How fair is this presentation? Does it use techniques such as exaggeration, emotion, distortion, or selective evidence?Based on this article:...

I am hardly an expert about nutrition, and so I have no
idea whether this article's conclusions are true or false.  However, I
can offer a few comments about the article's rhetoric (in other
words, how it tries to be persuasive).

Things seem to get
off to a bad start when we look at the headline of the
piece:

Human
nutrition research and practice is plagued by pseudoscience
and unsupported opinions

The
word "plagued" is obviously an appeal to the emotions. A word such as "hindered" would
have been far less emotional.  However, the headline may not have been written by the
author of the article. Even if he did write the headline, the author subsequently seems
to have guarded himself well against charges of exaggeration, emotion, distortion, and
selective evidence. Here are some representative quotations that show how he tries to
protect himself against the potential charges you have listed (with key phrases
highlighted in bold
print).

EXAGGERATION:

readability="10">

My purpose here is to definitively
(wherever possible) or
tentatively (where the data are incomplete or
nonexistent) answer a series of key questions about adult human nutrition
using relevant rigorous scientific principles and methods. The data clearly show that
much current advice . . . is
frequently unproven, erroneous, or even harmful and is
often based on pseudoscience or derivative incorrect professorial
opinion.

EMOTION:

readability="13">

As I described earlier, unless
proper studies are done (randomized, single variable, hypothesis-driven, with validated
instruments and proper statistical analyses), the literature is doomed to
potential, often-unknown bias and
confounding.

DISTORTION:

readability="10">

With a rigorous scientific approach, we can then
distinguish “true” nutritional claims with some
certainty—separate facts and reasonable inferences from false claims and
unproven hypotheses where there is inadequate, incorrect, or
misinterpreted
data.

SELECTIVE
EVIDENCE:

readability="10">

In general the
clinical trials in Table 3 are examples of controlled, randomized studies done with very
large numbers of people often versus placebo. (It is true, however, that
in certain populations the RDA of a few vitamins might be slightly higher
than in normal adults . . .

I
leave it to scientists to jude whether this article is persuasive. I can say, however,
that it effectively tries to be persuasive, and that I have seen
many other articles much guiltier of the charges you list than this article seems to
be.