All-Natural Snake Oil: Difference between revisions

It may be interesting to note that, as a commercial trope, this is mostly a fairly recent invention, growing through the 1960s and 1970s. (Though if you look through really old newspaper ads from the early 1800s, you can find examples of this.) For most of ''the rest of human history'', "nature" was widely considered to be filthy, disgusting, and [[Everything Trying to Kill You|chock full of things that want to kill and/or eat you]]. Had marketing forces stayed on-track, modern products would be touting their ''complete absence'' of anything found in nature, and extolling the health benefits (and exciting taste sensations) found from making food and health products with Pure Science.

 

 

* Given the name, if you thought the Natural Confectionery Company was a notably bad offender, you would be right. One [[Egregious]] example had a man reassure his daughter that the (jelly) snakes they were going to eat had no artificial colours or preservatives, and so were totally non-venomous. Because, as everybody knows, snake venom is completely artificial.

* Yogurt companies such as Actimel and Yakult are fond of boasting about how the 'good bacteria' in their products help reinforce your body's natural defences. The touted health benefits have not yet been proven, so the advertisers have to be careful not to include too specific claims in their TV spots (many have been banned already as a result of this). There is no discernible difference between drinking "probiotic yogurt drinks" and eating regular yogurt; in addition, the concentration of sugar is unusually high at around 18-20%. As a result, nutritional authorities (notably the one within the European Union) are attempting to prevent the manufacturers boasting the health benefits, which are seemingly outweighed by the unhealthy ingredients.

*** Actually, the situation is worse than that. Dasani was advertising as using ozone to purify the water; which they did. They took tap water, filtered it, added calcium chloride and bromide for taste, and pumped it full of ozone. All substances that occur commonly in nature. The problem was that the ozone reacted with the harmless bromide, converting it into highly carcinogenic bromate. The water was pulled because it contained double the legal maximum concentration of bromate.

** Just for fun, bottling the water at all automatically makes it worse for you; chemicals from the plastic leach out into the water. Also, the plastic is porous, which makes it a fantastic place for bacteria to breed.

* Speaking of water, check your shampoo bottle. Odds are, one of the ingredients listed will be "aqua", [[Altum Videtur|which is just another name for water]].

* [[wikipedia:HeadOn|HeadOn]]. Chemical analysis of the Migraine formulation has shown that the product consists almost entirely of wax.

* Splenda's "Made from sugar so it tastes like sugar", which makes as much sense as saying "Salt, made from [[Deadly Gas|chlorine]] and [[Made of Explodium|sodium]] so it's deadly."

** The tagline may be a sideways dig at Aspartame, which is a modified (asp-phe) dipeptide, while Splenda is a chlorinated sucrose, and is therefore a degree of separation closer from "natural" sugar.

*** [[Futurama|Uh-oh, I shouldn't have had seconds...]]

* The chemical used to approximate the taste of almonds comes in both natural and artificial. The natural-extract version is more expensive than the artificial one. The trick? The natural extract comes from peach pits and contains trace amounts of ''cyanide'' that the artificially-created version does not.