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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Technology
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Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.
I'm not saying that there's no magical thinking with cars
"my magical fuel additive" or whatever
but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.
It's also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.
I get that not everyone is a doctor or a dietician. But you'd think that any time you see someone promoting something as a fix for a wide, unrelated range of conditions, that it should be enough to raise red flags for someone, layman or no.
I think it's macroscopy vs microscopy.
Food and nutrition and health is all "invisible" to you in a way that a car engine isn't. To the average person, even hearing cellular functions explained sounds like magic, because it takes SO MUCH knowledge to get to the point where you can truly grok how a specific medicine works in the body.
That also explains why fuel additives are an area where that happens in cars. You can't see the difference in e.g. AKI ratings in action. You can't see summer vs winter fuel blend changes. So why isn't it possible that this additive could do things you can't see as well?
I think it's because the science of diet and health has contradicted itself so many times, and has given so many people such bad advice, and has frankly been so unreliable and untrustworthy for so long, that people's bullshit detectors are less well tuned.
Even without the huge ag lobbying boards doing their things, the sheer healthiness of eggs has, I swear, swung back and forth at least four times since the '80s. Like a Miller Lite "tastes great" "less filling" mudfight in the middle of a club.