Anti-vax. Anti-nappy. Anti-tampon. This actress just released a crazy parenting book.

So it turns out Alicia Silverstone (teen queen of the 90s, actress who played glorious, clueless heroine Cher in Clueless) is a bit… alternative. She thinks tampons cause infertility, eating plants can cure MS and those ‘vaccine’ thingies are dangerous.

And now, because she is a celebrity and celebrities are automatically ‘experts’ in everything they do, Silverstone has taken her ideas about parenting and turned them into a book with a (short and sweet) title:

The Kind Mama: A Simple Guide to Supercharged Fertility, a Radiant Pregnancy, a Sweeter Birth, and a Healthier, More Beautiful Beginning.

I had an inkling Silverstone was a bit off when she admitted last year that she pre-chews her child’s food and has him eat it from her mouth like a bird (seriously – watch it right here). Back then, I was a bit ‘each to their own’ about it all. Not my thing but whatever. But now she’s peddling a book filled with some scary nonsense and is trying to pass it off as a legitimate medical resource for pregnant women.

Cher Horowitz would not be impressed.

The Kind Mama is filled with lots of words like ‘potentially‘ and ‘anecdotal evidence‘ and ‘possibly‘ and ‘can help prevent‘, which is enough to send most of us running for the hills, but Silverstone’s last book about diet (plant-based of course) was a bestseller, so she clearly has influence over a lot of people. And I don’t mean to be way harsh Tai, but that is scary.

Lizzie Crocker over at The Daily Beast read the book and highlighted the most controversial tips Silverstone offered on how to be a ‘kind mama’:

1. Eating plants can solve every mental and physical health problem anyone has ever suffered, ever.

Forget ‘doctors’ and ‘science’; Silverstone claims that she can pretty much prevent all diseases (including cancer) and if you’ve already got a disease, she can probably cure it.

The secret? Eat only plants, or ‘kind foods’. Silverstone insists that living on a ‘kind’ vegan diet can (emphasis mine) “help prevent or even cure your PMS, insomnia, allergies, breakouts, weight struggles, thyroid condition, lupus, multiple sclerosis — while significantly lowering your risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.”

Also, if you eat only plants kind foods while your baby is in your ‘baby house’ (that’s what she calls the uterus), you potentially prevent all possible diseases your kid could ever get.

Wow. Is it just me or does anyone else feel like maybe Silverstone hasn’t been getting enough credit for curing MS?

Oh and also, if you get post-partum depression, it’s probs your fault. ‘Kind Mamas’ don’t really get depressed. So check your diet and if you’re already eating enough plants, you may need to cut out sugar. Including bananas, which are a ‘naughty’ treat.

2. Nappies are an abusive conspiracy designed purely for corporate greed.

According to Silverstone, the diaper industry is a multi-billion dollar hub of lies, totally “fueled by corporate-backed pseudoscience”. (And probably also run by the Illuminati.) Silverstone advocates a nappy-free system, where you just let your kid roam free to shit and piss wherever they may be. But don’t worry – it won’t be messy. If you’re a good mother, you’ll be able to read your kid’s facial cues in time to pick them up and sprint to the toilet. Apparently then you just dangle them over the bowl and let them do their business.

3. Tampons are giving your ‘chichi’ bad juju.

Having trouble conceiving? Silverstone reckons it’s those evil tampons you had the audacity to put up your ‘chichi’. Apparently there is possibly, maybe, potentially pesticide residue left on the cotton that our tampons are made out of. And that can totally mess with your super-absorbant chichi. So if you’re surfing the crimson wave and need to haul ass to the ladies’, avoid tampons.

4. Forcing your poor defenseless baby to sleep all alone in a cot is “tantamount to neglect”.

If you don’t share the ‘family bed’ with all your babies, you’re totally messing them up. How could you leave your infant offspring to fend for themselves in a “barred-in box”? You monster.

5. Be careful of those suspicious ‘vaccine’ thingies.

Here we go again. Another celebrity who read a book once in their ear-candling practitioner’s office that had lots of official sounding statistics and pictures of needles and babies crying and the words AUTISM in big red letters. Now Miss Silverstone knows more about vaccines than 100 per cent of trained medical doctors.

Oh wait, no she doesn’t.

Just like every other vaccine-denier out there, Silverstone only offers ‘anecdotal’ evidence that vaccines can cause harm. ‘Anecdotal’ meaning, no hard numbers or peer-reviewed medical journals, just, like, stories that she’s heard and, you know, read that time at her ear-candler’s teepee:

“According to Drs. Roizen and Oz… While there has not been a conclusive study of the negative effects of such a rigorous one-size-fits-all, shoot-’em-up schedule, there is increasing anecdotal evidence from doctors who have gotten distressed phone calls from parents claiming their child was ‘never the same’ after receiving a vaccine. And I personally have friends whose babies were drastically affected in this way.”

Now, the ‘no nappy’ thing, I can handle. If you have the time and patience to run around after your kid, then all power to you. Same with the tampon thing and the co-sleeping thing – a lot of women make those choices and it affects nobody but them and their child. I may find it a little weird, but at the end of the day it’s none of my business.

But saying that vaccines are damaging? And that it’s your own fault if you get post-partum depression? That is wrong.  And mixing dangerous ideas like that in a book with legitimate parenting choices like co-sleeping and toilet-training, gives those dangerous ideas the illusion of validity. When ideas like that are being sold as valid medical advice, it becomes everybody’s business.

Silverstone is a public figure with a lot of influence. If she’s going to insinuate she’s an expert and release a book with some scary concepts hidden its pages, we need to make sure we call her out on it.

This is a gallery of common myths about vaccines being harmful and why they’re wrong. It includes some good arguments to use when you’re faced with anti-vaccination rhetoric.

NB: This post has been slightly edited since being published.