Snake Oil By Any Other Name?

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

A person cannot turn on the television, stand in a check-out line, or mill around a water cooler these days without hearing about a wildly successful book and DVD that promises you any thing you want. This book and DVD---let's call it The Hidden Formula---argues that for centuries only certain people, mostly wealthy men (like, oh, Henry Ford), have fully understood a fundamental law of the universe and have kept it secret for centuries.

Fortunately, a middle-aged documentary film producer from the other side of the world was somehow given permission to publish The Hidden Formula, and now millions of people can benefit from it! Dubbed (for our purposes) the "law of enchantment," The Hidden Formula is basically this: your imagination is responsible for your life; whatever images you hold in your head magnetically attract like things. So, the idea is that if you constantly worry about bills, you're going to get them in your mailbox. However, if you constantly envision yourself wealthy, you will come into some money.

The law of enchantment sounds great, except for two problems: first, most scientists tend to believe that magnetism is explained by the attraction of opposites; and second, no matter how ravishingly beautiful I imagine my tummy, it's still a little rounder---okay, a lot rounder---than I imagine it to be, and years of wishing it flat simply have not worked.

Of course, no one is knocking the power of positive thinking and the importance of visualizing success for success. But the idea that one can cure illness or wish away an unhealthy lifestyle by merely thinking about it is ridiculous! This sort of thing used to be called "snake oil," although since this is all about make-believe I suppose the only real thing being sold is thin air. One thing's for certain: our middle-aged friend from Australia is the best evidence that The Hidden Formula works for some people! She's a millionaire many times over today. Damn! Why didn't I think of this racket first?

Another reason we might not want to call The Hidden Formula "snake oil" is because, well, scientists are discovering the stuff has some healthy properties. The term likely harkens back to the days when Chinese laborers were hired to build railroads in the nineteenth century. These hard workers gave snake oil to their fellow American and European workers for joint pain, and there is evidence to support the fact that snake oil works as an anti-inflammatory. Snake oil is still used in China today for the same purposes. Yet some shady European entrepreneurs bottled the stuff and sold it is a miracle drug, which of course it ain't, and thus "snake oil" became a term for fraudulent claims about ineffective cures.

But as an article in Scientific American published last November reveals, snake oil salesmen may have been on to something: the stuff is rich in the much ballyhooed Omega-3 acids! If you've followed health news for the past five or six years or so, many product makers have been touting the healthy benefits of Omega-3s: regular consumption may reduce the risk of cardiovascular heart disease and assist with a variety of blood-related issues (circulatory problems, etc.). This is because the Omega-3 fats move around in the body a bit more freely than other fats (though don’t ask me to explain the science any more than this---I'm not that kind of doctor!). The problem for many people is that Omega-3 is found in fish oil, and a lot of us don't like fish. So you can take fish-oil pills (which is what I do) or, scientists are finding out, snake oil. Apparently snake oil is richer in Omega-3s than salmon!

It may take some time for enterprising supplement makers—at least on this side of the globe—to start manufacturing snake-oil pills. In the meantime, you can get your Omega-3s by eating fish, taking fish oil supplements, or by cooking with recent-to-market buttery spreads and oils that incorporate Omega-3s into them.

Since I know you bachelors are not always the best with nutrition, why not swap out your butter or fake-butter spreads with some of these newer Omega-3 spreads? I have both canola oil with Omega-3s and the same brand of buttery spread and, I promise, you cannot taste anything fishy. Regardless, cooking and eating with these snake oil alternatives are going to be much more likely to improve your cardiovascular health than The Hidden Formula. Wishing really hard for good heart health is no match for exercising and eating well, something I struggle with myself but something, nevertheless, I know to be true!