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All-Natural Snake Oil: Difference between revisions
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** Most oils use the hexane process to get as much out of the oil seeds as possible, to the point that "expeller pressed" is practically synonymous with natural oil.
* Played shamelessly straight in a commercial for Herbashine hair care products. "The only one made with bamboo extract. Bamboo, like naturally strong." Yeah, I'm fairly certain that's not how it works.
* "[http://fakescience.org/dont-waste-a-good-pumpkin/ Don’t Waste A Good Pumpkin]" from ''Fake Science''. A pumpkin diaper!
== Parodies ==
* Spoofed in a sketch on ''[[A Bit of Fry and Laurie]]'' in which a brand of cocoa is advertised as containing "nature's own barbiturates and heroin".
** Another sketch features a doctor prescribing cigarettes, reassuring his patient that tobacco is a herbal ingredient.
** Or rather, a white-coated man masquerading as a doctor - the punchline is that he's a tobacco salesman. "Doctor? Whatever gave you that idea?"
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** Also [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] when Maria criticizes that just because it says organic, that automatically makes it alright.
* Parodied in an episode of ''[[King of the Hill]]'', when ''trans'' fats are banned in Arlen ala 1920s Prohibition. Bill Dauterive believes that if the food he's eating is organic (or at least free of particularly demonized chemicals), he can eat as much as he wants. He proceeds to get even fatter as a result.
* ''[[Dilbert]]'' has it repeatedly, because Scott Adams "[[Author Tract|loves]]" this one. A commentary in one of his books: "It frightens me to think how many people believe 'natural' is the same as 'good for you.'"
* An episode of the ''[[Dilbert (animation)|Dilbert]]'' animated series had his company killing people with herbal lozenges. "Anthrax is a bacterium, not a herb."▼
** Also spoofed in [http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2002-02-05
** "[http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-03-29 I'm writing a press release for imaginary new green energy technologies...]"
▲** An episode of the ''[[Dilbert (animation)|Dilbert]]'' animated series had his company killing people with herbal lozenges. "Anthrax is a bacterium, not a herb."
* Spoofed a number of times in [[Discworld]]:
** In ''[[Discworld/Witches Abroad|Witches Abroad]]'', Magrat assumes that absinthe is good for you because it's made with herbs. She ends up with a good-sized hangover afterwards.
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{{quote|'''Idiot citizen''': What's so bad about corn syrup? It's natural. Corn's a fruit. And syrup comes from a bush.}}
* A ''[[The Far Side|Far Side]]'' cartoon features an [[The Igor|Igor]]-like character walking into a shop selling "unnatural foods".
== [[Truth in Television]]: [[Real Life]] examples that sound like parodies ==
* In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a vogue for gland transplantation, especially procedures involving xenotransplants, or non-human tissue.
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*** Little has changed since then: testosterone-supplements are STILL an important ingredient in anti-aging quackery.
* Homeopathic remedies claim to work on the principle of [[You Fail Pharmacology Forever|"like cures like"]]. The idea is that an active substance (arsenic, for example) has [[You Fail Physics Forever|"energy"]] that can be transferred to water by shaking a mixture vigorously (but homeopaths say that only they know how to do the proper kind of shaking), and the more times you repeat the mix-and-shake procedure (to the point that you'd be lucky<ref>or, in the case of arsenic, unlucky</ref> to get one molecule of the original substance in a swimming pool) the more powerful the energy gets. And water that's been energized by the arsenic that's been diluted out of it ''cures'' [[Insane Troll Logic|arsenic poisoning and any illness whose symptoms vaguely resemble arsenic poisoning.]]
** The whole deal sounds even less credible when one is told how this system was "discovered" and developed. It started out with a man having the idea of "fighting fire with fire" with his patients. They came in with say, symptom x, he prescribed them something which is supposed to cause symptom x (usually one poison or another—people don't seek medical aid for benevolent symptoms). He began experimenting with different doses of said poison, to find that the less he prescribed, the faster the person recovered, and so he began diluting his "medication" to a point there was little more then simple water left in it. As a side note, any time a homeopathic fan tells you that it's better than "modern Western medicine", point out that it was invented by a German in the 1800s. It tends to blow their minds.▼
▲The whole deal sounds even less credible when one is told how this system was "discovered" and developed. It started out with a man having the idea of "fighting fire with fire" with his patients. They came in with say, symptom x, he prescribed them something which is supposed to cause symptom x (usually one poison or another—people don't seek medical aid for benevolent symptoms). He began experimenting with different doses of said poison, to find that the less he prescribed, the faster the person recovered, and so he began diluting his "medication" to a point there was little more then simple water left in it. As a side note, any time a homeopathic fan tells you that it's better than "modern Western medicine", point out that it was invented by a German in the 1800s. It tends to blow their minds.
** Another incarnation of 'like fights like' was the doctrine of signatures. Basically: if a plant has leaves that look kinda like a human liver if you squint a bit, than that plant can be used for diseases of the liver. The theory was popular with galen and his contemporaries and was revived during the renaissance. The main 'proof' behind the idea was that god had been friendly enough to mark all beneficial herbs with a nice instruction-manual.
* And let's not forget [http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/radium.htm Radio-Active Water] which was perfectly safe just like those natural radium sources being used as health springs at the time.
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