Browsing by Subject "denialismi"

Goals This study examines how and why people writing blogs find that the most recent Finnish nutritional recommendations are harmful. Blogs create an opportunity for anyone to write their own opinions and to react quickly to current topics. It also seems that bloggers can easily obtain the status of an expert, and this way enables them to spread their own opinions and attitudes, without any scientific research supporting their claims studies or arguments. Methods The research is qualitative and uses theory-driven content analysis. The material collecting was based on a predetermined timeline. Whit this timeline as a guide, 10 blogs with 11 different posts were choosen. Five of The writers were women and six were men. By analyzing the blog posts this study tries to find out reasons why the writers feel the nutritional recommendations are bad or even health threatening. The material was processed through analysing and thematizing the contents. The study focuses solely on opinions written in a negative tone. Results and conclusions The reasons for bloggers to criticize the nutritional recommendations range very widely. However, it became strongly evident that the writers forget the basic rules of scientific argumentation and focus mainly on limited set of research results. They also present impossible demands for the authors of the nutritional recommendations and accused scientists and the National Nutrition Council conspiracy. The above mentioned things are typical for denialism. Home economics teachers should have a good understanding of false specialist associated with food and nutrition. It is important for teachers and researchers of home economics science to identify different strategies of denialism. Identifying strategies that are used to spread false information can help fight against them and to raise awareness of genuine scientific knowledge.