Whole Foods is an American-founded “natural” grocery store that has now expanded into Canada and the UK. It specializes in “natural” foods, which Wikipedia characterizes as follows:
Whole Foods Market only sells products that meet its self-created quality standards for being “natural”, which the store defines as: minimally processed foods that are free of hydrogenated fats as well as artificial flavors, colors, sweeteners, preservatives, and many others as listed on their online “Unacceptable Food Ingredients” list. Whole Foods Market has also announced that it does not intend to sell meat or milk from cloned animals or their offspring, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled them safe to eat.
It also does not sell GMO foods. Because of its high prices and the demography of its shoppers (young wealthy people), the store is sometimes called “Whole Paycheck.”
I went to one of these places last weekend, and although the foods were tempting, they were also very pricey. I suppose that’s the tariff for organic stuff, and I confess that I’m not pure enough to buy the organic stuff. Good for those who have the will and money to do so.
But there’s also a dark side to Whole Foods, at least as described in an article by Michael Schulson in The Daily Beast: “Whole Foods: America’s temple of pseudoscience.” The accusation is that the store sells homeopathic remedies and other foods/drugs that sport medically unsubstantiated claims. I didn’t verify this myself, and I learned this only after my visit, but if it’s true—and I’m sure Schulson wouldn’t screw this up for fear of a lawsuit—it’s something that the store should remedy. (Schulson is a freelance writing described as having “a B.A. in religious studies from Yale.”
Schulson’s complaint:
My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it’s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.
Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.
You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.
I didn’t verify, as I said, whether the store I visited had a “homeopathy” section, but that would be unconscionable in any store. But browsing the Whole Foods website you can find information about homeopathic remedies for allergies, homeopathic remedies for colds and flu, and at least three homeopathic remedies for the latter. Boiron homeopathic medicines are also advertised as being sold at Whole Foods; the Boirion website lists a huge variety of medicines covering a huge number of ailments.
The liberal (and young) clientele was certainly visible in the Chicago branch I visited. I was probably the oldest person in that crowded store, and, ironically, the parking lot was full of gas-guzzling SUVs, as well as expensive cars like Audis and Porsches.
There’s more, though, about the quackery:
Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics—live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: “Stay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer’s.” A sample opening sentence: “We like to think that medicine works.”
Well, lots of stores have magazines containing that kind of pseudoscience, but if I were the boss of Whole Foods, I’d try to keep that out. If the store is dedicated to keeping its clientele healthy, it should get rid of stuff that isn’t good for health, like homeopathic remedies.
A couple of Schulson’s other complaints, though, sound curmudgeonly:
At times, the Whole Foods selection slips from the pseudoscientific into the quasi-religious. It’s not just the Ezekiel 4:9 bread (its recipe drawn from the eponymous Bible verse), or Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, or Vitamineral Earth’s “Sacred Healing Food.” It’s also, at least for Jewish shoppers, the taboos that have grown up around the company’s Organic Integrity effort, all of which sound eerily like kosher law. There’s a sign in the Durham store suggesting that shoppers bag their organic and conventional fruit separately—lest one rub off on the other—and grind their organic coffees at home—because the Whole Foods grinders process conventional coffee, too, and so might transfer some non-organic dust. “This slicer used for cutting both CONVENTIONAL and ORGANIC breads” warns a sign above the Durham location’s bread slicer. Synagogue kitchens are the only other places in which I’ve seen signs implying that level of food-separation purity.
Actually, I’ve used Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Oil Soap for years, simply because it smells good. The label, which makes all kinds of outrageous claims and statements, verges on demented ravings, but I don’t know anyone who pays attention to that. As for the mixing of organic and nonorganic coffee dust or bread crumbs, yes, I find that overly punctilious, but it’s something that a store specializing in natural foods has to do to let its customers know what is what.
But these quibbles pale in light of Whole Foods’ selling of homeopathic remedies and foods that make unsubstantiated health claims. That alone is enough to justify Schulson’s piece. And in the main I think he’s right when he argues that pseudoscience is pseudoscience, whether it’s in the aisles of Whole Foods or the Creation Museum:
Still: a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don’t Tell You, or Whole Foods’ overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article). If scientific accuracy in the public sphere is your jam, is there really that much of a difference between Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, who seems to have made a career marketing pseudoscience about the origins of the world, and John Mackey, a founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, who seems to have made a career, in part, out of marketing pseudoscience about health?
Well, no—there isn’t really much difference, if the promulgation of pseudoscience in the public sphere is, strictly speaking, the only issue at play.
Where Schulson goes wrong, I think, is in claiming that neither creationism nor quackery is especially harmful:
I’m not saying that homeopathy is especially harmful; I’m saying that creationism may be relatively harmless. In isolation, unless you’re a biologist, your thoughts on creation don’t matter terribly much to your fellow citizens; and unless you’re a physician, your reliance on Sacred Healing Food to cure all ills is your own business.
Well, creationism isn’t harmless to just biologists: it’s harmful to the public in three ways. First, when it’s taught in schools, it keeps children from learning abut one of the great wonders of nature, and the central organizing theory of biology: all living creatures descend from a single ancestral organism, largely via the materialistic process of natural selection, and every species on Earth is related to every other one. That’s just amazing, even to jaded biologists like me.
Second, creationism, an outgrowth of religion, enables further magical thinking, and blurs the lines between science and religion, which is the same as blurring the lines between rationality and irrationality.
Third, the fight to get creationism in the schools is a fight against America’s First Amendment to the Constitution: freedom of (and from) religion. If we allowed creationism in schools, there’s no doubt—as IDers and their Wedge Strategy make clear—that further incursion of religion would follow, culiminating in theocratic public schools.
Yes, it’s people’s own business whether they dose themselves with overpriced water—unless they have something that’s infectious. And, even if they don’t, homeopathy, like false medical claims for stuff like ashwagandha root, is dangerous because it deludes people into thinking that they can cure themselves and forget about doctors. It so happens that I had a friend with salivary gland cancer, and he initially relied on homeopathic medicine to treat it. After it became clear that the stuff didn’t work, he finally got himself to a real doctor, and had an operation. I think he’s in the clear now, but he could have easily died had he not come to his senses. So yes, homeopathy is dangerous—in fact more dangerous than creationism if you simply count human health. Whether creationism leads to less overall “well being” than homeopathy, given that both enable “magical thinking,” is something we can’t adjudicate. But since neither is true, we should fight against both.
Sadly, Schulson sort of undercuts his thesis by offering an analysis of why we fault creationists so much more than Whole Foods, even though both purvey pseudoscience. He gives two reasons:
Still, we let [Whole Foods’ pseudoscience] off the hook. Why? Two reasons come to mind. The first is that Whole Foods is a for-profit business, while the Creation Museum is the manifestation of an explicitly religious and political movement. For some reason, there’s a special stream of American rage directed at ideological attacks on science that seems to evaporate when the offender is a for-profit corporation. It wasn’t especially surprising that Bill Nye would go and debate Ken Ham; it would have been unusual had he, say, challenged executives at the biotech company Syngenta—which has seemingly been running a smear campaign against a Berkeley biologist—to a conversation about scientific integrity, or challenged Paleo Magazine’s editors to a debate about archaeology. For those of us outside the fundamentalist world, I imagine that the Creation Museum gift shop is the one part of the museum that makes some kind of sense. Well, okay, they’re trying to make money with this stuff. Meanwhile, Whole Foods responds to its customers, as any good business should.
I doubt this. I don’t see the shoppers at Whole Foods being especially pro-business. In fact, I see them as anti-business, at least when those businesses are agrobusinesses or Big Pharma. My own theory (which is mine) is that I don’t think the customers are either aware of the homeopathic remedies in the store (the person who took me there didn’t know about that at all), or they don’t know what homeopathy is. Those sorts of remedies are, I think, far more common in Europe (where they’re sometimes counted as government-subsidized “medicines”) than in the U.S.
And, second, we often have it stuck in our heads that science communicators have only failed to speak to the religious right. But while issues of science-and-society are always tied up, in some ways, with politics, they’re not bound to any particular part of the spectrum. Just ask Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., liberal political scion and vaccine skeptic extraordinaire, or Prince Charles, who pushed British health ministers to embrace homeopathic medicine.
This I don’t get. I don’t think that when left-wingers promote pseudoscience, they’re granted some kind of immunity by either skeptics or scientists. Orac, Harriet Hall, and other people who (I think) are liberals go after quackery all the time, as do many of the atheist/leftist bloggers like Sharon Hill and Simon Singh. As for science communicators failing to speak to the religious right—really? Here are a few names: Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye. It’s my impression that, in fact, people realize that science communicators do speak to the religious right. And they also speak to people like anti-vaxers, “spritual” healers, and anti-GMO foodies. Quackery is quackery, and we’re equal-opportunity skeptics.
The important issue is that a widespread and profitable grocery chain, which promotes itself as purveying “healthy” foods, appears to push quackery—spurious remedies that can hurt people by keeping them from seeking proper medical attention. If you’re a Whole Foods shopper, and have any respect for science and science-based medicine, you should protest this to the store and to the company.
