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?
Thank you Anton.
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 separating out. Get all your ingredients lightly 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 talismanic 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 Vegetal, 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
Thinking it through, if salmon DNA
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
