As a big fan of Dr. Mercola, that is a huge disappointment. Unfortunately, he has a lot of staff, so perhaps some fault lies with them as well- not to excuse his responsibility for what is in his articles. I've called him on a few of his articles too, but for the most part, I find his material reliable and ethical...

I don't think it's necessarily fair to blame it just on the fact that he makes profit from selling products. For goodness sakes, most people here at MFP think anyone who suggests that the Food corporations are up to shady practices (lobbying government, unethical advertising to/influencing children, research to make products as addictive as possible, etc) are merely tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. The fact that Big Tobacco took over some of Big Food, and brought their strategies with them, doesn't concern anyone at all. (except a few of us.)

That's a cool info-graphic... going to spend some time looking through it in detail.

.... some minor disagreements... especially with the sweetener part. Raw honey should be rated higher than stevia, and certainly above xylitol/erythritol/sugar alcohols. And it should be specified that added sweeteners are ideally avoided most of the time.

Overall, very excellent. I've now signed up to get information from them. Yay, thanks for sharing the info!

Yeah, I don't buy the whole "they're trying to make money, therefore their information is not credible" thing. Not everyone who's sharing information does it solely to make money, and it seems reasonable to me to have some kind of money-generating mechanism to allow people to help support the information you're providing. Everyone has to live within the economic structures of modern society.

That said, the issue Dave had with the Mercola site was that it never attributed him as per his condition for them using it, and the active removal of the comments that protested, and accusing him of slander for calling them out on it. What made it worse was that Mercola gets orders of magnitude more traffic than BPE, thereby exposing a large number of people to dietary guidelines that they stole and passing it off as their own. Regardless of who's making money off of what, you don't do that, and regardless of the actual person/people responsible for that issue, it makes everyone involved with the Mercola site look bad.

I'm disappointed that Dave felt the need/desire to put the infographic behind the mailer wall, though. I found it to be a nice way to show people how the sliding scale worked (and the previous setup drove traffic to his site, so he likely benefited from it, too), and the mailer wall kind of diminishes that.