Enemy of the truth

Got an email this morning. A forwarded email to be exact. The kind of emails which many, yeah I say many, mindlessly forward to others without doing a proper research on it, or at least prove that the information is valid and reliable with a few different sources. Google dear, use google. Google might be becoming evil but they still can do what they do best, ie search.

Wait, I'm suppose to be talking about that email, not google. That email was about stevioside or stevia being used in a number of commercially available food/snack that were taken off the shelves. Then I stumbled upon this article which had quite an insight on some mis-information of stevia. And then there is this. It just showed how old that piece of news was. Remind me of that sister Mars visiting mother Earth outdated news. Or wait, was it my source of people having an even slower source? The article mentioned about how fact could jolly well be distorted into mis-information and myth.

There is paragraph in that article that got me thinking though.

I like to defend the US as well. The official stand of the US Foods and Drugs Administration (FDA) is that stevia is “not generally recognised as safe”. The FDA did not even say that stevia is harmful.

Not safe does not imply to harmful. I'm trying to work out the logic on it. Ok, I think its like un-safe sex is not harmful, they just increase of catching diseases and parenthood.

The article reminded me of what a friend said during a scandalous night supper conversation. That friend mentioned a quote from US President John F Kennedy.The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and realistic. Indeed it is. Lie is of course not the enemy. Without lie, the truth cannot be a truth, that goes along with that fact that without evil, the good is not really a good.