I’m really getting tired of people making stupid invalid arguments just to try to scare people into not doing certain things, like eating fast food or drinking soda. I am also particularly pissed off when these people and their dumb arguments end up scaring my wife. I am referring to things like a segment from the 2004 anti McDonald’s documentary “Super Size Me” by Morgan Spurlock in which he does what he thinks is a scientific experiment by placing a bunch of McDonald’s food in glass jars. After a couple of  months, the french fries from McDonald’s do not get moldy or decompose at all. This clip pops up on blogs and facebook a lot and I always see comments  like “zomg! I’m never eating McDonald’s again that’s effin nasty!” or “dude, there is teh nasty chemicals in doze fries for them to not get rotten.” It amazes me that people just accept these kind of claims uncritically simply because it is such a pop culture fad these days to bash fast food, especially McDonald’s.

Now since I am going to be critical of Mr. Spurlock I know exactly what people are going to say. I am only on the second paragraph of this post and I can already hear the arguments they are going to make. People are going to claim I am biased in favor of fast food and that I am saying that it is perfectly healthy and that it is what you should be eating all the time. So I feel like I need to address that ridiculous and obvious straw man argument ahead of time. Yes, I do enjoy the occasional fast food meal, and no I am not saying that fast food is good for you. There are many reasons why should not eat too much food (fast or not) that is deep fried or has little nutritional value like french fries. What I am saying is that there are ways to make that point without using meaningless invalid arguments that are just designed to frighten people.

So let’s get to the video. Morgan starts off by saying “We’re just going to give you an idea of how this food is breaking down in your body. I’m just going to put it in some jars and kinda show you how it breaks down on its own over time.” He then shows the food in various stages of disgusting decomposition over the next couple of months, a couple of weeks at a time. The only thing that does nothing are the fries from McDonald’s. But the silly thing is that after he makes that opening statement, about twenty seconds into the video, the whole “experiment” is rendered useless. I can’t believe I even have to explain this because it is so blatantly obvious, I am actually getting the urge to do the crazy internet commenter thing and do it in all caps. I’ll resist that urge and here it goes:

Your stomach is not an empty glass jar.

Showing how food, any food, does or does not decompose in an empty jar does not say anything about how your body breaks it down. First of all, when you put food in your mouth, you begin the process by chewing the food and mixing it with saliva. When the food reaches your stomach the gastric juices in there break it down. What’s left then goes into the small intestine where the nutrients are absorbed by your body. The rest then goes into the large intestine and then after some more time ends up in the toilet.

I know that many people are wondering why the fries don’t get moldy, as well as why the fries from another restaurant that he puts in another jar do. It has to do with how they are prepared. Guess what the fries did right before they were served to you, they took a bath in hot oil and were then covered in a lot of salt. Certain types of oil will inhibit the growth of microorganisms, and salt draws moisture away from food through osmosis, thus helping preserve it. Humans have been using salt to preserve various foods for thousands of years so you’d think people would know this. My hypothesis about the other fries is that since they were a lot larger than the McDonald’s fries they did not absorb as much of the oil, but there could be many other factors. The other restaurant may have used a different kind of oil, or used less salt, or even none at all so the customer could add as much salt as they wanted from the shaker on the table. Is it because there are “chemicals” in the McDonald’s fries? Well, since everything that exists in the universe is a chemical  I have to say yes. In this case the chemicals are the oil and the salt, or maybe I should use salt’s scary sounding chemical name, sodium chloride. Ah, run it’s a chemical! McDonald’s also adds citric acid as a preservative. Oh my gosh, run, another chemical! Yea, a chemical that is also found it very high concentrations in those other really unhealthy dangerous foods like oranges and grapefruits. That was sarcasm, in case you didn’t pick it up. I have also heard people say that it’s “unnatural” for food to not decompose and that foods found in nature won’t stay preserved like that. Well, I beg to differ. A favorite sweetener of the all natural anti human crowd is honey. Even Mike Adams, the crazy conspiracy mongering nut from naturalnews.com has good things to say about it. Well guess what? Honey does not decompose either. They have even found jars of honey in Egyptian tombs that are many centuries old and are still good. Any conspiracy theories on that one guys? Are the bees being paid off by “big food” or the government to put dangerous chemicals in the honey they make? I guess that would be quite a stretch, even for the craziest of the crazy. I wonder if Morgan Spurlock ever realized that his little demonstration made no sense. He seems like a pretty smart guy and you would think so. If he knew that and still put it in his movie just for the shock value, then I seriously question his credibility and ethical standards.

On to another dumb argument used just for shock value and scare mongering that I heard recently. This one was on the television show “The Doctors.” Doctor Travis Stork, who I criticized before for recommending an herb for memory loss when studies have shown it does not work, was talking about certain foods you should avoid. One item on his list was soda. First he made a perfectly valid statement about how it was full of sugar and offered no nutritional value. He could have stopped there, but he continued with a little demonstration that was no better than the claims you see in many chain emails. He had an old car battery sitting in front of him with corroded terminals. He then poured the cola over the terminals and it dissolved away the corrosion. That must mean soda is actually corrosive toxic waste that will dissolve away your internal organs right? Wrong! The pH scale is used to measure how acidic or basic something is. The scale goes from one to 14, with one being the most acidic and 14 being the most alkaline or basic. The pH of cola is somewhere between two and four, which is pretty acidic. But it is not as acidic as the gastric acid that is already in your stomach which has a pH of between one and two. You would think that Travis Stork would know that since his is, you know, a doctor. Again, I am not saying that soda is good for you, just that this argument against it is invalid, misleading, and not necessary.

The bottom line is that if you want to make people aware that french fries and soda are not healthy there are perfectly valid arguments you can use. They are basically the same as many other unhealthy foods because they have lots of calories, little or no nutrition, and are chock full of saturated fat and sugar. But they are also not dangerous toxic poisons either. If you like them , you can have some on occasion, just don’t overdo it. If you use invalid and demonstrably false and unscientific arguments, it does nothing to advance your cause, it just makes you look stupid.