March 2, 2010 Literary Arts

Science and sensibility

Dr. Joe’s crusade against quackery continues in new book

by Christopher Olson

GRAPHIC DARNYA RUKHLYADEVA

There’s a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on Dr. Joe Schwarcz’s desk bearing his likeness, right beside a rubber duck wearing a stethoscope and a digital picture frame cycling through pictures of his family. I ask what he did to deserve such an honour, and Schwarcz, a McGill professor and a columnist for The Gazette, responds that it’s a novelty item from a factory tour.

Maybe it’s because I believe everything I read on a box, from “all-natural ingredients” to “a healthy part of a nutritious breakfast,” but Schwarcz warns me not to take every claim at face value—even if it’s his face on the cereal box.

As the director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, whose stated goal is to bring science to the public, Schwarcz has already written 10 books that separate fact from fraud. But this is the first time he’s given over an entire book to the subject.

“I’ve been getting more and more frustrated by the amount of nonsense that is out there,” says Schwarcz, explaining the inspiration behind his latest book, Science, Sense and Nonsense. In it he attempts to dispel 61 commonly accepted myths pertaining to food, medicine and chemistry—especially the myths propagated to make money.

“Charlatanism has always been with us,” Schwarcz explains. “The web has really aided and abetted that, because it’s so easy to set up a website that looks authentic, that looks scientific, and yet is total nonsense.”

Even legitimate science shouldn’t be immune to skepticism, he acknowledges.
“What’s life?” Schwarcz asks. “Life is the sum total of all the chemical reactions that are going on in our body all the time,” he continues. “So of course it stands to reason that chemicals can be a problem. Or they can, of course, be good.”

If you were to list all the chemical components of an apple, says Schwarcz, “it would be terrifying to people, because most of the names are multisyllabic, and they think that if they can’t pronounce it, then it must be doing them harm.”

Science may be to blame for rising cancer rates, he says, but that’s because science is doing such a good job keeping us alive longer, so that age-related illnesses have a fighting chance against viruses and disease to plague our health.

“We now have the luxury of worrying about trivia,” says Schwarcz, referring to the public backlash against the amounts of nail-polish remover and fire retardants that have been found in the human bloodstream. These numbers, he says, are statistically irrelevant. “Until quite recently, what did we worry about? We worried about dysentery and cholera and typhoid and polio. I mean, when I was in high school, polio was still a big issue. I had kids in my class who came down with polio.”

The anti-vaccination movement—whose primary spokesperson, actress Jenny McCarthy, contends that vaccines definitively cause autism—is proof that not all nonsense is motivated by selfishness, he argues.

“There are two kinds of charlatans,” says Schwarcz. “There are those charlatans who are in it for financial gain, who genuinely know that what they’re saying is total bunk and it’s all contrived to make money. And then there are those that are honestly self-delusional, who believe that they’re right, and Jenny McCarthy belongs to that [group].”

It may be expecting too much to hope the public might brush up their knowledge of science, but it is possible to teach people how to scoop out a fraud, says Schwarcz. Some false claims should be obvious.

“I came across this one yesterday,” he tells me. “It was a company that, believe it or not, was selling ocean water—bottled ocean water—for $60 a bottle, making all kinds of claims about how it contains magical molecules.

“It’s just overwhelming, the amount of stupidity out there,” he sighs.