Want to become a douche? Eat organic

It seems that eating organic food makes you a healthy jackass. New research has found that those who eat healthy organic food tend to be douchier than those who don’t. At a conference last year, the CEO of Whole Foods Market (a purveyor of organic but expensive food), Johyn Mackey,  said, “There’s a significant portion of the population that doesn’t want to keep eating crummy food, and they’re willing to pay for it.” It might seem like that based on this statement, that customers won’t be able to find any kind of bread, cookies, or pastries at Whole Foods Market locations, but when you read between the lines you realize that what Mackey meant is that people are willing to pay a premium for food that is not unhealthy (ie, crummy). But I digress.

A new study contends that those who eat healthy food turn into douchebags. Their proof, you ask?

Kendall Eskine, an associate professor of pshychology at Loyola University, conducted a study in which 62 Loyola students were divided into three groups, and each group shown one of the following set of pictures: 1.fruits and vegetables bearing an organic label, 2. comfort foods such as cookies and ice cream, 3. neutral foods such as grains and beans.

After looking at the images the participants were asked a series of moral-based questions which revealed the horror of looking at eating organic food. It turns out, if you substitute eating with looking at pictures of food, and then ask  weird questions to determine the moral cost of activities such as incest or eating a dead pet, it turns out those who look at “wholesome” foodstuff are more likely to object to morally questionable activities.

After the experiment, the students were asked to help yet another professor as part of a different study.

“On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were, like, 5.5, while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were, like, a 4.89.” The organic people also only offered to volunteer for a mere 13 minutes, as compared with the control group’s 19-minute offer and the happy comfort-food group’s 24-minute commitment. (The Atlantic)

So Eskine, interpreted these results to mean that those people who eat a healthier diet are, in common parlance, douchebags (more judgmental).

Concluding that those who choose to eat healthy food are less stupid and more likely to make the correct moral judgment (at least when asked a direct question) would have seemed too obvious a result and probably gotten Eskine reprehended for wasting the universities funds on idiotic research, so he decided to interpret the results slightly differently.

I see a full professorship and a tenure to follow soon thereafter for Eskine.