Maybe the name Yvette d'Entremont doesn t a ring a bell to you, or maybe you know her by her internet persona: The SciBabe. Whatever your familiarity level is with her you need to dial it way up. Start following and listening to her because she is bringing the heat. Last month she delivered an assault on the Food Babe in which she eloquently pointed out that Vani Hari is: Full of Sh** and this month she is at it again attacking the hypocrisy of the natural food movement.
In this latest piece, titled The Bullsh** Hypocrisy of "All-Natural" Foods, she starts out by pointing out that with the spread of the Natural movement (what she dubs Natural Inc) consumers are getting lost in the shuffle:
Recently, several large companies have made decisions to alter their products based on chemical phobia. Is this a good thing? If you follow any natural food blogs, you might say yes. But the science says otherwise. And stuck in the middle trying to make sense of it all is the consumer.
The meat (so to speak) of this piece is her discussion of the current events in chemophobia: Chipotle, Kraft, aspartame et al. and with each she expertly points outs what's real and what's (to use her phrasing) bullsh**. One praiseworthy example comes from when she tackles Kraft s decision to change to natural dyes, a decision that makes no sense because all dyes are processed in a lab, which Yvette explains is a good thing:
We re switching food dyes synthesized in the laboratory to food dyes that are ¦ well, still going to be produced in the laboratory. We now have the safest class of food dyes ever on the market... Laboratories have helped that process because they can check final products for safety and purity, whether synthetic or derived from natural sources. And no matter what the source of the dye, a chemical solvent is used to extract the target color molecule.
She concludes by making an important distinction between what she dubs Nature, Inc and Nature. The former, she explains, is about ideals that are based on an image people want to portray of themselves on social media, while the latter is the dangerous events in human history that science has allowed us to overcome:
We load the hybrid dog into the hybrid car, stretch on a pair of green-friendly $100 lululemons while hiking in the artificially designed nature trails of L.A. while drinking artificially sanitized water and tweeting selfies on our technological marvel iPhones with the hashtag #nature.
That s Nature Inc ¢.
Nature, on the other hand, is generations ravaged by smallpox because vaccines weren t invented yet. It s having a home birth not because it s been romanticized, but because it s your only option. It s dying of malnutrition because, even though you have soil, sunlight and water, you don t have the technology to fight off bugs, weeds, or droughts ¦ Because as much as nature makes delicious fruits and vegetables, if you re not paying attention, it also makes poisonous mushrooms.
The whole piece is done in a voice that her followers will easily recognize as uniquely SciBabe (her website s banner reads Come for the science, stay for the dirty jokes) but those new to her style will enjoy it as well. Through and through it s an excellent yet slyly informative read that will open the eyes of consumers to the holes in logic of the people who push this mindset. We here at ACSH say kudos to The Scibabe and we are eagerly anticipating her next piece.