no flaming - not from me - I'm only going to agree or disagree with the points that have been made. I believe this is called debate.
Although I think we have both adequately made our points on this subject.
On the FDA - I hope that because I did not criticise them, no one inferred that I was defending their actions. I feel that issues around impartiality ARE important, and yes I believe that we are justified in questioning the impartiality of people who have strong financial ties with those they are supposed to be regulating. Independent SHOULD mean exactly that.
For instance, I believe that stevia should be licenced for use as a sweetener. It would appear from the current evidence that it is as safe as other licenced sweeteners such as saccharin, and aspartame. There are valid reasons to believe that it's rejection by the FDA were based more on political and financial reasons than it's safety. It was rejected after an anonymous complaint - hmm I wonder which large multi-national company that was possibly from?
On science being a belief system I rather liked this...
Scientific realism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
realism is the current philosophy behind how science works, and whether science represents an underlying reality or not.
the argument for is simply that science is very good at explaining current phenomenon. The argument against is that many previous theories that were once thought to be true have been rejected in favour of better theories and are now believed to be false. So the question becomes - what makes us think that our current knowledge will not be demonstrated to be false by later theories?
my concern about natural remedies, is not the remedies themselves, but the marketing that goes with them. (I have concerns about the ways that pharmaceutical companies market their products as well). Just a quick search using the term diabetes yields hundreds of companies marketing natural cures. There have been many posts on this forum asking about this or that supplement. Often advertised as natural, safe and effective - and after looking into the claims, usually it is discovered that the evidence is poor at best - often we are talking mice studies.
And this is the rub...
do people not want to know whether the product they are taking is really safe and effective?
