Baby Boomers, the generation that gave us rampant alcoholism, divorce, over-medicated American culture, and denial of science to protect the environment, are now being targeted by marketing groups with claims you don't need medicine, you can cure disease with...food.

I'm not being mean to baby boomers, they also were the first generation to have a polio vaccine and they ended Smallpox. They paid the taxes that funded an optimistic War On Cancer and the successful moon landings and Medicare. I was just noting that if you are in the spin business, you can frame broad demographics, especially tens of millions of people, any way you want.

And that is being done with a report saying baby boomers thinks food - specifically organic food -is medicine.

“Baby boomers are renegades,” according to Melissa Abbott, vice-president of retainer services at food consultant The Hartman Group, Inc. “They are the pioneers of the organic movement. They’re the first generation in America that is actually questioning their doctors; they want to try treating things with food first."

Questioning their doctors? Read that first paragraph again. They are the most over-medicated generation in history, that was not spin. Of course, they will live longer than any generation before them, also due to medical care, claiming they are renegades who think food will cure cancer is not valid.

It's true a few Baby Boomers did create the organic food industry. The 1960s began being the most pro-science decade in history and ended with Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich, and people who believed "Silent Spring" had science in it. But all Generation X (which I became, when marketers changed generations from being 20 years to 18) can't be blamed for the alar scare in the 1980s just because the hucksters at Fenton Communications manufactured a scare about it. Baby Boomers also had incredible confidence in science, technology, and the future.



So they defy the breezy categorization marketing groups want to create, just as we all do. Remember, these are the same marketing groups who turned the Baby Boom from a 1946-47 population event into an entire "generation" that lasted until 1964. What does someone born in 1946 share in common with someone born in 1964? Very little. Not even music. In 1946 pop music was dominated by the I–vi –IV–V scale ("Earth Angel", "Blue Moon") while by the time 1964 rolled around the pentatonic rock sound was everywhere. 

These marketing report claims are mostly nonsense, but with razor-thin margins and a desire to compete, food companies need an optimistic message, and groups that consult on food are happy to oblige. Some things are true, but you knew them without buying a report, like that baby boomers assume organic food has higher quality because it is more expensive rather than being safer pesticides or more ethnical, the way later generations were indoctrinated. They think low-fat diets are still a thing and are worried about both salt and cholesterol, because they believe in epidemiology (or don't know what a mess it is today) and don't know salt and cholesterol are just statistical risk factors for risk factors, not disease causes, the way smoking is. People often continue to accept science and health findings from when they were young, while becoming jaded about later developments that contend the opposite. It is human nature.

But they think food is medicine? Nonsense. They were told to eat trans fats and low-fat yogurt because they came up in a Golden Age of American science and still stick to it. That doesn't mean they think it is curing diseases.