JLQ "Skinny Bitch." She is reading/scanning it casually out of curiosity, but certainly not taking it to heart. I scanned a few of its pages and not surprisingly took it to heart. It hit one of my pet peeves about the world - bad "science" and terrible research.

I'll just post my rambling email I sent to her this morning. I thought it was a good idea to write this email instead of, say, "getting ready for work" and "making sure I'd be on time." Priorities, people, all about priorities.

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Re: Skinny Bitch

Are you effing kidding me? This is poor science. Maybe the rest of the book is better, and the chapter I read in the beginning seemed very good, but the meat eating thing reeks of poor science - having a conclusion, then hunting around for evidence to support it. I haven't taken an anthro class in a decade and can tell this section is rubbish.

The Atkins diet is moronic. Obviously. "If you study animals in the wild, you will note that they do not rely on anything other than their natural hunting ability, speed, strength, claws, teeth, and jaws." Then the girls go on to describe how physically frail we are. And that we'd get our ass kicked if we tried to hunt with our bare hands. That we would be helpless without silverware or an oven.

What? There are so many things wrong with these three pages it is unbelievable. It seems that the girls have forgotten that controlling our environment through intelligence and tool use can change our evolutionary trajectory. It seems they have forgotten that there are things called "scavengers" that can also eat meat. They seem to have forgotten about half of our teeth, designed for ripping and tearing. They must have forgotten that before using ovens, humans domesticated fire...i dunno...two MILLION years ago.

"Even if this were the case and eating meat did help us evolve, look at what we evolved from. We looked like friggin' apes and had massive heads, strong jaws, and brute strength. Maybe back then we were supposed to eat meat."

Really? Seriously? Did they watch 1,000,000 BC for their evolutionary research? We looked like apes because of our common ancestor. True. But these big cave dudes that we evolved from were...smaller than us. Every Australopithecine was smaller than us. Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and I'm sure the half dozen other early Homo species were *all* smaller than us. What was a reason they had huge heads and jaws? We had bigass teeth to grind tough plant material. When we domesticated fire and could begin breaking down plant and animal products into more easily digestible substances our teeth and skulls began to get smaller.

"But the last time we checked, we aren't cavemen anymore."

I'm pretty sure they think early humans meant Neanderthals. Big dudes with clubs, eating a mammoth a day. Last I checked, Neanderthals were evolutionary dead ends.

It is apparent they are discounting or not aware of the last two million years of human evolution. They go on to talk about our digestive tract, our saliva, comparing it to carnivores. Maybe it differs because we are OMNIvores. Maybe it differs because unlike every other carnivore, we tend not to eat raw meat, and haven't for a long, long time.

Want to get preachy about factory farming? No problem. Want to talk about fad diets being dumb? Good, they are. Want to try to help girls eat sensibly? Fantastic. But read this book with a grain of salt (which I know you already are). The fact that my passing knowledge of human evolution can completely rip apart these three pages of text makes me think that if I had passing knowledge of some other topics in this book, they, too may not hold up to scrutiny. Books like these that sound like science can be as bad as the fad diets and myths they are trying to debunk, and there is no reason more research wasn't done to avoid that.
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See, this pisses me off in the same way intelligent design pisses me off. It is worse than Creationism, because it wears a veneer of science while possessing none of its rigors and operates in the wrong direction (conclusion first). Boo, I say. Boo.