t. colin campbell

Today I read what must be the most mind-numbingly stupid “scientific study”. Some are bad; this was awful. To test whether polyphenols in red wine really had any benefit (why?), a young doctor from the Netherlands decided on the bright idea of adding synthetic polyphenol “extracts” to dairy drinks and giving them to patients, to see what happened to their blood pressure. There are TWO stupid problems with this: The polyphenols are stripped of all their accompanying substances, enzymes, etc, found in the grape Milk is probably the number #1 cause of blood pressure I have found over the years. Put anything in milk and it will not work in lowering blood pressure. The first problem is typical of medical “thinking” (if I can use so bold a word for it): the belief there is one magic bullet in natural food or plant substances and that “one thing” must be the reason the food or plant works therapeutically. They call it the active ingredient but it’s a scientific nonsense. The obsession with isolating a single compound comes, of course, from the desire to then mutilate it beyond Nature’s best and so patent it. But nothing works out of context. There may be a million other substances in grapes which make the polyphenols work properly (so-called adjuvants). 

Today I read what must be the most mind-numbingly stupid “scientific study”. Some are bad; this was awful. To test whether polyphenols in red wine really had any benefit (why?), a young doctor from the Netherlands decided on the bright idea of adding synthetic polyphenol “extracts” to dairy drinks and giving them to patients, to see what happened to their blood pressure. There are TWO stupid problems with this: The polyphenols are stripped of all their accompanying substances, enzymes, etc, found in the grape Milk is probably the number #1 cause of blood pressure I have found over the years. Put anything in milk and it will not work in lowering blood pressure. The first problem is typical of medical “thinking” (if I can use so bold a word for it): the belief there is one magic bullet in natural food or plant substances and that “one thing” must be the reason the food or plant works therapeutically. They call it the active ingredient but it’s a scientific nonsense. The obsession with isolating a single compound comes, of course, from the desire to then mutilate it beyond Nature’s best and so patent it. But nothing works out of context. There may be a million other substances in grapes which make the polyphenols work properly (so-called adjuvants).