2008 - Bad Science

by Ben Goldacre

  It’s interesting to think about why this kind of decoration is so seductive, and to people who should know better. Firstly, the very presence of neuroscience information might be seen as a surrogate marker of a ‘good’ explanation, regardless of what is actually said. As the researchers say, ‘Something about seeing neuroscience information may encourage people to believe they have received a scientific explanation when they have not.’

  But more clues can be found in the extensive literature on irrationality. People tend, for example, to rate longer explanations as being more similar to ‘experts’ explanations’. There is also the ‘seductive details’ effect: if you present related (but logically irrelevant) details to people as part of an argument, this seems to make it more difficult for them to encode, and later recall, the main argument of a text, because their attention is diverted.

  More than this, perhaps we all have a rather Victorian fetish for reductionist explanations about the world. They just feel neat, somehow. When we read the neurosciencey language in the ‘bogus neuroscience explanations’ experiment—and in the Brain Gym literature—we feel as if we have been given a physical explanation for a behavioural phenomenon (‘an exercise break in class is refreshing’). We have somehow made behavioural phenomena feel connected to a larger explanatory system, the physical sciences, a world of certainty, graphs and unambiguous data. It feels like progress. In fact, as is often the case with spurious certainty, it’s the very opposite.

  Again, we should focus for a moment on what is good about Brain Gym, because when you strip away the nonsense, it advocates regular breaks, intermittent light exercise, and drinking plenty of water. This is all entirely sensible.

  But Brain Gym perfectly illustrates two more recurring themes from the industry of pseudoscience. The first is this: you can use hocus pocus—or what Plato euphemistically called a ‘noble myth’—to make people do something fairly sensible like drink some water and have an exercise break. You will have your own view on when this is justified and proportionate (perhaps factoring in issues like whether it’s necessary, and the side-effects of pandering to nonsense), but it strikes me that in the case of Brain Gym, this is not a close call: children are predisposed to learn about the world from adults, and specifically from teachers; they are sponges for information, for ways of seeing, and authority figures who fill their heads with nonsense are sowing the ground, I would say, for a lifetime of exploitation.

  The second theme is perhaps more interesting: the proprietorialisation of common sense. You can take a perfectly sensible intervention, like a glass of water and an exercise break, but add nonsense, make it sound more technical, and make yourself sound clever. This will enhance the placebo effect, but you might also wonder whether the primary goal is something much more cynical and lucrative: to make common sense copyrightable, unique, patented, and owned.

  We will see this time and again, on a grander scale, in the work of dubious healthcare practitioners, and specifically in the field of ‘nutritionism’, because scientific knowledge—and sensible dietary advice—is free and in the public domain. Anyone can use it, understand it, sell it, or simply give it away. Most people know what constitutes a healthy diet already. If you want to make money out of it, you have to make a space for yourself in the market: and to do this, you must overcomplicate it, attach your own dubious stamp.

  Is there any harm in this process? Well, it’s certainly wasteful, and even in the decadent West, as we enter a probable recession, it does seem peculiar to give money away for basic diet advice, or exercise breaks at school. But there are other hidden dangers, which are far more corrosive. This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering. All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people.

  But what’s most frightening is the way that pseudoscience makes your head go soggy. Debunking Brain Gym, let me remind you, does not require high-end, specialist knowledge. We are talking about a programme which claims that ‘processed foods do not contain water’, possibly the single most rapidly falsifiable statement I’ve seen all week. What about soup? ‘All other liquids are processed in the body as food, and do not serve the body’s water needs.’

  This is an organisation at the edges of reason, but it is operating in countless British schools. When I wrote about Brain Gym in my newspaper column in 2005, saying ‘exercise breaks good, pseudoscientific nonsense laughable’, while many teachers erupted with delight, many were outraged and ‘disgusted’ by what they decided was an attack on exercises which they experienced as helpful. One—an assistant head teacher, no less—demanded: ‘From what I can gather you have visited no classrooms, interviewed no teachers nor questioned any children, let alone had a conversation with any of a number of specialists in this field?’

  Do I need to visit a classroom to find out if there is water in processed food? No. If I meet a ‘specialist’ who tells me that a child can massage both carotid arteries through the ribcage (without scissors), what will I say to them? If I meet a teacher who thinks that touching your fingers together will connect the electrical circuit of the body, where do we go from there?

  I’d like to imagine that we live in a country where teachers might have the nous to spot this nonsense and stop it in its tracks. If I was a different kind of person I’d be angrily confronting the responsible government departments, and demanding to know what they were going to do about it, and reporting back to you with their mumbling and shamed defence. But I am not that kind of journalist, and Brain Gym is so obviously, transparently foolish that nothing they could say could possibly justify the claims made on its behalf. Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:

  I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that ‘Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.’ What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?

  ‘Anton’, 2006

  Thank you Anton.

  3 The Progenium XY Complex

  I have great respect for the manufacturers of cosmetics. They are at the other end of the spectrum from the detox industry: this is a tightly regulated industry, with big money to be made from nonsense, and so we find large, well-organised teams from international biotech firms generating elegant, distracting, suggestive, but utterly defensible pseudoscience. After the childishness of Brain Gym, we can now raise our game.

  Before we start, it’s important to understand how cosmetics—and specifically moisturising creams—actually work, because there should be no mystery here. Firstly, you want your expensive cream to hydrate your skin. They all do that, and Vaseline does the job very well: in fact, much of the important early cosmetics research was about preserving the moisturising properties of Vaseline, while avoiding its greasiness, and this technical mountain was scaled several decades ago. Hydrobase, at around £10 for a half-litre tub from your chemist, will do the job excellently.

  If you really want to, you can replicate this by making your own moisturiser at home: you’re aiming for a mix of water and oil, but one that’s ‘emulsified’, which is to say, nicely mixed up. When I was involved in hippy street theatre—and I’m being entirely serious here—we made moisturiser from equal parts of olive oil, coconut oil, honey and rosewater (tap water is fine too). Beeswax is better than honey as an emulsifier, and you can modify the cream’s consistency for yourself: more beeswax will make it firmer, more oil will make it softer, and more water makes it sort of fluffier, but increases the risk of the ingredients se
parating out. Get all your ingredients lighdy heated, but separately, stir the oil into the wax, beating all the time, and then stir in the water. Stick it in a jar, and keep for three months in the fridge.

  The creams in your local pharmacy seem to go way beyond this. They are filled with magic ingredients: Regenium XY technology, Nutrileum complex, RoC Retinol Correxion, Vita-Niacin, Covabeads, ATP Stimuline and Tenseur Peptidique Vegetal. Surely you could never replicate that in your kitchen, or with creams that cost as much by the gallon as these ones cost for a squirt of the tiny tube? What are these magic ingredients? And what do they do?

  There are basically three groups of ingredients in moisturising cream. Firstly there are powerful chemicals, like alpha-hydroxy acids, high levels of vitamin C, or molecular variations on the theme of vitamin A. These have genuinely been shown to make your skin seem more youthful, but they are only effective at such high concentrations, or high acidity levels, that the creams cause irritation, stinging, burning and redness. They were the great white hope in the 1990s, but now they’ve all had to be massively watered down by law, unless on prescription. No free lunch, and no effects without side-effects, as usual.

  Companies still name them on the label, wallowing in the glory of their efficacy at higher potencies, because you don’t have to give the doses of your ingredients, only their ranked order. But these chemicals are usually in your cream at talis-manic concentrations, for show only. The claims made on the various bottles and tubes are from the halcyon days of effective and high-potency acidic creams, but that’s hard to tell, because they are usually based on privately funded and published studies, done by the industry, and rarely available in their complete published forms, as a proper academic paper should be, so that you can check the working. Of course, forgetting that technical stuff, most of the evidence’ quoted in cream adverts is from subjective reports, where ‘seven out of ten people who received free pots of cream were very pleased with the results’.

  The second ingredient in almost all posh creams is one which does kind of work: cooked and mashed-up vegetable protein (hydrolysed X-microprotein nutricomplexes, Tenseur Peptidique Végétal, or whatever they’re calling them this month). These are long, soggy chains of amino acids, which swim around in the cream, languorously stretched out in the moistness of it all. When the cream dries on your face, these long, soggy chains contract and tighten: the slightly unpleasant taut sensation you get on your face when you wear these creams is from the protein chains contracting all over your skin, which temporarily shrinks your finer wrinkles. It is a fleeting but immediate pay-off from using the expensive creams, but it wouldn’t help you choose between them, since almost all of them contain mashed-up protein chains.

  Finally there is the huge list of esoteric ingredients, tossed in on a prayer, with suggestive language elegantly woven around them in a way that allows you to believe that all kinds of claims are being made.

  Classically, cosmetics companies will take highly theoretical, textbookish information about the way that cells work—the components at a molecular level, or the behaviour of cells in a glass dish—and then pretend it’s the same as the ultimate issue of whether something makes you look nice. ‘This molecular component,’ they say, with a flourish, ‘is crucial for collagen formation.’ And that will be perfectly true (along with many other amino acids which are used by your body to assemble protein in joints, skin, and everywhere else), but there is no reason to believe that anyone is deficient in it, or that smearing it on your face will make any difference to your appearance. In general, you don’t absorb things very well through your skin, because its purpose is to be relatively impermeable. When you sit in a bath of baked beans for charity you do not get fat, nor do you start farting.

  Despite this, on any trip to the chemist (I recommend it) you can find a phenomenal array of magic ingredients on the market. Valmont Cellular DNA Complex is made from ‘specially treated salmon roe DNA’ (‘Unfortunately, smearing salmon on your face won’t have quite the same effect,’ said The Times in their review), but it’s spectacularly unlikely that DNA—a very large molecule indeed—would be absorbed by your skin, or indeed be any use for the synthetic activity happening in it, even if it was. You’re probably not short of the building blocks of DNA in your body. There’s a hell of a lot of it in there already.

  Thinking it through, if salmon DNA was absorbed whole by your skin, then you would be absorbing alien, or rather fish, design blueprints into your cells—that is, the instructions for making fish cells, which might not be helpful for you as a human. It would also be a surprise if the DNA was digested into its constituent elements in your skin (your gut, though, is specifically adapted for digesting large molecules, using digestive enzymes which break them up into their constituent parts before absorption).

  The simple theme running through all these products is that you can hoodwink your body, when in reality there are finely tuned ‘homeostatic’ mechanisms, huge, elaborate systems with feedback and measuring devices, constantly calibrating and recalibrating the amounts of various different chemical constituents being sent to different parts of your body. If anything, interfering with that system is likely to have the opposite of the simplistic effects claimed.

  As the perfect example, there are huge numbers of creams (and other beauty treatments) claiming to deliver oxygen directly to your skin. Many of the creams contain peroxide, which, if you really want to persuade yourself of its efficacy, has a chemical formula of H²0², and could fancifully be conceived of as water ‘with some extra oxygen’, although chemical formulae don’t really work that way—after all, a pile of rust is an iron bridge ‘with some extra oxygen’, and you wouldn’t imagine it would oxygenate your skin.

  Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and pretend that these treatments really will deliver oxygen to the surface of the skin, and that this will penetrate meaningfully into the cells, what good would that do? Your body is constantly monitoring the amount of blood and nutrients it’s supplying to tissues, and the quantity of tiny capillary arteries feeding a given area, and more vessels will grow towards areas with low oxygen, because that is a good index of whether more blood supply is needed. Even if the claim about oxygen in cream penetrating your tissues were true, your body would simply downregulate the supply of blood to that part of skin, scoring a homeostatic own goal. In reality, hydrogen peroxide is simply a corrosive chemical that gives you a light chemical burn at low strengths. This might explain that fresh, glowing feeling.

  These details generalise to most of the claims made on packaging. Look closely at the label or advert, and you will routinely find that you are being played in an elaborate semantic game, with the complicity of the regulators: it’s rare to find an explicit claim, that rubbing this particular magic ingredient on your face will make you look better. The claim is made for the cream as a whole, and it is true for the cream as a whole, because as you now know, all moisturising creams—even a cheap litre tub of Diprobase—will moisturise.

  Once you know this, shopping becomes marginally more interesting. The link between the magic ingredient and efficacy is made only in the customer’s mind, and reading through the manufacturer’s claims you can see that they have been carefully reviewed by a small army of consultants to ensure that the label is highly suggestive, but also—to the eye of an informed pedant—semantically and legally watertight. (If you want to make a living in this field, I would recommend the well-trodden career path: a spell in trading standards, advertising standards, or any other regulatory body, before going on to work as a consultant to industry.)

  So what’s wrong with this kind of spin? We should be clear on one thing: I’m not on a consumer crusade. Just like the National Lottery, the cosmetics industry is playing on people’s dreams, and people are free to waste their money. I can very happily view posh cosmetics—and other forms of quackery—as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don’t understand science properly. I would also be the first
to agree that people don’t buy expensive cosmetics simply because they have a belief in their efficacy, because it’s ‘a bit more complicated than that’: these are luxury goods, status items, and they are bought for all kinds of interesting reasons.

  But it’s not entirely morally neutral. Firstly, the manufacturers of these products sell shortcuts to smokers and the obese; they sell the idea that a healthy body can be attained by using expensive potions, rather than simple old–fashioned exercise and eating your greens. This is a recurring theme throughout the world of bad science.

  More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Micro-cellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Vegetal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences.