While I agree with a number of the points he's making, there's a serious correlation / causation problem here.<p>The claims:
• Most people in America don't know how to think critically.
• People who think critically are literate.
• People who are literate buy books.
• Using bestseller lists is an easy heuristic to see who knows how to think critically.<p>Obviously, his argument breaks down, in a number of ways. Perhaps people who like low-carb diets have more money that they can spend on books. Perhaps low-carb books have better marketing (I don't think they do ... just throwing that out there). Perhaps low-carb proponents feel that they're biased against by the media and by popular culture, and so they buy books out of solidarity (note the "Fireproof" movie and the urgency associated with supporting it by / within Christian groups).<p>I'm not saying any of these <i>are</i> the case ... just that it was ironic that he was railing against Americans' ability to think critically, and then he laid out a string of fallacious arguments.<p>You could push his argument further, and say that, because the Harry Potter books are at the top of the USA Today list, then the typical Harry Potter reader (whatever that is) is better at thinking critically than a low-carb enthusiast — or anyone else in America.
One of the things I would consider a basic criterion for being able to call yourself an "independent thinker" is coming to the realization that when people think for themselves, they come to different conclusions. Which leads to a number of obvious conclusions, including: While "the sheeple" may not have the truth, by necessity the majority of the "independent thinkers" can't either, and you can't measure how independently someone is thinking by looking at what they believe.<p>There is no single monolithic "the sheeple", and it is possible that low-carbers are simple a sheeple that were told to buy a book instead of watch a show like Oprah.<p>I say this as someone who at least intellectually is very sympathetic to the "low carb" nutritional picture; I don't think it entirely corresponds to reality, but the old-school "low-fat" diet seems outright wrong. (By "old school", I mean the old dietary standards that treat fat as a single monolithic entity. Newer stuff is getting more nuanced and, I believe, more correct, at the cost of being very difficult to describe to people in detail.)<p>But going back to my main point, if you still measure the "independence" of somebody's thought by what they believe, you are not your own thinker; you've simply chosen a different crowd of sheeple to run with. Nobody's really immune to this, and by this standard I have seen precious few truly independent thinkers. (Even some people who have dedicate great time to an "independent thinker" shtick almost invariable slip in some belief touchstones into their definition of independent thought, whether or not they realize it. I am not thinking of anybody in particular here; I've seen this from many such people. (I'm not <i>quite</i> a hypocrite on this point; the first sentence of this post is more of a definition of what I consider an independent thinker than a touchstone belief, and I freely acknowledge the existence of other useful definitions... but I'm certainly slicing things awfully fine here... but I realize it.))<p>This may not be directly related to the original article, but it is certainly indirectly related.
Maybe because low-carb promises an easy fix to the problem? Just guessing, but certainly low-carb books being on top of the bestsellers lists doesn't validate the theory in my opinion.