Wed 12 Nov 2014
Air Head
Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, In The News, Kooky, Skeptical Thinking, SmashItWithAHammer, Stupidity, WooWoo
[13] Comments
Acowlytes! Let me introduce you to Food Babe. If you haven’t heard of her up until now, this is going to be a very special post for you. Food Babe, aka Vani Hari, is to put it quite simply, a reality-challenged, uneducated loon. Her basic schtick is to take everyday food items (anything that’s not chia or sprouts, principally) and concoct some kind of conspiracy around how they’re going to kill you.
She also gives travel tips:
The air you are breathing on an airplane is recycled from directly outside of your window. That means you are breathing everything that the airplanes gives off and is flying through. The air that is pumped in isn’t pure oxygen either, it’s mixed with nitrogen, sometimes almost at 50%. To pump a greater amount of oxygen in costs money in terms of fuel and the airlines know this! The nitrogen may affect the times and dosages of medications, make you feel bloated and cause your ankles and joints swell.
That’s right folks, airlines are trying to kill you with nitrogen. Up to 50% of it in the air they FORCE you to breathe when you fly. The fuckers!
Aside from being completely scientifically addled, that paragraph is, of course, nothing but pure unadulterated bollocks. She pulled all that information straight out of her ass – pretty much like she does with all her ‘facts’. The problem is, a HUGE number of people read this hogwash and take it as gospel.
You can read more Food Babe here, if you are a sucker for punishment. I guarantee it will make you feel more nauseous than an all-you-can-eat buffet at Outback Steakhouse.
NOTE: Not only has the main link to this article been redacted from the Food Babe site, someone is systematically moving all the cached links as well. The Google caches have been scrubbed, as has the Wayback Machine cache. In the grand tradition of historical revisionism everywhere, Food Babe is trying to make it seem like she isn’t an A-Grade idiot. Fortunately you can read the entire text of the redacted page at Skeptical Analysis.
Doesn’t this stupid arsehole know anything? the air we breathe contains around 78% nitrogen and 20% oxygen…and where does that air come from? It’s all around us so of course aeroplanes fly through it!!
Beauty and brains? I think not, she’s about half way there!
Yup.
Spray tan, hair dye, synthetic clothing materials, lipstick. But it’s the air that’s going to hurt her? More like the air between her ears. Airhead joke somewhere here…
Hence the title of the post. But yeah, don’t go looking for logic anywhere in Food Babe’s head.
And if you order a whisky on an airplane, the chances are pretty good that the stuff’s been kept in a freakin’ barrel for more than a few years! Bleah!
That’s truly disgusting. Next they’ll be serving yoghurt with BACTERIA in it!
One thing the Food Babe got right is that pumping in nitrogen IS cheaper than pumping in oxygen, since nitrogen weighs a little less than oxygen.
A real enterprising airline would save even more money by pumping in pure hydrogen, which weighs LOTS less. Probly turn a 100% profit on all return flights too.
Or even better, pump in helium! Lighten the plane AND it would be amusing.
Yeah, that stuff’s pretty cheap too.
You can probably import it from the Sun.
Hydrogen, of course, is even cheaper.
Throughout the universe, that stuff is supposed to be as common as dirt.
Damn! There might just be something in what she says about nitrogen overload. I was looking at a photo of her in those tight blue jeans and SOMETHING started to swell!
Down boy.