I was flying before smart phones and tablets killed SkyMall. To me, it was always a Brookstone of the sky â a place to buy over-priced gadgets for increasingly niche purposes. It was fun to page through the catalogs and think of who bought a Sasquatch lawn ornament while ignoring the in-flight movie. Then I got older. I realized that SkyMall wasnât just selling niche goods; it was selling a lot of pseudoscience. So I took up another hobby â annotating SkyMall pages with science.
I know full well that my effort to insert some science into the pages of SkyMall was ultimately futile. Iâd have to mark up literally thousands of these magazines before I made any real dent in public consciousness, or at least whoever had my seat next. In addition to posting my work online, Iâd leave the copy for the next traveler. It probably didnât make any difference. I was just a science vandal.
But I felt compelled to be. SkyMall always had that feeling of âwho buys that anyway?â while simultaneously encouraging us to be that who. It was undoubtedly fun to buy a SkyMall product, like being a part of a much less scandalous mile-high club. However, many of those products completely misrepresented human health, biology, and physics.
A lot of this work was just for me. I started out writing about science from the point of view of a skeptic. I wrote explainers for ghosts and water fluoridation and âchemtrails.â So I am always primed for the language that signals a product that is probably bogus. Buzzwords like âion,â âfrequency,â and ânaturalâ are almost always red flags.
Some of the products were just silly, and were obviously meant to be. A bigfoot for your tree or a âvelociraptorâ for your lawn isnât exactly harming our critical thinking skills. I annotated them anyway.
Some were simply incorrect about how the human body works, and expected you to pay handsomely for them. This is where I thought the harm was being done.
Others still made claims about the efficacy of supplements and health-tracking products. I said my piece in the pages with a pen.
SkyMall may not be leaving our seats just yet, but Iâm not exactly holding my breath. In my mind, itâs devilishly clever to slip exorbitantly priced products that donât work into a catalog of products we arenât sure will work in the first place. At SkyMallâs best we can buy an ear insert to eavesdrop on conversations, at its worst we can buy largely untested and unproven pills that are supposed to âgive you energy.â It lowers the bar for what we consider healthy, reasonable, and efficacious.
But then again, Iâve taken to ranting in between the pages of a now bankrupt magazine and leaving the result for other airplane passengers. So maybe I’m not all that reasonable to begin with.
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Kyle Hill is the Science Editor at Nerdist Industries. Follow on Twitter @Sci_Phile.
Wow, you’re quite the authority. I’ll just believe you that pressure points don’t exist. You must have read that somewhere “legit” enough to discount thousands of years of eastern understanding.
Thousands of years of “eastern understanding” also says that ground up rhino horns are an aphrodisiac. Doesn’t mean it’s actually true in any way.
Very funny stuff. I’m curious about the “supplements being automatically flushed out of your system” bit. What sources do you have on that?
Biology lessons in school since 7th grade, training as a nutritionist and being a RN. But that’s only for water-soluble vitamins. Fat-soluble vitamins are being stored to a certain amount and you can actually overdose.
My doctor often tells me the same thing about taking calcium supplements – you’re always going to get way less than you put in. She’d rather I just eat more dairy.
That said, my cardiologist has me on niacin and fish oil supplements that are scientifically valid ways to improve your ratio good to bad cholesterol. BUT they would never be enough to prevent great disease without some dietary effort.
*Heart disease, sorry.
Sooo, could you do this with Plexus? But never let on that I asked? There would be a horde of women after me if they knew I requested someone tear apart their beloved Pink Drink.
Oh, I have tried. My cousin’s wife is selling it, and I’ve nicely tried to inform her a few times of what she’s selling, to no avail….