Pseudoscience!

This illustrates a "science" known as "craniometry". It was developed to explain the obvious superiority of western Europeans. This is one of the most common species of pseudoscience--assuming a result and gathering "evidence" to support it. Craniometry was simply racism in a lab coat.
Today pseudoscience peddlers are more subtle. They use better jargon, they toss around words like "research" and "studies", and they relentlessly promote the opinions of so-called "experts" in order to sell something--usually a product, but often a point of view. What they get out of selling their falsehood is either power or money or both.
The foodies have a corner on the pseudoscience market today. Using simply the latest issue of FIRST for women and an article about "fat-flushing soups", my Nutrition class was able to identify dozens of mistakes in application of basic biology, common sense, and the scientific method to reduce this article to rubbish. In the end it was simply a testimonial by two women that eating soup caused them to lose weight. We don't know what they were eating before, and they did not reveal caloric expenditure. Their "evidence" is not falsifiable, since it is pure anecdote, and that alone takes their "nutrition science" into the realm of fantasy. My Nutrition students asked the question, "It is possible to lose weight without caloric restriction?", since this article claimed that eating these soups would do that. Their unanimous answer? NO. Case closed--for today.
Craniometry was racism--popular nutritional literature is wishful thinking at best and a host of cruel lies at worst. Neither has a place in a scientifically literate society.