Cutting Through the Cyber-Bull

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Re: Which search engine works best for research?

Without a doubt, Google works best.

Google has the “largest single catalogue of web pages available today.”

What about Google Scholar? It sucks.

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Beware of any search engine that wants to “help” you.

Beware of any search engine that …

offers “disambiguation prompts”

calls itself a “decision engine”

has “helpful crosslink results”

focuses on material “subjected to scrutiny by scientists and scholars”

Don’t let your search engine hijack your search.

Stay in the driver’s seat. Never ride shotgun.

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Successful cyberspace searching is 99% semantics and psychology.

“Know the Source” and “Follow the Money” are your prime directives.

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Who is supplying the information?

What are their qualifications?

Who makes money if I believe what I read?

Am I reading marketing hype or is it truly unbiased research?

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Case In Point — DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid).

Type in docosahexaenoic acid. Page after page will tell you how “essential” and “important” it is to “healthy aging.”

Aging is healthy? Since when?

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You’ll find thousands of DHA links without any mention of any mention of Yellow Fat Disease.

Do you think Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, AOL Search, or any other search engine is going to help you find out about Yellow Fat Disease unless you know about it in the first place?

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Type in Yellow Fat Disease, and go behind the dark side of the Moon to discover what’s being hush-hushed about DHA.

I wrote three books about what I found in six months … and I merely examined the snowflake on top of the iceberg.

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Here’s one way you can research the dark side of DHA.

Go to Wikipedia’s “List of animal names.”

Type in the name of every animal followed by “yellow fat disease” in quotation marks, and with time and patience, you can write multiple books on the subject too.

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Here’s what happened when I typed in …

fitch “yellow fat disease”

I immediately found …

H.V. Brooks, C.G. Rammell, J.J.L. Hoogenboom, D.E.S. Taylor (“Observations on an outbreak of nutritional steatitis (yellow fat disease) in fitch (Mustela putorius furo),” New Zealand Veterinary Journal, Sept. 1985) wrote …

“An outbreak of nutritional steatitis in farmed fitch (Mustella putorius furo) caused by feeding high levels of dietary polyunsaturated fat was investigated. The disease affected mainly 13 to 15 week rapidly growing kits; 793 kits were affected and 183 died. The outbreak was quickly controlled by lowering the level of polyunsaturated fat in the diet and administering high doses of vitamin E. Affected animals had severe generalised steatitis characterised grossly by yellow brown granular fat, which histologically consisted of diffusely necrotic adipose tissue heavily infiltrated with macrophages and neutrophils. There were extensive deposits of PAS-positive, fluorescent lipopigment within macrophages and extracellularly throughout the inflamed fat. Affected fitch had normochromic microcytic anaemia, lowered liver iron levels, increased thrombocytes and acute inflammatory leucograms. Skeletal or cardiac myopathy was not observed grossly or histologically in any of the animals examined. The diet contained high levels of polyunsaturated fat (7.7%DM), a high proportion being docosahexaenoic and eicosapentaenoic acids which were derived from the squid component (40%) of the ration. The livers from affected fitch contained correspondingly high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids. The diet provided 13 mg Vitamin E per fitch daily, which was clearly inadequate considering the high levels of polyunsaturated fat being fed. Liver selenium levels were extremely high as a result of the high selenium levels in the squid portion of the diet.”
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