Thanks to Ottawa Skeptics founder and Reality Check podcast host Jonathan Abrams for passing on a link to Penn and Teller's recent Bullshit! episode on fast food.
Up front I'll tell you I've been a big Bullshit! fan and for those who aren't familiar basically it's a show where mouthy magicians Penn and Teller question the facts behind commonly held beliefs, institutions and ideals.
For the vast majority of the topics they cover, I really don't have an expert opinion and generally I've tended to agreed with Penn and Teller's take on just how backwards some people think about a certain subject matter.
They're also magicians and when I've seen them perform their tricks, I've been wowed.
That said, I wonder if I'd have been just as wowed were I a magician and was able to see through their misdirection and sleight of hand.
With regards to their Bullshit! episode on fast food, given that I do know a fair bit about fast food, obesity and nutritional advocacy, I can tell you it sure wasn't tough to see through their misdirection and sleight of tongue.
The episode (and you can watch it below and draw your own opinions) hinges on some simple premises:
1. Opponents of fast food want it regulated out of existence.
2. Opponents of fast food believe that eating it makes you fat.
3. Opponents of fast food think those who eat it are inherently lazy or otherwise flawed.
4. Opponents of fast food think there's a conspiracy among fast food purveyors to create addictive foodstuff.
5. Opponents of fast food want the government to control everything we eat.
6. Proponents of fast food are hard working mothers and fathers who rely on it to serve healthy meals on the quick to their families.
I'll get to those points in a moment but first let me talk about who they decided to interview to champion the anti fast food cause. Her name is MeMe Roth and she's certainly the lunatic fringe of anti-obesity activism. I've blogged about her loathsomeness in the past and not surprisingly she's got some pretty loony things to say (go figure - when you interview someone from the lunatic fringe you'll get some pretty wild statements). Choosing MeMe to represent the anti-fast food argument would be like choosing Pat Robertson to represent modern Christianity or Osama Bin Laden to represents the tenets of 21st century Islam.
With regards to the show's main arguments, plainly put they're asinine.
Healthy eating advocates don't believe that eating fast food magically causes weight gain - they know that caloric imbalance does, and that restaurants fast and slow alike, are a huge contributor to that imbalance. They know that over the course of the past 30 years people have stopped cooking, and more and more dollars are being spent on food purchased outside of the home, foods with boatloads of calories, cups of salt and buckets of sugar - things that aren't good for our health.
Healthy eating advocates don't believe in banning fast or slow food, they believe in empowering people with enough information to make healthier and more educated choices in all restaurants and about protecting our most vulnerable and most precious resource - our kids from predatory marketing practices.
Being a healthy eating advocate myself I can tell you what I want to see change:
- I want a level playing field where people are provided with calorie counts at point of purchase in clearly visible locations so as to help those people make informed caloric decisions.
- I want to end the predatory practice of targeting children too young to discern truth from advertising with spots that extol the virtues of nutritional garbage or cartoon characters that beckon from the grocery aisle.
- I want taxes in place that discourage the consumption of products that are exceedingly unhealthy (and here I can't fault Penn and Teller, but since their show aired there's proof out of Harvard that sugar-sweetened taxes do indeed work to reduce soda consumption) which in turn impacts on the bottom line of Canada's health care expenditures, GDP and my taxes. And it's not as if there isn't precedent here. Regulating unnecessary risk is certainly part of the purvey of government, especially a government in a country with socialized medicine. From tobacco taxes, to seat-belt and helmet laws, to licensing requirements etc., governments do it all the time.
- I want changes in fast food zoning around schools as studies have shown disproportionate placement of fast food locations within walking distance of them.
The one argument I agreed with in this episode was the fact that governments are considering creating soda taxes while simultaneously subsidizing the production of corn. That is a ridiculous dichotomy as the artificially low prices of corn (and consequently high fructose corn syrup) are one of the primary drivers of cheap calories.
The biggest bullshit in this episode? For me it had to be the skinny active family who were talking about how much time they save with fast food. How long does it take to make oatmeal or some eggs for breakfast? How long would it take to do a quick stirfry or make some sandwiches for supper? And $20 to feed a family of 4 for a single meal? I can feed my family of 5 healthily on less than half of that.
Penn and Teller sum up this episode by letting the skinny mom who feeds her kids a diet heavy in fast food state,
"It's up to everyone to choose what they want to eat"And she's absolutely right and only truly loony folks like MeMe would argue otherwise. What I want, and what most healthy eating advocates want, is an environment that doesn't stack the deck in favour of selling fast food but rather stacks it in favour of informed, healthier choices.
Watching this episode and knowing a great deal about the subject matter certainly has me questioning Bullshit! as a whole. If this is how they report on fast food, who's to say that they don't grossly mischaracterize other arguments in other episodes?
If Penn and Teller really want to do a good Bullshit! episode let's see them take on the notion that it's faster or cheaper or just as healthy to buy fast food for your family than actually taking the time to cook. To that, and to pretty much this whole episode, I call bullshit.
Want to judge for yourself, here's the episode as posted on YouTube (until it gets yanked by Bravo):
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Agreed. I want the same things you want. I've read some interviews with Meme Roth in the past and I think her heart is in the right place but that she's overzealous and misguided.
ReplyDeleteMy veg kids just had accidental meat for the first time last week and it's given us some fascinating conversation over the past few days. Among other things, apparently my 6yo twin thinks that you cook people up and eat them when they die. (?) But it's giving me insight to their perceptions of how THEY eat compared with their extended family and peers. Fascinating stuff.
Excellent post. That mother in part 1...WOW! Every time I see shows, movies, interviews like that I'm amazed to see how clueless and careless people are about their health. Love yourself a little bit more, people! Anyway, I suppose you have seen this one too http://www.heartattackgrill.com/
ReplyDeleteI've been waiting for this to roll into my RSS reader. :)
ReplyDeleteI think they are right in that people vilify fast food and godify non-fast food. It is not just fast food that uses fat, sugar, and salt to make their food good.
Subway is an excellent example of an establishment whose marketing has done well. Panera bread too. Their menus are consistent with McDonald's in their ratios of calories to sodium. 50% your daily sodium for maybe 10-25% of calories. For example, a footlong The Feast at Subway nets you about 1000 calories but 5000 mg of sodium. At least it is "fresh", right?
P&T have always been interviewing the fringe, especially if it means Penn can yell incessantly at them for something stupid they say. It's not new, it's just in your subject area. :)
There are so many lies floating around in the food industry and it is unfortunate that P&T didn't really smack them down (except for people vilify fast food but not non-fast food).
Really, the only way to truly eat healthy is to never eat out. Even then it is way too easy to get too much sodium.
P&T 'Bullshit' is a great show, but it's occasionally infused with the creators' libertarian leanings. The episode about environmentalism has the same straw-man arguments (here are some flaky hippie enviro types! now you can see that cap-and-trade is bad!).
ReplyDeleteGreat post and agree with much of it but taxation is ridiculous and the idea to tax it because government does it all the time is even worse. You could say, tax the company who contributes to obesity and put that towards healthcare but even that is a terrible idea because it will push up costs for everyone. Despite the bad label we put on these restaurants, they provide a certain segment with otherwise unattainable employment and poorly educated families with the opportunity to at least put food in their family's mouth.
ReplyDeleteI agree to make sure consumers have access to the nutrition facts but let's be honest, we've been told cigarettes kill you but people still smoke. People do dumb stuff and make poor choices.
I try to eat healthy and make better choices so being face with nutrition facts could help but every now and then, a JR. Bacon Cheeseburger craving is going to override any common sense.
I wrote something similar about their Disabilities Act episode and their Taxes episode [warning: swearing]. They have also publicly apologized for their smoking episode. Though hopefully they will address some or all of these in their planned "The Bullshit of Bullshit!" episode.
ReplyDeleteThe BS shows in general, as Anonymous said, are far from objective. Entertaining, sure, but I find it a bit disappointing (as I do with Chomsky, by the way) that they use the same sleight-of-hand rhetorical tactics and misrepresentations as the people they criticize -- when they're often criticizing them for their rhetorical tactics and misrepresentations.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned the corn subsidies as one of the good things in the show. What about the studies into people's perceptions of calories? Or pointing out how bad fancy dining is too?
ReplyDeleteI just found it unfortunate that they came off as so gung-ho for fast food. It's one thing to defend it from people that portray fast food as toxic (it's not), but to imply that it's somewhat healthy erases a lot of credibility from their arguments.
Hey Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteI didn't buy their calorie guessing game. Studies consistently show we're terrible at guessing calories, fast food or otherwise. I suspect careful editing and/or answer cherry picking.
Regarding them pointing out that fancy dining is, "bad too" - I don't think they really did that very well as they spent much of the episode painted fast food as not in fact bad and didn't spend much time at all on fast casual. Ultimately both are bad but indeed, calorically, sit down's often going to be worse than fast.
Thanks again for the link.
Regardless of whether the point about fine dining was well made, it's still a tu quoque logical fallacy. The badness of fine dining is irrelevant to the badness of fast food. The problem with fast food is its ubiquity combined with people's poor food-related decision-making. More information (i.e., education) about calories and health would be beneficial to reduce overeating in either setting, supporting the idea of posting calories on fast food (and other) menus.
ReplyDeleteAs a Libertarian, here are some rebuttals to your requests:
ReplyDelete1) Why should the restaurants be required to offer calorie counts? If you don't like it, you don't have to eat there.
2) Commercials for unhealthy food may be targeted to children as much as adults, but it's the responsibility of the adults to watch what their kids eat. The parents are the main consumers, not the kids.
3) People often say that they're not in favor of banning fast food outright, but they'd like a higher consumption tax placed on them. Considering that wherever you draw the line (in regards to how high the tax is), it will be completely arbitrary, this is just a different kind of ban. If you raise taxes so high that it is not cost-feasible to the consumer to buy such comestibles, you're practically doing the same thing.
4) Once again, parents should exercise control over their children.
The style of delivery is always with a view to making up your own mind from the evidence provided, the commentary mocking both those Against and For any argument or debate in each show. I see them more as Devils Advocates, presenting both sides with a sardonic air suggesting both are suspect in what they say, and it's up to you to figure which lie you like best. Or which gets you blogging your own bullshit in defence of some moral or religious standpoint or weight issue you have they picked on that week...
ReplyDeleteI would say that P & T never give a fair sided representation of any debate. You are correct, that they will always seek out the lunatic fringe and incite them to amp up the crazy for the TV. There are thousands of scientists discussing the present implications of vaccines and GMO's, yet we never see one of them for those episodes. The argument is always misrepresented and never presented evenly.
ReplyDeleteAs for this issue, i agree with the Libertarian above regarding consumption taxes. I want government out of the picture altogether. The problem starts way further upstream with them subsidizing Corn, Soy, HFCS so these cheap ingredients will always circle the drain at the lowest restaurant on the food chain.
This is really old but I want to let of steam anyway. As someone who is a jack of all trades, and does a lot of reading on science, technology and economics, I'd say at least 75% of the episodes are total bullshit and make my blood boil. I don't know everything (shallowly) so it may be a higher percentage of bullshit than I'm able to detect (and my job necessitates a high degree of bullshit detection in very technical and diverse fields).
ReplyDeleteA few of the episodes are spot on, but the shows that are bullshit are either obvious right-wing short term economic blindness, easy targets like psychics (do you really need 30 minutes to debunk psychics?) or unprovable stuff (UFOs) then they go find kooks and make fun of them, and sometimes just straight up bullshit about bullshit(seriously, hair? orgasms?).
Probably the worst episode is the one on organics. "organic" is basically a worthless marketing term in American supermarkets anymore so there's really no point and judging them in comparison to contemporary farming. This episode pisses me off the most because if you only listen to them and not know about the food industry already, you'll get the impression that they actually are correct and provide valid scientific evidence when a majority of the studies are funded by huge powerful corporations you've never heard of.
Area-51 is well documented to be the testing ground of the original stealth aircraft, the SR-71. (I read all about this as a kid and built a model and everything.) The fact that they missed that very important (and awesome) piece of history on a show about Area-51 means they don't do their homework, and are full of bullshit.