Slashdot Mirror
Science's Biggest Failure: Everything About Diet and Fitness
HughPickens.com writes: Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) writes on his blog that science's biggest failure of all time is "everything about diet and fitness." He says,
"I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin. I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven't. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now. I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies."
According to Adams, the direct problem of science is that it has been collectively steering an entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems. But the indirect problem might be worse: It is hard to trust science because people have become accustomed to learning that they've been steered wrong. "I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?"
"I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin. I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven't. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now. I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies."
According to Adams, the direct problem of science is that it has been collectively steering an entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems. But the indirect problem might be worse: It is hard to trust science because people have become accustomed to learning that they've been steered wrong. "I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?"
Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
Alex, I'll take "Flawed Science" for $1,000.
Sent from my ENIAC
I think he means the credibility of scientists.
The problem is they disprove a strawman (ie no relationship between two factors) and then if that is false they take that to mean their theory is true. Because the strawman is disproved with math they think it is a "scientific" thing to do. It is something out of idiocracy. Things will continue to get worse until that ends.
If Scott Adams thought that, it's because he didn't do the necessary research to act as an informed consumer, and instead just took articles at face value when the referenced miscellaneous "scientists" and "researchers".
cancer. But that's medicine, which only recently has become "evidence based". Wait...
Nutrition science is terrible, and the close watch on it paid by various agencies (private and government) is even worse. Every time some case-control study on some nutrient shows it's bad or good, it gets jumped on as some fad. Then of course it turns out to be random noise. Doesn't mean science doesn't work, it means many of the ways we have for teasing small signals from noisy data have a nasty tendency to false positives.
Unfortunately, nutrition science isn't terrible because nutrition scientists suck. It's terrible because it's hard; you can't really do repeatable controlled studies.
There have been more studies on the effects of vitamins than most people could read in a decade, maybe a lifetime. There are many things to test them for, and to expect that every possible dosage has been tested against every possible disease, interaction, and side effect is unreasonable.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Has ANYONE lead us wisely when it comes to diet and fitness? No. Science has only done one thing "wrong" in this respect: it has made our lives so much easier that we don't want to worry about fitness anymore, and do not. Thus we pretend we care about what science has to say, but don't actually pay for proper studies, just ones driven by the food and fitness industries. Hence why the "wisdom" changes every year, and why it's no more effective than what we had before. But it's not science's fault, it's our fault for looking for a scapegoat.
The problem isn't science. The problem is science reporting. A study making come claim makes for a catchy headline. Problem is, it's just one study, usually calling for more studies with guidance at the end. That's the bit that's usually left out.
A few years ago a European health organization did a huge study of cell phone safety. Thousands of trials across dozens of countries over the course of a decade. Of the thousands of trials - ONE showed a *possible* correlation between one form of cancer and cell phone usage. What was the headline? Study shows that cell phones cause cancer! What was the official conclusion of the study? Cell phones probably don't cause cancer, but the one trial should probably be re-run just to make sure.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
better headline, fixed that for you.
You CANNOT go by what some article says about what "science" has now "found" about X.
The idiots writing the articles are idiots AND they're writing the articles for maximum sensationalism.
Dude! Use your BRAIN!
Slashdot hasn't been "news for nerds" for quite some time now. The only place I see that phrase at this point is on Slashdot Beta. You're not a closet Slashdot Beta user are you??
It's just another 'celebrity' getting science wrong... so why is this news? This is a misdirected attack on what should be savagely unleashed on media and the nature of for profit markets. I'm not opposed to either directly, but they have tons of problems in themselves, and apparently getting worse. (aka, Journalist creed being 'report the truth' while the people who hire them has the creed 'bottom dollar') - let's talk about the contradiction that leads to problems like this instead of the side effects.
As someone who has been in deep dietary ketosis for over 12 months and eating close to 200g of fat a day (and losing body fat), this news comes as no surprise. I love when people throw their bunky diet theories at me in the lunch room 'you must have a fast metabolism' while they crunch down on their low fat 'diet' snacks packed with sugar.
Hi
Evantually people will accept that the food pyramid is complete and utter sham and Ancel Keys' 7 Countries Study is a massive black mark on the credibility of nutritional science.
Wrong!
Science's Biggest Failure: marketing, communication and lobbying.
While it's right that we learned a lot about diet in the last decades, all the "problems" cited here are pushed by marketing and food corporations, not science:
"Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin."
It was bullshit and it is bullshit. Eating a lot of basically anyhting gets you fat. My guest: USA population. Of course, snack makers will say otherwise.
"I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven't. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. "
Bullshit the former, of course right the later. It has never been the standard that a healthy person needs any kind of vitamin suplement aside of what comes with a varied and healthy diet. Big pharma will say otherwise, of course.
"I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now."
Learn a bit of US food pyramid and the impact of lobbies on its redaction. Oh, and it's not so much that older food pyriamids were utterly wrong (basically relative importance of carbs versus veggies have changed roles), but the way to get your dose (too much prefab) and the dose itself (USA standard portions are about double than needed -remember Paracelsus: ...It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.") Again, marketing and communication.
"I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies."
Here you have a point but, again, science has gone as far as saying something on the lines of "a glass of wine" (not just alcohol, mind you, never heard that a glass of whisky a day was healthy at all) was probably liminary benefitial, current trend says there's probably not a healthy minimum for alcohol, so a glass of wine a day goes from "minimally benefitial" to "minimally harmful", not a great issue. Of course, wine and beer producers want to make a lot more noise than that.
"the direct problem of science is that it has been collectively steering an entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems."
Bullshit. That's a direct problem of the food industry lobbying and marketing left and right.
I had a different account here 15 years ago when Slashdot was full of intelligent people...
I'd say slashdot isn't at the worst it's ever been, you can't even blame dice or whoever owns it now for that, but it's been moribund for a LONG time...
Also I noticed that they slashdotted the dilbert site. No wait, linking there didn't cause ANY posts over there for the 20 minutes the link has been up.
http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,944914,00.html
http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
That's the one that caused me to lose my science "faith" as a child. I know now that "science reporting" "science," but the trust is gone.
Apparently, we should blame science for not always proving our hypotheses correct. At least, that's what Scott Adam's argument essentially amounts to.
"How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers?"
You give them a real science education and hope they understand that even the "wrong" answers are the right answers. The other half is to stop the media from making every new incremental discovery a "potential cure for cancer", or suggesting that every slightly contradictory piece of research on nutrition overturns everything we know and held dear about [cholesterol, fat, sugar, etc.].
I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health
I don't even know what study he read to find that out.....all the ones I've seen say one glass of wine is good for the health, and that the same good effect can be had by grapejuice. No one ever said that Vodka was a good substitute AFAIK.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You may soon be able to put your bits where your mouth is...
Sent from my ENIAC
Nope he's got it correct.
The FDA has been faking the science on diet ALL ALONG.
They NEVER TESTED their diet advice, not for heart disease, not for much of anything. There was an excuse that it would cost too much and take too long and might never be conclusive ... which is no excuse for promoting bullshit, but promote bullshit they did.
And the world ate it up, and everyone pretended that mere guesses were settled science.
The FDA is set up to test drugs that companies will make money on. But you can't patent nutrition information so it can't fund nutrition research.
He's got huge bones to pick with scientists because they argue with him about his gravity conspiracies and how wishing for something hard enough makes it true. Some funny comics, but he's a complete loon.
I remember how shocked and disappointed I was, since 'Dilbert Future' was the first 'book' book of his I'd read - and the last!
http://www.insolitology.com/rl...
So why should I go to a doctor for something more serious?
This guy treats science like it's a religion, something to believed, or even a single entity. He says, "Science has a credibility issue."
Well yeah, if you expect every study you ever see to be true, then yeah, it has a credibility issue. Whereas if you treat science as a tool, rather than a glee-club, you'll find it's extremely useful and can be used to discover many interesting things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Athletes and bodybuilders have managed to have their diet and fitness nailed for decades, it's only the common joe that seems to be confused.
This issue is less the fault of science and more the fault of marketing. Marketers will latch on to any scientific study, however tenuous, to push a product and the news will happily inflate their claims for headlines, e.g. the thoroughly debunked '1 glass of red wine is the same as an hour of exercise' study released recently. It's not scientists making these claims, its marketers and news reporters.
Corporations that lobby politicians to to sell more of their products also aren't helping. The US food pyramid isn't the fault of scientists, its the fault of farmers wanting to sell more grain. Michelle Obama's attempts to revamp America's food issues are being thwarted by huge corporations with deep pockets and news reporters siding with the opposition doing their utmost to paint any attempts for nutritional revamp in a bad light. None of those guys are scientists.
If you want to learn about nutrition and exercise get away from the marketing and the news and start looking at what athletes and bodybuilders are doing. They've been doing it for a long time and if you look closely a lot of what they do is backed up by science. Eating grilled chicken/steak/fish with brown rice and steamed vegetables and doing weight lifting/high intensity interval training doesn't grab headlines though and takes effort.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/fossils_are_bul.html
"I’ve been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? It’s the fossil record that has been bugging me the most. It looks like bullshit. Smells like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit. Why isn’t it bullshit? All those scientists can’t be wrong."
No thanks Scott. Stick to your comics.
The most damaging event in modern nutritional science has been the false correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. In 2014 the WSJ published a fascinating article about how that happened:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
"I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven't. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science."
What the hell has he been reading? Clearly not enough.
In the 1930s vitamins and biochemistry suddenly appeared. By 1948 it had been shown one cures polio with 100% efficacy and zero side effects. But, the commercial pressure from the pharma companies who stood to make billions suppressed it. There are thousands of clinical reports that show clearly some vitamins in therapeutic doses have a rather dramatic effect.
In Japan for example they've treated MRSA with IV C with striking success and they keep asking why no American journal will publish it.
Scott doesn't have enough of a biochem background and hasn't read enough to know what's what. The levels in a multivitamin are too low to be useful, so I guess we agree they're worthless.
In the last 5 years, fish oil, niacin and bad gut flora have been recognized by the medical industry; prior to that they were ridiculed as "alternative" medicine for 100, 50 and 35 years respectively. It takes generations for new advances to filter out to the medical establishment and if Adams had done the proper reading he's see where science hasn't failed us, marketing has. Foster's work on HIV or Shaefer and Potter's work on cancer would open anyones eyes who knew enough to understand what they've written.
First and foremost, what do you think stoped Ebola, Scott? It wasn't a vaccine.
was not found.
"Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart
Need Mercedes parts ?
Fat cells do not become larger on their own. They require a signal to enlarge. That signal is called insulin. If you control your insulin, you control your weight (minus other variables, such as muscle mass). Type I diabetics know this from direct experience. Just ask one.
Short answer (22):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmC4Rm5cpOI
Long answer with chemistry (1:30):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
History:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o
But with vested interests.
E.g. High Fructose Corn Syrup.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Dr. Oz and similar people are getting all of the O2.
Food science is just crazy. Too much pseudo-science. All those fancy diets, not mixing carbs, fats and proteins in one meal, the current superfoods ("it's all you need!") - it just doesn't make sense.
I've never limited the amount of food I take, though I generally try to go for natural and avoid processed food. I cook my own dinners at home (most days), and make sure there's vegetable included as well. Snacks are often fruit (fresh or dried), rather than crisps or biscuits. Another thing is that I try to keep my diet varied, eating many different things. All this should ensure I get all I need, in sufficient quantities, and in the meantime I can really enjoy what I'm eating. It seems to work really well, without much thought (or worries) about it I do keep myself in shape. I've lost quite some of my waistline over the past year, in part due to my current job as tourist guide which means I'm walking a lot - easily 8 hours a day on my feet, for several days a week.
The problem for most people nowadays is most likely 1) lack of movement, and 2) lots of processed foods (high nutrient density - doesn't make you feel full nearly as fast as natural food does).
Many people nowadays sit in their office all day, then sit in the car going home, pass by a drive-through restaurant to pick up junk food and sit in the car eating it (this part for the Americans typically), and sit on the couch most of the evening watching TV before going to bed. No walking. Not even the walk to the train station, no sports, no physical exertion ever. That's asking for problems. People are designed to be active, to walk around all day, construct things with their hands. We're designed to handle natural food sources which by nature are unprocessed and very varied: there's simply a lot of edible things around in this world.
This is why I got to my rather simple philosophy of remaining active, eating varied, and basically eating as much as you like when it comes to unprocessed foods.
Yes. No matter how much propaganda is clothed in science, it is not science. Propagandists know very well that science has a stellar reputation. All the time, they want to pass off their lies as scientific fact. These days, that works far better than claiming that the Bible says so. Science's very reputation works against it in this matter, causes it to be used more than anything else as a vehicle for lies. People have to be constantly on guard to separate lies dressed as science from real science.
The profit motive warps far too much scientific endeavor. Over and over, studies that could finger some chemical or process as harmful are squashed, suppressed before they can be carried out. Obesity is certainly a case in point. The victims have been blamed for being too lazy or gluttonous. Another convenient scapegoat is genetics, which is patently ridiculous as our grandparents weren't suffering obesity in anything like the current percentages. Other explanations were at best overlooked, which would make this one of the biggest and most incredible cases of mass blindness. More like, explanations such as that it's the food, were purposely buried. It took things like the Supersize Me movie to break the silence. Only recently are suspects such as Bisphenol A being noticed. Our cities, especially newer suburban cities, are very hostile to walking, largely for political reasons. Many people want everyone to need a car to get around. Requiring an expensive item is a great way to keep out poor riffraff, and cutting down on opportunities for exercise is just an unfortunate side effect.
People aren't fat because they choose to be that way. No one wants to live with the intense social stigma of being obese. In all the propaganda and politics being flung around, this basic fact get quickly covered up. Why then are people fat? It's because their bodies and environment drive them to eat too much and/or exercise too little, and that in turn is partly caused by disruptions of the body's endocrines, and perhaps also the body's microbiota.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Stop complaining about slashdot.
In the olden days, I wore an onion on my belt and everything was better.
If you don't find a story interesting, skip it. No one else wants to hear you moan.
Much of the bias, pseuoscience and error comes from university "authorities" and thought leaders that were purchased wholesale, and media that claim (big) "Science sez..." The nutrition field has had many sellouts to industry.
If you want to know what science says, read and analyze papers yourself then compare with other papers. Then make some observations and checks yourself, just to be sure. There is always vested interest groups eager to do your thinking for you, for only a small part of your health, wealth and freedom.
Yes. Agreed. Bad policies are made because of bad scientific method with conclusions endorsed by bad scientists. Ancel Keys helped doom many people to a lifetime of metabolic and cardiovascular disease. Hopefully you are not genetically predisposed to have to learn the hard way that the dogma related to diet and fitness can be horribly wrong.
Scott Adams is 100% correct when he says science's biggest failure of all time is "everything about diet and fitness".
The first time I had to make real decisions for myself was when I started living on my own in my early twenties.
I was aware that there studies on diet and health, and that there were dietary recommendations based on those studies.
I also knew that those recommendations had change over time.
So I decided that I wasn't going to turn my life upside-down over this stuff until the recommendations stopped changing for at least--I picked a number--five years.
Even at the time, I knew that this was mostly a self-serving rationalization for me to just keep eating the foods I liked.
As the years went by, I watched with growing astonishment as the fads (in science!) came and went; diets swirling around them like groupies, or celebrities.
Nothing has ever stayed settled for more than five years in a row.
I've never been called on my original committment/rationalization.
It's been over 30 years now.
Everyone I know equates a good diet with being healthy. A more important aspect is the activity level and physical exercise. When I was a state champion level gymnast my health was amazing. I had six pack abs at the age of eleven because I worked out and trained 20 hours a week. During that time I ate mcdonalds every day. I ate fries at school. Milkshakes, candy bars. Any source of calories I could get. And my health was phenomenal. Everyone (but women especially for some reason) seems to think that a 'healthy' diet is the answer when what they really need is to work more. I'm not saying healthy eating is bad. But if you don't use your body it will never truly be your tool and always be something your working against rather than working for you. Use your body or it will atrophy in every way.
The Blade Itself
Whilst technically correct, the amount of people eating a diet that provides all the vitamins they need is minimal in this fast food world we live in. Whilst you can survive and live quite happily with a minimal intake of things like omega fats, supplementing with them, and many other vitamins, can be advantageous.
To simply say we as a society don't need vitamin supplements because we all eat varied diets is as much a fallacy as a marketer saying we are all deficient in all vitamins.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
You don't need anything else.... Okay maybe a chocolate shake.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?
Because we're brothers.
... it's not like Scientists MEANT to kick People in the balls. Except for that Guy with the PhD. in rochambeau studies.
This is the important bit of history that needs to be read before anyone comments on how in the world all this happened.
This wasn't a fault of "science" per se, since "science" is the scientific method, which is logically sound.
The scientific establishment (you know, the part with the humans involved) combined with government (don't even get me started) is where the mess arose.
The fact is that when large professional associations start to become integrated with government because their "scientific" findings influence policy, then you instantly create a massive impedement to the scientific method's ability to correct errors.
But this sort of screw up couldn't possibly have any relation to global warming, or climate change, whatever it's called these days ;-)
It's really a failure of politics too thou. Back in the 60s a major 8 country study was done that showed fatter diets caused heart problems, except later we found out he had data from 20 countries but only used the data that fit his model. Heart problems it seemed were actually caused by consistent inflammation which was more a sign of lack of exercise. protip: margarine is much worse for you then real butter, in several ways
So the government tried to get fat out of foods, which they thought would mean people would eat more veggies, but snacks just changed from high fat to high sugar "hey look! this food is low fat" except the sugar spikes your insulin, causing most of the calories to be stored as fat. I still hear myths like a a calorie is just a calorie, or low calorie diets are good for you. protip:exercise requires calories. I mean just look at all the people buying lowfat milk, which is mostly milk suger with all the healthy fat taken out.
another example is the whole wheat sensitivity wave, when really it is mostly the additives that make the bread shelve stable for 2 weeks that are bad for you.
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
-- Redd Foxx
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Medicine is not science.
watch as he shows what he has achieved
... eat fewer calories than you burn, get some exercise for both stress-reduction and upping the number of calories burned. And I hope those on high-fat diets never have gallstones... They'll learn real quick what's different about a low-fat diet.
Everyday I see the following scenario: researchers conduct an experiment that might show possible correlation between A and B, but like good scientists, provide adequate riders and caveats. Some eager reporter from a leading daily reads the synopsis and puts out a story screaming "People! You have GOT to try taking copious amounts of A! I will do a whole lot of B for you!!"
A good book analyzing the history of food misinformation is Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health"; another good book by him is "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It". If you just want a good book on losing weight, Bob Harper's "The Skinny Rules" has some advice I found helpful; it's less about "diets" and more about how to structure your life so that you end up eating both better and less.
Dr. Oz is not science. It is still true (as science has maintained for a lot of years) that if you digest more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. It's the law of conservation of energy (a.k.a. science). Eat too much and you get fat. Eat less than you need, and you'll lose weight. Period.
...to discern the difference between science and marketing.
Marketing is the force behind much diet, exercise, and fitness advice.
Similar problems with climate change, economics, and energy.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Scott Adams apparently skips the fine print in vitamin and supplement ads which very clearly state "These claims have not been tested by the FDA and are complete bullshit".
Stop complaining about slashdot.
In the olden days, I wore an onion on my belt and everything was better.
God damn Slashdot.
See? Here we have a poster who claimed superior performance using a belt-onion—as everyone who knows anything would expect—but failed to give us an explanation of our upgrade options!
Who are the major players in the allicin-rich pants suspension market segment? Have you tried garlic suspenders? Any recent startups coming out of stealth mode with something like leek garters? What's disruptive here?!
Also, that post is worthless without at least an unboxing video.
There's definitely a problem that we've been fed a lot of misinformation, but those problems are generally facilitated by lack of scientific data. I think the case of multivitamins is a good example. The creation of multivitamins was spurred by the realization that there are different types of compounds that we must consume in certain amounts in order to maintain health. Then someone saw an opportunity to pack all that stuff into one little pill and sell it at a huge mark-up. There hasn't historically been a lot of evidence supporting multivitamins as a maintainer of good health. Instead there's been a lot of evidence that we need the stuff that is in multivitamins. Just because a multivitamin contains what you need doesn't mean your body can access those resources. Now that there's finally research coming out about the effects of multivitamins, the studies are proving that in many cases multivitamins at best have no effect on health.
There's still a lot more to be researched on this issue, but that's the point, the scientific community never knew a lot of this stuff in the first place. It's been both the media trying to sell newspapers and companies trying to create new products without actually researching what those products do.
Another great example of this is the inclusion of vitamin A in topical products like moisturizers and sunscreens. Companies started putting vitamin A in these products because vitamin A is important for healthy skin, so they assuming that slathering it on your body would benefit your skin. Now that research has finally been done on these products, it is now believed that using this product can increase risk of sunburn for as much as a week afterwards!!!!
We should stop blaming science and start blaming those who either manipulate scientific studies for profit or rush products to market without actually using scientific methods to test that the product is safe and does what it is intended to do.
My feet started swelling-- I stated taking multivitamins and the swelling stopped the next day- like a medicine.
I forgot to take them, the swelling came back. I resumed taking them and the swelling stopped again.
So multivitamins work.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sounds like my last job.
Try eating 1kg of cashews a day at your desk job and see how thin you get.
I think what you mean to say was "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
There's a basic misunderstanding of what science is in that Scott Adams post.
>"I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?"
The term 'science' is used very loosely. It's not clear what he's referring to -- 'popular science', I deduce. Popular science is not reliable, so, with that definition, I can't disagree that Scott Adams has been "kicked in the balls for 20-years" by it and that he should have learned a long time ago not to close his eyes and trust it.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
oh great Dilbert, thanks, so you're an anti-vaxer?
People make bad decisions, so it's science's fault? I don't know if i'm just missing something here, but this seems a lot less like a failing of science and a lot more like the ravings of a person who doesn't understand how science works. Nutrition is a balance, it's not as simple as saying "I thought fatty food made you fat, but turns out it doesn't guise!". Vitamins have been/are vigorously studied, it's not like scientists are clueless about their effects. My personal opinion is that he, like many, probably got duped by the downright horrible state of science reporting in the media. Now that the headlines haven't come true, it seems to make sense that those bumbling scientists had no idea what they were talking about! Scientific data about diet, health, and really anything else generally requires a lot of expertise to interpret. Headlines like to make conclusions of studies cut and dry, when the reality is that each study usually only contributes to the understanding of a system, and is not an answer in and of itself. The only way that science itself can be responsible for obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems is perhaps that since we have science we can have richer diets, and live longer lives, increasing the likelihood that those diseases will kill us as opposed to having a grizzly bear gnaw our faces off. The hard truth about it is that the public in general is really, REALLY ignorant when it comes to scientific issues, and even just how science works. Science is what keeps you alive past 30, gives you food a plenty, and every other modern amenity that you can think of, so really if diabetes, obesity, and coronary heart problems are your chief concerns i think you owe science a lot, not the other way around. Science is not a "mostly wrong" situation by design. Science is a systematic method of examination, using careful observation and logic to arrive at conclusions based on evidence - it is designed specifically to find what is Correct, not what is Incorrect.
Where is the controversy? ... and I immediately see it. The more you exercise, the more you can eat, so it looks like eating huge amounts of food is not so bad.
OK, take two-- stop driving at all. Now you will be healthy. Period.
Eat a good meal. Enjoy it. Stop stressing over the details. Stress is worse for you than a few extra pounds.
No matter what you do, you're going to end up dead at the end of the game. It's just a matter of when.
Personally I'd rather enjoy my life and my food now than live a few extra years gumming gruel in the nursing home.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Dilbert wears a polo and an ID lanyard now, not a stripy phallo-tie. Who knew?
Sounds like a resounding success to me! Pack it up and go! One more for the rodeo!
Media whores with little to no domain knowledge paid to invoke hyperbole and spread FUD for ratings.
Science whores paid to generate gibberish about benefits of Smoking, Asbestos and Lead for citation by marketing and political whores (see below)
Marketing whores sticking every piece of crap on the wall allowable by law.
Political whores making policy based on what is best for industries who enrich them rather than people they represent.
Finally we have vast seas of individuals virally propagating assumptions and hearsay without ever checking or knowing the source.
Most everyone is responsible in one way or another by action or inaction.
rapeseed oil
Note that you will rarely see 'rapeseed oil' on an ingredients list. Can't call it that, sounds terrible, people won't buy it.
when the truth is that sugar is essential for all life on this planet. Every organism that expends energy does so by converting sugar. The lie is perpetuated firstly by those who would see us addicted to a substance originally developed as an insecticide, secondly by those who swallow the lie.
It's also been repeated down this page and I totally agree, that our increasingly sedentary lifestyle is killing us. As creatures originally designed to forage, we are not only losing our mental capacity to know what we should be foraging for (nuts, fruits, roots, leaves and berries) and hunting for (meat and fish - yes we are obligate omnivores, there are substances in meat we cannot obtain from vegetables), we are as a species becoming more and more dependent on prepackaged, bulk farmed, artificially stuffed meat-like and vegetable-like "product" that we've actually forgotten what real food feels like. As a result, we are missing out on vital nutrients that we have evolved to depend on hence we are becoming sick as a result of that combined with just pure fucking laziness. We should be going out and picking vegetables if only to get out in the sunshine and grab some rays so we can (some of us still can) make our own vitamin D instead of requiring supplement that *doesn't, for the most part, make it past the stomach*. If you spend most of your life behind a desk, you're likely to suffer symptoms of vitamin D deficiency such as rickets and osteomalacia for the simple reason that humans were NOT meant to spend their entire lives inside a clay box. Neither were they meant to wear sunscreen - which inhibits VitD production by blocking UV from reaching the skin. Note to self: research other possible triggers for skin cancer than solar exposure, pretty sure it would require a genetic predisposition...
We are great at abusing ourselves, what we're not so great at, as a collective, is realising just how shitty of a job we're doing of recognising that what most of us see as normal civilised behaviour is what's actually killing us.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It took me 25 years of study to realize that science, religion and politics work together as a system. Separately, they fail miserably. The main reason for this system is that it keeps us evolving at a proper speed, not too fast and not too slow.
Firstly, I don't think that science's position on diet has changed a great deal. Plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, regular exercise, don't overdo the booze - I mean it's not all that hard. Omega-this, and poly-unsaturated that, and free-radicals the other - this sort of nonsense is the fault of lazy and sensationalist reporting, not of science.
Science does not make any attempt to defend itself against this - and arguably this isn't science's job anyway. It needs to be some-one's job, but it isn't at the moment. I don't even know how one would go about setting up a dis-interested and objective organisation who's task was purely to disseminate scientific knowledge in an easy to understand form. Perhaps it's not even possible.
But really, if you don't know how to eat properly, then you really haven't been paying even basic attention to basic science. Scott Adams is right in the sense that people are confused (Paleo diet? Seriously?), but science itself isn't confused. And nor should you be.
Multivitamins were always about marketing, not science.
I eat what I need, I spend a lot of time outside doing stuff, whatever it is I'm exposing skin to sun and getting air that's not full of dead skin cells. People call me skinny, but apart from a touch of arthritis which comes with being ridiculously tall, I'm fit as a butcher's dog.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
No matter if it is Science or Voodoo nothing can beat the "Lemon juice is alkaline" bullshit that has been circulating in many dieting / health circle all over the world for the past 2 decades or so
And that is only one of the many examples of pseudo-science in the dieting / health fields
Yeah, some skeptics have an interesting take on this colossal screw-up and have pointed out the parallels with the climate debate. (Example: http://judithcurry.com/2014/08... )
Many people seem to think that groups of scientists can not possibly make genuine, colossal, "obvious after the fact" screw-ups. If anyone suggests that they have made big mistakes, they are harangued with insults like "conspiracy theorist" or "denier". Yet these same (supposedly rational) people claim "big oil" is funding skeptics (a conspiracy theory) and "big food" must have been behind this spectacular failure (another conspiracy theory). Apparently they have never heard of systemic bias, group-think, or the madness of crowds.
Or cognitive dissonance.
For some reason they can imagine millions of people being wrong about religion but they can't imagine a small group of elite "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" scientists being wrong about science.
They can imagine their own bosses being complete ignorant ass-holes, but they can't imaging leading scientists being egotistical, arrogant fucktards who have no qualms bullshitting people.
They can imagine a "group-think", ass-kissing, brown-nosing, yes-men corporate culture, but can't imagine the same in academic circles.
They can imagine a CEO who would drive his own billion dollar company into the ground just because his ego is too big to listen to anybody else, but can't imagine a scientist being anything other than a perfect little angel. Apparently scientists don't have egos and are immune to the many psychological issues that normal human beings face.
Government could NEVER bias a scientist, because governments are completely disinterested entities that are only concerned about the long-term health and economic interests of their citizen. (Except when governments take bribes. That's the only time the above is not true.)
Unfortunately a few scientists have been known to take bribes from evil corporations. But that's really, really easy to explain: it's a simple and direct benefit that anybody can understand without thinking too hard. And that's the only thing capable of biasing a scientist: a simple and direct benefit that's really, really easy for people to understand.
But those are not real scientists.
Real scientists are completely immune to human nature. Except for the few bad apples (who are not real scientists), scientists are better human beings than the rest of us.
Either that or many people are romantic idealists whose eyes glaze over in a state of credulity whenever they indulge their childish fantasies about "scientists".
You were also 11. Try the same diet at 50 with the same exercises and you'll get vastly different results.
When your activity level decreases so should your food intake. If you don't want to work more you can eat less and be fine. The problem is people never eat less.
The real question is how the public can be reliably informed about which theories are and are not supported by the scientific consensus when most people do no such checking and both claims and calls of BS may be made for non-scientific reasons.
...why do people still listen to Scott Adams?
He's deluded about his self-importance, his shtick is always to appear witty by throwing a really bad argument at his nerdy audience.
He complains about marketing, and rightly so, but then blames science. WTF!?
If you learn about "science" from TV commercials and fashion magazines and sensationalist articles, guess what? You're not getting the real thing.
The wheat that we eat today is completely different than what was sold up until the 1950's or so.
The corn that is used in so much of our "American" life is just absolutely terrible for us. The "Round-Up Ready" corn is either squeezed for it's oil/sugar or ground-up for feed to cattle and chicken. Never, not once, in all of my life have I ever seen a cow walk out into a corn field when it had the luxury of grazing on grass in a field.
I read a book recently called "It Starts with Food" and found much of the information extremely helpful in understanding how grains and nuts may not be the best thing for us. It was helpful in explaining how vegetables provide plenty of calcium and fat. How pasture raised chicken and cows are a good thing! I did a whole 30 days of "good eating" and then another and another. Wow, what a difference.
I hear people now talk about how going to Applebee's is good food. How did that ever happen? I woudln't even trust that a salad at Applebee's or any other restaurant is actually good for me. Maybe better than "fast food," but saying it is good would be a hard stretch for me.
If I could encourage people reading this to do one thing; remove grain and corn from their life; or at least try it for 30 days. Anything that has corn/grain in it or uses that as part of the food chain to your gut: remove it.
The power of food is so overwhelming. Some of you are reading this and actually getting pissed at me. That's how much you value your corn, wheat, bread, cheerios, etc. I don't blame you. I love popcorn. After 40 years of a love affair with popcorn, it took me 60 days of no grain to finally feel like I could say "no" or "pass" on eating it. That goes for so many other foods.
One thing that often comes up is the need for milk and calcium. I hate to say this, wrong. Americans drink more milk than any other country. We also have the highest amount of osteoporosis. Actually, the calcium in milk doesn't relate to absorption into our bones. You're better off eating kale or spinach!
Anyways, I think this is a fantastic topic. I hope it gets a lot of discussion!
I see your point but I think you may have it backwards.
However, I will say that I use to be right in line with you. I use to believe that calories are calories and all I had to do was just run and work-out a lot. Some of that is true. I mean, I could eat 2 plates of spaghetti and not gain weight but that was because I ran 8, 12, 15 miles in a day.
A healthy diet is important. It is critical.
The reason I was "healthy" had more to do with age and extra excessive exercise.
I do agree that exercise is very important.
Getting pushed aside by marketing campaigns pushing pseudo science.
"Clinical studies show..." really means "Someone put this on some cells in a petri dish and they didn't die".
People assume that's science proving the product works as advertised. It's not.
If all that matters is "Energy Balance" how is it you can feed some people 10,000 calories per day and only get an increase in body weight of 18%? Why are you ignoring the reality that some people simply can eat anything and stay skinny?
The body is a complex system and just to think of energy in and consumed is ignoring the ways the body metabolizes and processes different forms of food coming in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This has nothing to do about science. I'm quite certain tha the so-called missguided generation did no get advise in scientific papers.
This is a pure marketing and product placement/capitalism problem. People get advise from TV ads and doctors. The latter have, contrarely to the general perception, nothing to do with science and their advice on diet show little to no scientific insight. Their sources are also marketing driven.
This is a society failure. Not a science failure. And failling to understand this brings you only further to solve the problem.
Yes, nutritional science is the stupid butt end of science. It has got everything wrong for decades and the vast majority of nutritional studies are horribly statistically flawed.
But you are at liberty to experiment on yourself. Sign up to a cost effective lab testing service (I use walkinlab.com), get you blood tested regularly (I get it done every 6 weeks) with an NMR test so you get LDL particle size and number (the part that matters) then try a diet that emphasis one of the macronutrients and see what happens over a few months.
The paper linked in my sig is of the results of two people eating an all meat diet for an extended period. Only good things happened. Nutritional orthodoxy would suggest this would kill you. With the occasional exception, I eat an all meat diet. I has fixed my cholesterol and dropped my weight to the leptin limit.
If you struggle with a standard western metabolic disorder, you owe it to yourself to escape nutritional orthodoxy and do some science on yourself to find what works. You are probably carb sensitive and need to eat none of it. But maybe not, that's why you need to test yourself, because unless you have a very enlightened doctor, no one else is going to do it for you.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So, apparently, all those health fad thingies are really marketeering. In fact science had nothing whatsoever to do with it except failing to study the subject. And therefore people's slavisly following marketeering fads is really science's fault?
Scott, be a dear and don't be a caricature of your own characters, there's a good cartoonist.
The summary sounds like a anti-government troll-post, cooked up by an anti-vaxer against that "Godless public health research".
The most damaging event in modern nutritional science has been the false correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. In 2014 the WSJ published a fascinating article about how that happened:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
Mary Enig's book Know Your Fats is an excellent place to learn what fats are so you correctly interpret the utter bullshit that people spout about particular fat types.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
A friend in college was a body builder. His six pack abs had six pack abs.The only thing I ever saw him eat was mcdonalds. He said he had to eat at least 5,000 calories per day.
The real problem are people over interpreting science results. The truth is when you eat more joules than you need you become rounder at the edges. Foods which contain a high amount of energy could lead to obesity, but it is not necessary. If you eat things which trigger fat storage processes it is harder to resist to eat more. Now when Mr. Adams is confused because of a new book, he should go in and try to differentiate between documented effects, corelations, and their total impact. Cheese might be fatty, but it is something different than a burger (containing sugar which causes a heavy insulin reaction). Traditional foods are often less dangerous if you also work in a traditional job. Fast food is designed to trigger you to eat more based on the science he is not so sure of. And it works.
The best thing about food is: Eat responsible. Meaning eat real food. Don't think in nutritions and supplements. Eating is a social, cultural task as much as it is necessary to supply you with necessary nutirtional resources.
Stop complaining about slashdot.
In the olden days, I wore an onion on my belt and everything was better.
God damn Slashdot.
See? Here we have a poster who claimed superior performance using a belt-onion—as everyone who knows anything would expect—but failed to give us an explanation of our upgrade options!
Who are the major players in the allicin-rich pants suspension market segment? Have you tried garlic suspenders? Any recent startups coming out of stealth mode with something like leek garters? What's disruptive here?!
Also, that post is worthless without at least an unboxing video.
A proper sophisticate would use a belt-shallot.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Mod parent up.
In my early 20s I was 55-60kgs and 6ft tall. I spent my thirties eating total crap and lying on the couch. At age 40 I got type II, I was 105kgs /6ft. At age 41 I started lifting weights. I am now 42. In my experience, lifting weights:
1. Once you get over the minor aches of heavy weightlifting you will feel better than you ever have in your life.
2. BECAUSE you are exercising hard you naturally eat less crap and drink more water
3. As you start to move towards building more muscle your protein intake increases. Protein is a very strong appetite suppressant. I eat even less crap.
4. Skinny I aint, But I no longer take diabetes medication and I'm stronger than I've ever been in my life. The fat is disappearing slowly and any dietary modifications did not seem onerous or extreme or annoying- just a natural progression. Furthermore, weights have many good effects on older people re: maintenance of bone density, circulation etc. I am hardly ever cold. I am hardly ever sick.
It doesn't even take up that much of my time. ~6hrs per week. I do it all from home with a couple hundred bucks of bars and weight plates. no benches, no gym memberships, no smelly morons hogging equipment. I can do what I want between sets. There's plenty of good information on how to lift safely on youtube. MY #1 channel is scooby's workshop.,
But it's a very popular geeky cartoon!!
Surely that has to count for a PhD in nutrition and a couple review papers published in Nature?
I stole this Sig
Everyone I know equates a good diet with being healthy.
A more important aspect is the activity level and physical exercise.
When I was a state champion level gymnast my health was amazing. I had six pack abs at the age of eleven because I worked out and trained 20 hours a week.
During that time I ate mcdonalds every day. I ate fries at school. Milkshakes, candy bars. Any source of calories I could get.
And my health was phenomenal.
Everyone (but women especially for some reason) seems to think that a 'healthy' diet is the answer when what they really need is to work more. I'm not saying healthy eating is bad. But if you don't use your body it will never truly be your tool and always be something your working against rather than working for you.
Use your body or it will atrophy in every way.
You have it backwards.
Exercise is best for fitness, but when it comes to being thin diet is far more important than exercise.
Of course genetics and a youthful metabolism trump all, assuming your recollection is accurate I'm guessing that was the real source of your 6-pack. An older person with less fortunate genes might find themselves diabetic following your advice.
That's not to speak against exercise, it's absolutely awesome, but it doesn't have a lot to do with keeping you thin.
I stole this Sig
Too much cheese can make you unhealthy. Eat it sparingly.
science never dropped the atom bomb
It is not that hard. It isn't difficult to stop eating the processed foods that lead to deteriorating health, you just have to decide that is how you will eat. This problem with "diets" is that it implies they are temporary and that once you have finished it you can go back to eating all the shit you used to.
For me I decided I would design my diet to exclude processed food and include the nutrient dense food I like, including the skin off the chicken(yum!). I'm a really busy person so when I cook, I cook a lot and freeze it. Then home cooked good food is about 10 minutes away.
They myth about fat being bad excludes the knowledge that you actually need it to carry water insoluble nutrients through the cell walls so that nutrient dense foods sustain your wellbeing.
The longevity of a geek/nerd career is closely tied to this. Awareness, cognition and being able to think deeply are all affected by what you eat so I structured my permanent diet to incorporate nutrient dense foods early in life. If you can avoid processed food your own instinct will guide you when you shop for food.
As for fitness, I am 90kg in my 40s and surf the same waves with my body that most people use a board for. I train several martial arts and still whoop guys in their 20s. The physical activity makes me a better programmer because I can think clearly.
The biggest secret about diets is you don't need them if you don't eat processed foods (including crappy sugar drinks) and focus on unprocessed food. Plus it doesn't need to be "organic", just fresh.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
For one, he didn't choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn't suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany.
France as a country eating a lot fat! WTF?!!? Are you a fucking idiots? Do you also believe to no-go zones?
Age-standardized mortality from ischaemic heart disease in European regions (men; age group 45–74 years; year 2000).
Wow! Le Crueset pots, $800.00
"The heavy cast iron fry pan I use has a tough enamel surface that can be scrubbed hard with steel wool as often as you like."
That is probably not enamel. It is probably Powder coating.
Unfortunately it's easy to whine at "science" for not providing you with easy, no-brainer advice on how to live your life. But like anything else, you have to read between the lines. If someone is trying to sell you something, they will likely try and use a "scientific study" to validate their claims. This isn't limited to nutrition.
Ultimately what the guy is really mad at, is unscrupulous marketing.
The science has always been there if you used some common sense and stopped believing whatever you were spoon fed by corporations after your money, so don't get mad at science now that you realise cheetos made you fat
better headline, fixed that for you.
I think he's a better troll than cartoonist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
While I agree that it would be nice to have some sensible answers and concensus in the health and nutrition field, bits like this really made me cringe:
"The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:
Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.
Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time."
Excuse me?! Those press-gargoyles sure as bloody hell aren't OUR winged monkeys. It's more like:
"Step one: scientists say: hey, there's an effect linking A and B. Let's investigate further.
Step one A: press: Scientists prove A causes B! Don't ever do A again!!! You won't believe what comes next...
Step two: scientists say: Hrmmm... seems it doesn't replicate. Good thing we checked.
Step two B: press: Holy shit scientists have been lying to us! Oh the humanity! Who can we trust?!"
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
Effectively nobody reads science. Everybody gets it through different channels that have a bias. Very few understand it and feel shit for not understanding it. So those that filter it pick and choose and shape the scientific message so that people don't feel inadequate. It will always be like that, learn to live with it. Most people are happy with bread and circuses. The remaining few enjoy the beauty of nature the the quest for understanding. Choose to be among the few.
The problem is not with science claiming to be perfect but with the media representing every trivial mathematical correlation as causal fact. News tries to dumb-down science and winds up completely misrepresenting it in the process.
Also, there definitely is such a thing as bad science.
Eating lots [emphasis mine] of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin.
No, eating the right amount of peanuts, avocados, and cheese might (I have no idea, this is the first I've heard of it) decrease your appetite and make you thinner than you otherwise would be, but eating lots of them will still make you fat.
I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies.
What is that supposed to mean? "just a correlation found in studies"? What other kind correlation would a) convince you that an effect was real and b) you expect from science?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Exercise. Do sports. Maintain a healthy lifestyle. Don't be a repulsive, flaccid, obese, sweaty zit-faced neckbeard with the appeal of a cockroach.
Practically everything you learned in science classes has been "on faith". EVERYTHING you ever learned about stuff that you didn't directly experience has been "on faith". All you really have time for is to attempt to weigh the arguements and see if there is a consensus among experts that you have some reason to trust. Expecting everyone to be an expert in everything is absurd. The best we can hope for is that people are reasonably proficient at evaluating other people's arguments/expertise.
I'll second that. In my experience, when I exercise regularly I can manage my weight and when I don't I can't. I suspect that the exercise (mostly running) is influencing my appetite. Exercise is also great for mood management.
Let's get one thing straight: your health was not phenomenal. Phenomenal requires commitment to healthy habits over a long period of time in diet (eat mostly or exclusively wholefood plant-based), exercise, avoiding harmful addictive behaviours (smoking, drinking), weight watching, stress management (eg. meditation, yoga), regular health checks (notably blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar levels) and other less obvious factors. I will grant you one thing. Your diet did not have obvious short term negative effects at eleven. That is not shocking.
To actually achieve this lifestyle you probably should take each step one at a time and given the state of diets in developed nations it's probably best to start there.
"the direct problem of science is that it has been collectively steering an entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems"
Oh, I believed it was junk food and fast foods responsible for that, not science.
Or "Super Size Me 2" should be filmed in a laboratory?
Likewise with salt intake = hypertension and other silly relations.
The only absolute known with salt is it increases the chance of stroke all around the world.
But even in Japan and other countries around it with a high salt intake, that increase is moderate at best.
All this new research has only told us something far worse, that there is a huge underlying illness or illnesses that we don't have a clue about. Illness(es) that make people susceptible to salt through some mechanism not known.
That is a scary thought.
Also glutamates. The "takeaway headache" or whatever other names it has, that diet that people always attribute to things like curries and general spicy food. Absolutely nothing to do with that.
It is all the glutamates fault. Yet another underlying issue we had no clue about until just recently.
That becomes an issue because it is found in so many foods, including leafy deep green veg and cheese, not just your "MSG" flavoring which is harmless to your average person.
We have so so much to learn in food science.
But that isn't the worst of it, the worst is so many industries straight-up suppressing information because it damages their industries. (like mentioned below by rs79 and vitamins, and recent science has only just begun to accept certain concepts like bad gut flora, something that horribly ruined my life, na, totally just faking it, it is just bad demons in me, nothing else)
.. like not posting the opinion on science from creationist, anti-vaxx misogynist kook like Adams.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
I can tell you as a researcher few things are as awkward as talking to a reporter. Not only are they usually completely uneducated in even basic science, even if you manage to give them a more or less accurate impression, AND they don't just outright lie to make the story more interesting, then the editor steps in and "adds some spice". E.g. oncologist finds a drug that halves the size of specific tumors in mice becomes "SCIENTISTS CURE CANCER !!!!!111".
Then there's this pathetic "fair and balanced", "both sides" approach to reporting, trying to make their personal beliefs/ whatever they're payed for look at least as likely and respectable as science established by hundreds of papers and thousands of experiments. We all know some of these - evolution vs creationism/"intelligent design", climate change vs whatever the deep pockets of oil companies say, actual evidence based medicine vs alternative "medicine", elementary good judgement vs antivaccine bs.
Then of course, any scientist who actually uses some of his/her free time to strike back and point out the bs being published gets called arrogant, threatened with libel suits, or even gets death threats.
I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true.
Too much fat still increases circulatory system problems!
I don't think the FDA ever said that eating lots of high energy foods wouldn't make you fat...
what diet advice was it anyways? the "science" line to eating is to "eat normally" but not too much and not just one thing....
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Also, it is NOT science.
Adams used to think that eating fat would make you fat not because the science said so, but because he trusted the government, and the government said the science said so. But the government knew that this was not the case, and pushed a high-carb, low-fat diet on The People anyway. Sadly, there is no smoking gun which proves who fired the shot, but since this is a capitalism you can simply follow the money. Who profited? Big Pharma, Big Health, and the Processed Foods Industry. One or more of those groups applied the bribe money. I'll bet money.
Meanwhile, some of the official advice is still good and applicable, like go out and get some exercise, you troglodytes. But on the other hand, if you're counting on the USDA nutrient content of foods database to tell you how eating something is going to impact you, you should be aware that caloric measurements are derived by setting food on fire. That's inherently bullshit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's what's so different about science compared to other ways tried to find out reality. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BELIEVE. It's entirely possible for you to, if you really want to know, look for yourself.
Also it is willing to change based on what it finds out.
What's not great here is that we're only really able to do testing on ourselves as a society. finding out that the guess was wrong (and truths we know are all guesses: just educated ones) means everyone has been trying "the wrong thing" for a decade.
If you don't use your brain , it will atrophy too.
And last "news" I heard, is that if you (blokes) don't use your dick regularly, it too will get smaller.
Like any muscle, use it or lose it.
The sensational articles about what "science" has now "found" about X are now largely written by PR departments of universities or even the researchers themselves in order to bolster their resumes and impact statements for their next big grant. If you think scientists and scientific administrators are wholly innocent on the charge of blowing inconclusive results out of proportion to make wild sweeping claims (especially in the field of medicine), you are flat out wrong.
A skewed view with no science degree. Sure, we should ALL take our POV from Dilbert. *wink*
Eat a mixed diet and exercise.
Sounds easy, but isn't if you don't take the time.
The most damaging event in modern nutritional science has been the false correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. In 2014 the WSJ published a fascinating article about how that happened:
Yes, that's an excellent followup to this Gary Taubes piece published in the NYT in 2002, which covers most of that same ground and a lot more besides.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The FDA has been faking the science on diet ALL ALONG.
Wrong. They didn't fake the science at all. They deliberately misexplained it, but the science was right there for any interested party to read. Apparently, nobody was interested.
And the world ate it up
The world is bigger than the USA. HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ugh, no, your massive-outlier experience does not even suggest that exercise, particularly the over-the-top type you're referring to, is even vaguely appropriate for normal non-gymnast non-pre-teens.
Healthy diet is, for people who lead anywhere between sedentary and moderately active lifestyles (read: People who have at very least 9 to 5 jobs or school to contend with and thus cannot spend hours every day working on their abs), vastly more important.
Exercise is important. We should almost all get more than we do. But the idea that your McDonald's diet is somehow perfectly reasonable just because it didn't turn you into a tub of lard is just plain stupid.
I turn to a management cartoonist.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This is part of a review I posted on Amazon for "Muscle Myths: 50 Health & Fitness Mistakes You Don't Know You're Making:"
There is new research now that certain foods heavily influence your gut bacteria, and that the type of gut bacteria you have has a lot to do with your weight.
Actual scientific studies, published in Nature, show that the obese patients in the study (about 80% of the group studied) had lower counts of gut microbiota. These people were more obese than those with higher counts of gut bacteria. They also tended to put on weight faster.
If a calorie is just a calorie, then nobody in the groups should have put on weight unless they were eating more calories than they were burning. So it seems that there is more to it than just calories in vs. energy expended. Hmmm.
I highly recommend getting a copy of Dave Asprey's "Bulletproof Diet" and "Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization," by John J. Ratey and Richard Manning. Both books go beyond the calorie. The types of food you eat do influence gut bacteria, and these books explain that very well.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I agree that a good level of activity is beneficial and that it allows you to be "bad" with your diet, too a certain extent. When you are young and growing your body absorbs and utilizes temendous amounts of stuff. A high activity level also contributes to this. A balanced regimen of food intake ( a.k.a. diet) will help but you can get away with less care. As you get older you are more likely to be sedentary and still eat a lot and badly. The main thing is to balance activity level with food intake, but maintaining a good level of physical activity is important as well.
I have noticed two trends. If a women feels they are overweight they tend to think "I'll starve myself" while a guy tends to think "I need to exercise more". Maybe they will follow through maybe they won't. The point is that they are both looking for a silver bullet fix. One thing, diet pill, lift weights, grapfruit diet whatever to solve the "problem".
There is no silver bullet that safely allows you to "burn fat", "loose x inches in y days", "gain x inches of rippling muscle with just ...". The average person needs to eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly, doing both so that they meet reasonable goals. Quick fixes and "just do this one thing and X will happen" are snake oil from people who want to take your money.
Nutrition is a matter of balance. I once read a book where one chapter described why we "good"need protein in our diet. It also said that eggs were a good source. The very next chapter talked about choelesterol being bad and that eggs had lots of it. What I got from that was that eating some eggs regularly was good but too much wasn't. The same is true for just about any other thing you eat, including water.
Essentially its a lifestyle issue and not a "do this for x weeks and things will be perfect" issue.
Actually, science it's so bad about this. Sure, it's been wrong, but research is steadily improving. Also, there have always been nutritionists.
The biggest offenders are the MDs. The first thing that happens when you enter medical school is that you have brain surgery to remove every stich of knowledge you have about nutrition. Seriously, every MD I have ever met is totally ignorant of nutrition. The SMART MDs will at least admit that. The rest just assume that nutrition is never the problem. Magnesium, B12, and D deficiencies are rather common, actually. The American diet is HORRIBLE, so people have nutrient deficiencies and get fat eating too many calories while their bodies struggle to extract things it needs from nutrient-poor foods.
About the best the MDs can ever do is tell you to eat less. But NEVER would they consider telling you to cut out certain specific foods. Do you know how many people have gluten sensitivity? About 10% of the American population have some sensitivity whose effect can be correlated with a variety of diseases, especially auto-immune. (Do 23andme, and put the data through NutraHacker, and see if you have the genes for it. I do. However, my wife, who has celiac disease, doesn't have the gene defects, so it can be environmental too.)
Speaking of auto-immune disease, in medical school, doctors are specifically trained to assume that an ailment is all in your head if you come in and report a constellation of symptoms, ESPECIALLY if you've written them down. However, constellations of symptoms are common with auto-immune diseases like Hashimoto's and lupus, and the associated brainfog forces people to have to take notes on things, because they know they'll forget something.
I've met an immunologist who thought hashimoto's was untreatable and gastroenterologist who didn't believe in food allergies. You think these people would be better trained in their own fields!
Science didn't ever make those claims. All science did was establish a correlation between things. For example, it may take 10-20 years and 100-200 publications on the same matter before a consensus can be drawn, and in the end of it you will see "The data suggest that doing A will result in B. Although it is important to keep in mind that 18% of the studies found that if you do A, you won't have B."
Okay, now where's the problem?
The problem lies withing newspapers, magazines, TV, the internet, and people. Short put, the problem lies in irresponsible and sensational journalism, and in a gullible and stupid society. People will take ONE article published on the matter, they will make a story saying "Science claims this", where they will not even bother to give credit to the original researcher, neither will they link the original publication, and then people will read that and not go after the information themselves. Then, when another one of these "science men" publishes that "Science found out that now you must do the opposite", everyone will follow blindly like sheep again.
The perfect example is the post by the OP. Not a single citation, not a single reference, just empty claims in the name of science... and the many ones here that follow it blindly instead of opening their eyes and doing some reading themselves.
Scott Adams, the cartoonist, has a go at science? And is taken marginally serious? Is this a bit of celebrity fawning that's gone too far, or what? Much as I appreciate his humour, on occasion, the guy just isn't a scientist, and not surprisingly, it shows.
Science has never made a secret of the fact that they don't understand how our bodies regulate calory intake; things like the food pyramid should not be taken as 'Scientific Fact' - it has only ever been a good, educated guess, and it can only be as good as our understanding permits. Plus, it doesn't really tell you how to keep a healthy weight, it only tells you what a balanced diet most likely should contain.
Accusing science of "steering an entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems" is at best uniformed nonsense, and at worst obscene drivel that is likely to harm, not just science, but also the health of the very people he claims to speak out for. Scientific research is the only way to unravel the incredibly complex mechanisms that control our metabolism; if he wants to blame somebody, blame the media for uncritically running with any fad or sensational bit of news, without sparing even the slightest glimmer of thought for understanding the content of what they are saying - or caring about the consequences. Or blame the unprincipled sharks that puke out one fad diet after the other, simply because they know there is a lot of poor fools out there that are desperate for anything that can help them with what is becoming an ever more serious health problem. Or blame the manufacturers of processed foods laden with HFCS, hydrogenated fats and low-quality raw-ingredients hidden behind food-additives.
The only two parties that one can't blame, are the scientists, who are in fact working hard and achieving real results, and the victims of obesity, who, try as they may, are not able to cope with the combination of poor advice from health providers, shameless lies and advertising pressure from the industries, and peer pressure from idiots around them, who regard you as some sort nut-job if you don't want to fill you gut to bursting with sugar and fat ('Are you some sort of health-freak?')
All this tells me is that you are missing something that is provided in your multivitamin. I will agree that multivitamins provide what they say they provide. The unanswered question is do we all need what they provide?
there are ways (foods w/specific chemicals, timing, etc) to make your fat cells more (or less) cooperative in lipolysis (releasing stored energy for metabolism). while conservation of mass is unquestionably the law of the land that's a bit like answering "how do I get to Canneige Hall?" w/"PRACTICE!". HOW you do it makes an enormous difference in how quickly (& ultimately whether) you get there.
what are you, a COMMUNIST?!? this is 21st century USA! this is nothing a few well-placed bri..., er, "campai...", er, a little "free speech" by "virtual people" can't cure!
His point is that "food science" is confusing and everybody is an expert who knows everything. Look at this discussion, for example. Every post starts with "The problem is..." or "No, the problem is actually..." Basically, everybody chiming in because they have it figured out
One person will tell you that eating whole grains is good, because they have complex carbs and fiber that will help you lower your cholesterol.
But then another person will tell you that whole grains are bad, because they have phytic acid which will rob you of nutrients and make your teeth rot.
Then someone will tell you that all you simply have to do is burn more calories than you consume, to create an energy deficit (and thus burn fat)
But then someone will tell you that your body will refuse to let go of certain fat because it acts as a storage device for toxins, so you need to cleanse with nutrient-rich food to lose weight.
One person will scream low carbs is the key.
Then another person corrects them, stating that simple carbs are bad, and complex carbs are good.
Yet another will state that fatty oils should be avoided, unless it's olive oil because everybody knows olive oil is healthy, just look how skinny the mediterranean people are!
This goes on and on. Everybody is an expert on health, and yet there's still obesity and health problems run amok. Personally, I think food is a very complex thing that we're not close to understanding. The best thing is to just eat like a dumb human animal, eating fruits, mushrooms, nuts and seeds, vegetables, whatever you can grab with your amazing human hands. Maybe occasionally, after lots and lots of running, you can eat some meat too.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Conflating science with corporate and government politics.
99/100 scientists are extremely careful in what they say. If you're taking medical advice from a newspaper (a JOURNALIST) instead of a doctor, it calls into question your intelligence, not that of the scientific community.
Have to make fresh soup from fresh vegetables, which are potassium rich.
I have a degree in this (exercise/nutrition) field. I work as a programmer now. Why? 1) because my degree qualifies me to hand out towels at a health club (a BS and good test scores will get you into grad school, but nothing that pays a living wage) and 2) the industry is all scams and diet pills.
The reason that people don't trust the science around fitness is because 1) scammers have been presenting pseudoscience as fact for years, and 2) they don't like what the actual science tells them. The actualscience around health and fitness is problematic because it tells us that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you take in. This requires modifying your behavior, and as we all know, at least as far as Americans are concerned, if it requires effort, it's not worth doing. Telling someone that to lose weight they need to cut their caloric intake by eating less, and increase their caloric consumption by exercising more, gets you "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" from the average person. They want a pill/drink/whatever they can pop and remain lazy slobs. (Berke Breathed had it right years ago: http://www.sumitsays.com/publi...)
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The way science works is that someone has an idea, publishes a paper, and then a flurry of papers follow which attack or support that idea, and eventually the idea perishes, survives, or mutates according to the evidence uncovered. That process is like a safety net which protects science from bad ideas, although it doesn't protect a scientist's *reputation*.
So if you get a committee of scientists together and demand guidance on a topic what they're trained to do is give you a hopelessly equivocal answer. If the committee is put under enough pressure and there are politicians involved, what you'll get is half-baked advice.
What this takes is an engineer's perspective. The first thing an engineer is trained to do is understand what a client is asking for; an experienced engineer knows that clients often don't understand what it is they're asking for, and that a successful project starts with clarifying that.
So here goes: what people want from dietary advice is eternal youth. The truth is if any of us live long enough, we'll get old, sick and then die. Paleolithic people lived about 35 years on average, enough to raise a shiny new replacement generation to independence. You can stay healthy on practically any kind of diet for 35 years, particularly if you walk (as paleolithic people did on average) 20 kilometers a day over rough ground.
I think what people would be satisfied with is advice that allows them to live to 70 years with the same level of health a 35 year-old typically enjoys. The extremity of that challenge should be apparent. For some people who have a genetic propensity toward certain disease clearly it's an impossible demand. What's more if you look at the rate of change of nutritional science over the past thirty years it's clear that the scientific evidence is in flux. Take fat: it turns out not all fats are the same, that became clear decades ago. Just in the last fifteen years we found out that not all unsaturated fats are the same -- some are trans. And I think evidence is emerging that not all saturated fats are the same, and not all trans fats are the same.
So what to do if you want to be a 70 year-old that's as healthy as a 35 year-old? "Have good genes" is not useful advice. It seems to me the best way to maximize your chances is to eat a wide variety of mainly unprocessed foods in modest quantities, and get a wide variety of moderate exercise every day. Any advice beyond that would be speculation at this point.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...but with the marketers, media, salescritters and politicians. All you can blame the scientists for is that they didn't shout FRAUD immediately. Maybe we could use a kind of Wikileaks for this? Or are there other sites we could use?
I know only one person who takes vitamin supplements. But I live in europe. Most people cook themselves and 'ready made' dishes (frozen or what ever) are usually still quite healthy.
I guess people simply don't know what vitamins are in what food.
A steak and an apple or a bit of salad already has all the vitamins you need. A glas milk, or a Cappuccino and a slice of bread with cheese as breakfast on top of that and you certainly have all you need.
And don't forget many foods already have extra vitamins added as conservation means or for the better look (e.g. Vitamin A, Vitamin C).
Of course you can top all this by eating Fish sometimes or other sea food, eat salad every day and make sure you eat vegetables every day.
Even a glass of a random fruit juice already has minimum more than half the vitamins you need per day.
In other words it is super simple in our society to eat in a way that you have enough vitamins.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Scott Adams is a moron and you should ignore everything he has to say about pretty much anything.
I would suggest that the argument here is weak because it collapses everything into a binary view: Science and the Rest_of_Us.
Indeed, we need to be able to count past two here. It's silly to view Science in a monolothic way that ignores time, competing views, vested interests, etc.
The issues raised here actually have more to do with the relative inability of folk to DIGEST information from Science, scientists and scientific studies than it really does with a lack of credibility on the part of Science and Scientists. Very often any benefit or harm discovered in a study is altogether minor. And yet, folk latch on to something being either good or bad (that inability to count past two again).
Furthermore, it is sheer folly to ignore the way the general population feeds information back into itself and turns things into trends and fads. Why blame the Scientists when the "crediblity problem" is often a factor of marketing forces, popular science (both facile journalism and self-help books), fads, etc.?
However keep in mind the dilbert cartoonist is a creationist. Just FYI.
The science has at times been bad. Much of what he decries is not actually science but marketing and industry, not the process itself.
It probably is!
People love to believe stuff like that. That a shot of vitamine Z would cure some serious disease.
No, he is not. Science doesn't presume to give clearcut answers, science gives multiple answers and justifications for them. Many of those answers are contradictory, some are outright wrong. The error is with politicians who look for a clearcut answer from scientists (often a "consensus") to base policies on.
In the case of diet and exercise, it's just complex. Some people do fine with low fat diets, others don't. Some people do fine with high fat diets, others don't. If you measure the US population as a whole, on average, low fat diets might actually help with weight loss, even if they are lousy nutritional advice for many people. It's not a failure of science when government makes bad policies in response to scientists presenting such incomplete results on a really complex problem.
Nope he's got it correct.
No, he doesn't. Why anyone pays attention to him is beyond me.
And your tinfoil hat is on inside out.
Science has been inconsistent on diet. However, it's hard to blame science for fat people because science has basically said that you have to: (1) count calories; (2) eat fruits and vegetables; and (3) exercise. On the margins, science might be wrong on moderate alcohol consumption, healthy fats, etc. But the average America is fat because they're not exercising, and eating ridiculous amounts of unhealthy foods that scientists have always said was dangerous as fuck.
Don't forget that scientists discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I love Dilbert, I've enjoyed many of Scott Adams' opinion on his web site. I disagree with him on this issue and I think his opinion is especially ignorant one considering his intellect.
Science hasn't gotten nutrition and fitness wrong.
People don't want to be told that they can't have everything they want in regards to eating, weight control and health. They don't want to accept that some delayal of gratification is necessary.
This refusal to accept reality fuels the popular diet book market, which floods popular media and popular opinion with misinformation.
If you slow down, go deeper into the literature, and spend time with it you will find that science doesn't have all that many disagreements about nutrition, weight control, how to eat to prevent disease etc.
Umm most of what he posted is known to anyone with a brain as to not being science.
Loose weight? Calories. It is simple. I used to think that foods high in fat made you fat. I was 8.
We ruthlessly study the digestive biology of commercial animals. We perform surgery on thousands of cows, sheep and goats to intercept their food as it passes through their system and we study their excrement in excruciating detail. Commercial operators know exactly how lean the beef will be based on the animal's food. We don't come close to doing this humans. Humans also don't eat the same thing every meal which greatly complicates the entire study. But at no point would we study humans in the way we do commercial animals.
Is it the science, or the science reporting?
It is normal to for scientific results to waffle back and forth, especially when we don't have a complete picture of what's going on.
The real problem is that newspapers report on every single damn study, so you end up with this whole "Eggs are bad! No wait they're good! No wait they're bad again!" thing going.
It's impossible to know what's what when you are bombarded with information, and that information is presented piecemeal and conflicts with previous information.
Everyone I know equates a good diet with being healthy.
A more important aspect is the activity level and physical exercise.
When I was a state champion level gymnast my health was amazing. I had six pack abs at the age of eleven because I worked out and trained 20 hours a week.
During that time I ate mcdonalds every day. I ate fries at school. Milkshakes, candy bars. Any source of calories I could get.
And my health was phenomenal.
Everyone (but women especially for some reason) seems to think that a 'healthy' diet is the answer when what they really need is to work more. I'm not saying healthy eating is bad. But if you don't use your body it will never truly be your tool and always be something your working against rather than working for you.
Use your body or it will atrophy in every way.
Do you still have that six pack? Are you still eating mcdonalds, fries, milkshakes, and candy bars all the time?
I wonder what the next headline will be?
"Dilbert Cartoonist Joins Anti-Vaccine Movement"
the real problem is advertisers claiming their magic elixir is "clinically proven", the science press overstating results - X causes cancer! (fine print: if you take it at a 1000 times the normal dose for half your life) Y is good for you! (fine print: some correlation was found in a small population that has ZERO resemblance to you); Y is bad for you! (in a different correlation study on another unrelated population). It isn't the science that's the problem, it's the hyping of science that ends up making unsupported or untrue claims when "simplifying" it; and the charlatans claiming to have "scientific evidence" of something when they don't. Part of the job of the media is to sort the nonsense from the truth, and they are REALLY bad at it, and getting worse. Government can't intervene because of elected representatives who believe (or are paid to believe) in the same kind of silly magical thinking as the public at large.
"Can we stop saying SSL now, since it had better be TLS?"
Is that just opportunistic complaining?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Science journalism, science education, and the media and public's affinity for overreaction (SCIENCE: We have found evidence that high sodium intake may contribute to a slightly elevated risk of hypertension in some patients; MEDIA: The Deadly Truth About Salt ... tonight at eleven; PUBLIC: OMG! Scientists say we should cut all salt from our diets! I heard it's a *chemical*!) are strong contributors to the problem.
However, an additional complication faced by health researchers is ethics. It's not that ethics are bad, but rather that they make it difficult to perform randomized controlled trials. If physicists want to learn about subatomic particles, they only need to build a machine big enough to smash atoms together really hard and see what happens. I'm told that's a bad idea with human subjects. If health researchers want to know if Factor A will kill a person, they can't just randomly assign half their subjects to Factor A and see if it kills them.
Instead, researchers have to develop ways to find reliable data from instances where Factor A just happens. They can get good results that way, but it's harder to control for outside factors such as environment, personal habits and genetics. It also means the iterations are slower. They cannot find interesting data, ask a new question and just re-run the experiment with updated parameters.
I'm not saying it's impossible or that the results are unreliable. I'm just pointing out that it results in an experimental environment where you have less control over the variables, more limits on what you are allowed to do, and a public environment that likes to take every incremental finding as The Law of Heath.
The science is proven and the results are here...
http://nutritionfacts.org/
Fat is bad and plant based diets improve health and longevity.
Why are you closing your eyes? That is your problem, both literally in your example and metaphorically. All you know is that you close your eyes, you get kicked in the balls, and there is a scientist in the room. I might recommend a trial with your eyes open. You may find it's someone else who has been kicking you.
Science demands that you examine your surroundings with your eyes wide open. Don't just swallow what a scientist tells you, not because you distrust scientists, but because science demands evidence. And definitely don't swallow what the media tells you about what a scientist tells you. That's a game of Telephone that nobody wins. If a scientist gets something wrong, call them on it ,or freely ignore them. If the media gets something wrong, demand they get it right, or freely ignore them. If you don't feel qualified to evaluate a claim, reserve judgement until you hear the same thing from many scientists. In science, consensus is not conspiracy.
Scientists get things wrong. Sometimes on purpose (fraud). But just as often we get mad that scientists got things wrong based on claims they never made. The claims were made for them, or in spite of them in many cases. We say, "Don't shoot the messenger," but sometimes the messenger is at fault.
I bought some raw seafood at the store the other day. The check-out clerk and the bag boy were both amazed that I could cook my own raw shrimp and snow crab legs. Many people really do have no idea how to cook other than to follow package directions for the microwave.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You won't get (type 2) diabetes if you exercise! If you exercise but don't restrict, you may get fat but you won't get type 2. ONLY LAZY SLOTHS GET TYPE 2 DIABETES!
Take an average Joe, give 'em a glass of tea. Give them a sugar bowl and have them sweeten it to taste. Now unless you're in the south (they do things different down there) the subject will add a gram or so. Now show that person the contents of a Snapple, a whopping 41 grams. On so many levels this exemplifies everything. Premade food is diabetic by design.
The problem is that science didn't dictate much of what we consider "common knowledge" about diet, food and nutrition. The food companies pretty much made up the first "food pyramid" and the government just adopted it.
The human body is an incredibly complex machine. Each and every body has a different metabolism and will respond differently to different foods. Anyone who thinks there is a single "best" ratio of foods to eat is simply insane and that is why we call them guidelines, not rules.
Science has learned more and more about body chemistry and used that knowledge to refine their statements about nutrition over time, so yes science gets it wrong sometimes. In the end science admits failures and corrects to the new truths.
It's very unlikely I need everything they provide. If the particular thing I need is magnesium, then I could simply get a magnesium supplement.
However- the nutrient value of our food is lower than it used to be due to our mass farming methods. You can't predict what trace minerals and vitamins will be missing from food.
In some cases, like wild salmon vs farmed salmon and pasture eggs vs industrial farmed eggs - you can literally see the difference. (you can also taste it, but taste is harder to measure). In many cases, the difference is much more subtle. Tomatoes are also pretty obvious (high cellulose for shipping and longer shelf life vs more food value from home grown).
Taking an inexpensive multi-vitamin ($9 for 90 days so about $0.10 per day) helps cover that case.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
[science/fact based] Diets are a lab experiement. They dont consider the system, i.e. you stress levels, environment, DNA, etc... It purely looks at calorie intake and energy and that's pretty much it. Diets never considered anything else and that's the flawed part of the science--much like studying just the wind and never looking at barometric pressure to determine if it's going to rain.
Since there's a motivation of cash with diets, science really gets pushed to the side. Much like using science to help you find a date.
In order to lose weight, the most effective method is to control your calories.
In order to lose fat, the most effective method is a low carb diet that is also calorie controlled.
The problem is that neither of those is the real objective, which is to lose fat while retaining lean body mass. The answer to that is quite a bit more complicated. The shorthand version is you must eat correctly, workout properly and elicit the right hormone responses. Spelling out all the details would take a fairly large book.
Starvation causes death and human fat metabolism has a dominant linear term? Huh, fuck me gently, who knew?
Just for the record, one could construct an equally impressive linear regression concerning weight loss and water intake. Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, the Desierto de Atacama diet works, bitches.
While we're at it, why don't we point out that humanity has possessed a viable means of birth control for six million years now (+/- one)?
Or it could it be that these aren't the droids we're looking for?
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
If you're overwhelmed by the number of responses to this article, here is the summary:
We all agree that there's a severe lack of science, and to prove it, here's some more.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
About once a week there's a shock news story about how food $FOO is now bad for you causing strokes, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, bad breath.... If you go back a few years, food $FOO was hailed as the new wonder-food and we should all eat plenty of it. What you should take away from this is to eat a balanced diet with everything in moderation. That way, you're spreading the risks and hedging your bets. After all, you'll never get out of this life thing alive.
"Science" hasn't failed anything. Surveys and amateur statisticians that can't differentiate correlation from causation; journalists who wouldn't understand statistical significance and its implications if their life depended on it; and, a public that hasn't the attention span beyond a headline, and filters based on celebrity name keywords. On top of multiscale incompetence, maybe "the scientific funding mechanism and a priority for novelty and publicity over scholarship" has failed...yes, actually, I suspect that's the main one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"You mean, there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies, or hot fudge?"
"Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."
Milk contains saturated fat which has proven negative effects on health (yes, even skim milk has saturated fat).
A typical steak contains 27 g of saturated fat according to google. To get the same amount through skimmed milk, you would have to drink 27 liters or more. That's about a month worth of consumption for a moderate milk drinker. Typical skimmed milk contains 0.1% fat. You definitely don't need to worry about it.
It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to be more physically fit, then of course increased physical activity is the only way to achieve that.
However, if the goal is weight loss, that goal almost certainly will only be achieved in the kitchen. Reason: in adults, increased physical activity will make your body want to increase its food intake, and that increase, in the typical case, is way more calories than were burned during the increased physical activity.
I get what you're saying. I used to be an athlete in my teens as well, and I ate like crazy, any garbage I could find. But between a teenager's metabolism and working out 3+ hours daily, I couldn't put on a pound of weight. But most adults don't work out 3+ hours per day, and neither do we need to eat more to compensate for a growing/developing body. So if we, as adults, want to lose weight, it's going to be by eating less in nearly all cases.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
We already know what we should and shouldn't be eating, courtesy the largest study of its kind ever conducted. It's stupidly simple but for some reason nobody wants to hear it.
Summary: Eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet, and get no more than 10% (better, 5%) of your calories from animal protein.
Don't get me wrong, I love Dilbert and Scott did an amazing job with that cartoon series. But his science credentials are really, really bad. His book, "God's Debris" is full to the brim with nonsense wrapped up as science.
So he's simply not someone I can trust with scientific claims. I honestly don't think anyone should care what he says in this regard...just because he draws fantastic cartoons doesn't give him any special platform for saying this kind of stuff.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
In the world of health foods, natural diets, and alternative nutrition, there are scads of scientific studies cited that demonstrate the "possible" value of this or that nutrient, supplement, or other non-mainstream dietary item. All these things "may" have "possible" benefit for some group of users. This is the way the public sees scientific studies of health and fitness, and Adams is absolutely right in calling science on it. Even given that science is always conditional, always likely to contradict earlier "truth," there is far too much reportage that just veers from extreme to extreme in the realm of nutrition. There are far too many studies that aren't carefully designed, or are studying to a predisposed result, or are just shams for some corporate agenda. The good ones are likely to be mis-reported by one or more popularisers, or have significant factors ignored in the media, or in some other way be distorted when made public. Even when the science is excellent, the reportage is likely to be horrendous. The bottom line for me, at least, is that I'll eat what I want, do the exercise that I want, and try to avoid the things that seem too nutty to be valid. That's not very scientific, I guess, but it beats being led around by the nose by competing studies and experts.
The proposed alternative headline nails it. Journalists who cover science/tech/health apparently never ask a scientist tough questions or talk to other researchers in the field.
when it comes to being thin diet is far more important than exercise
This is also incorrect. Without exercise, your body will simply compensate for the reduced caloric intake by lowering your resting metabolic rate and reducing muscle mass. A terrible diet with lots of exercise and a great diet with 0 exercise are both unhealthy, just in different ways. If anything, diet and exercise are equally important. You need both.
And the difference between science, voodoo and alchemy would be?
I only partly agree "healthy living" is about diet and exercise, never one or the other taken in isolation.
When I was a student I made myself very ill by eating Asda ready meals 3 times a day, not all ready meals are healthy.
People definitely don't know what vitamins are in their food and which are missing.
I would love to see some citations that show your varied meal plan would be 100% nutritionally complete. I don't think I've ever met anyone who has a steak 7 times a week and/or eats fish 7 times a week though.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
A steak and an apple or a bit of salad already has all the vitamins you need
Not sure why you included apple in it - one apple doesn't contain even 20% of minimum requirement of ANY vitamin or mineral that is in human top-30 nutrients, and not even 10% of anything other than vitamin C.
The only reason your above statement isn't false is that it isn't falsifiable. That is because "salad" doesn't mean anything in particular, and means everything in general.
If you knew what vitamins are in what food, you wouldn't have included apple.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Read Ben Goldacre: Bad Science.
In brief, there's a lot of stuff out there being peddled as science that is far removed from the standard of peer-reviewed double-blind studies on a significant number of samples etc.
And all our science journalists do is think of a snappy headline, instead of checking the quality and actual result of the study.
In a way the differing ever changing advice regarding nutrition is no surprise. Conducting studies on people who you can't really control poses lots of problems when collecting and analysing the data. This can create a situation where different studies seem to come up with different results and then journalists or people with a vested interest can run away with the results they favour, over blowing the facts to fit their agenda.
Now I will contradict myself and say that really nutrition advice hasn't changed, well at least science based nutrition. Eat a varied diet, avoid overly processed foods and simple carbohydrates, more importantly do lots of exercise. Only then worry about what number of eggs are optimal for health.
What really bugs me about nutrition is a new wave of "scientific based" advice which is contrarian to most other previous advice. A good example is the idea that saturated fats are good for you and carbohydrates and vegetable fats are bad. A number of highly moderated posts above link to the article The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease by Nina Teicholz. The article is a condensed version of her book which gets an absolute pasting The Big Fat Surprise: A Critical Review; Part 1. She accuses scientists of bad practice and hiding data, yet quote mines studies leaving out the conclusions which undermine her thesis.
The most dangerous drug
I don't eat ready made meals.
In Europe ready made meals are usually "supervised" by nutritionists.
I have no varied meal plan. I simply eat once or twice a day something I like, and thats it.
Instead of relying on other peoples citations, web links or what ever, why don't you simply google for the relevant stuff and set up your own plan?
E.g. an adult needs about 100mg vitamin C per day, an Apple (100g) has between 15mg and 60mg an Orange 60mg to 90mg. All that depends ofc on race/kind and growing/transportation conditions.
In your case I would simply start with stuff you eat anyway, add up the most important nutritions and then check if there is even a gap. Then I would check what you really like to eat/drink but consume rarely. E.g. Avocado, Bell Pepper, what is your favourite salad? Can you change the dressing, e.g. to olive oil and balsamico? I like, especially for kids a dressing based on grated apples (including skin, ofc!).
Another neat thing are spices, e.g. Mustard, Pepper, etc. contain lots of trace elements. Instead of buying good looking pre made mixtures in glass, buy full pepper grains etc. grind them fresh or use a wooden/porcelain mortar.
Check for conservation add ons, e.g. ascorbic acid is "vitamin C", prepackaged Salami etc. or many other stuff in cans or glasses is treated with it. So it is very unlikely that you need additional vitamin C if you eat some salad and fruits and get most of it via "canned food".
Otoh, I'm quite sure you find ready made eating plans on various "health sides".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The food pyramid is a product of the Dept. Agriculture, which has been spouting nonsense about foods since I was a boy (I'm 71 now) . The purpose of the Dept of Agriculture is to promote agriculture, so the department has to satisfy the various food lobbies (dairy, cattlemen, chicken factories, wheat farmers, con farmers, etc).
This is the problem with vaccines, because the pharmaceutical industry is untrustworthy, particularly with the flu vaccine.
Annual flu vaccines have a very low efficacy rate, is based on guesswork, and -- worse of all -- actively spreads the flu virus via the still-living viruses in the inhaler "vaccine."
I assume the inhaler is continued largely due to financial concerns (ka-ching) and it helps make the flu a worse problem across America/the world, and thus (they likely assume) helping to herd people into getting (what else?) more flu vaccines. Eventually, I expect criminal prosecutions over this, someday.
But for now, continue to blame the "anti-vaxxers" for sickness in America; the pharmaceutical companies appreciate your allegiance.
Hippocrates said, Let your food be your medicine.
There is plenty of knowledge out there that goes far beyond what is commonly reported and accepted by the mainstream.
And, it's proven by people that are still alive, and healthy! It's finding it.
When it can be put into a pill and marketed under a medical sounding name, such as Zolinlux and cost $$$, you'll hear about it.
There are many things that mainstream medicine does that is good, but there is a long way to go.
It's not so much science or even pseudo-science as it is pseudo-statistics. A lot of the recommendations on diet come from studies with very shaky statistics.
Not everything in this list is science. Some are not science at all, just marketing. Diet pills or diet advertised in TV programs are not studied scientifically. Some may have some anecdotal basis like paleo-diet, most are just crazy sh**, but all of them haven't been studied scientifically because it simply takes time and money to prove that a diet works. And usually money is the biggest problem. The fat in your food does not necessarily make you fat, food industry makes you fat. They take the nutrition out of their food by processing it and adding sugar, salt and other cheap ingredients to make it taste better. The only science behind food industry is marketing. Which is the same industry behind the climate change denials ... Sounds like a connection here, huh
That isn't evidence for or against global warming. It's evidence that the chicken littles don't have a good handle on it.
You all seem to have confused the fact that we live in a capitalistic society. The media is yelling and shouting in our faces the idea that religion is an enemy of science. The only enemy science has today is capitalism. And capitalism has had religion as its enemy for centuries. Eg Jesus kicking the crap out of the money changers for cornering the markets for half-sheckles at the temple. The Jewish Torah, The Christian Bible, and the Muslim Qur'an all at one point made interest on a loan a sin. The Torah was first to change, and the Bible soon sought to catch up to their competitors.
Capitalism is an enemy of Science because the capitalists treat science like a commodity. They figure they can "buy some science..." that makes my company look good. Convinces people that having a long shower is causing global warming. Tells folks that switching off lights will contribute to power conservation but ignores the amount of power used by their vacuums, hair dryers, and electric ranges. Proliferates lies about their diet in such a way that everyone becomes sick and has to visit the hospital all the time, take very expensive drugs with extensive side effects, and pay thousands of dollars in health insurance. And it's working! But real science doesn't work like that. Real science can't be swayed by interpreting the numbers wrong and spin-doctoring the results. Real science depends upon an informed public, just like democracy. It depends on people being able to scrutinize the opinions of scientists and capitalists alike, and deciding for themselves whether the science they are reading about through the sensationalist media is valid or not.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend! Therefore science and religion are friends! The media frenzy proclaiming the opposite is obviously engaged in divide and conquer tactics. Ignore them.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
It's not so much a problem of science, but of misreporting. The problem is the the media doesn't understand science and typically misreport what the reports actually mean and say. Then the lie is doubled when hucksters bend and twist those inaccurate words into deliberate lies. Science however is not without fault because of the grant giving process. In order to solicit grants from some source, they market the intended results before a study is done. They might cite some anomaly and ask for grant money to determine some question, all the time hinting strongly where they will take the research. Government and corporations who wish to promote their biased views, will buy into these studies, knowing full well they are biased from the outset. Science will limit the scope and use weasel words to make their findings somewhat inconclusive so as to leave the possibility of further funding possible. It's all about money. He who pays the piper gets to call the tune.
"He didn't do the necessary research to act as an informed consumer"
BULL-SHIT.
Every Day this was pumped into classrooms around the world. Commercials, TV, news articles, and popular culture pushed these ideas before the internet was even a thing.
Once you burn an idea into someone as fact you may NEVER have the opportunity to undo it. You will never have an adult be a malleable or open to information as a Child in a controlled classroom. Children are the most vulnerable, they are not rigorous thinkers and are punished for questioning authority.
Science worship is a thing. It seems that some people just need an authority to follow. Some people have personal anxieties to quell and a ritual or placebo does the trick.
Citation needed.
I've heard that particular "argument" used over and over by vitamin pushing quacks, ie salesman.
The more recent article on fecal transplants is interesting and thought-provoking in that obesity may be linked to imbalanced gut flora, but Taubes is dishonest and overstates the case for his hypothesis:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-cause-of-obesity/
I thought everyone knew that the Food Pyramid was totally made up by big business and in collusion with the government.
The Food Pyramid was designed in order to seer the masses to foods that could be grown/produced which would feed the people with the most PROFIT margins for commercial farming interests, such as grains, corn, etc..that favored massive commercial farming, and away from foods that required more effort to produce and favored small family farm production methods.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
If the problem lays mostly in the people trying to sell multivitamins, refined sugar, milk, etc and journalists pushing bad information to sell more papers, that sounds much more like a failure of capitalism to regulate itself than a failure of science to discover facts.
Yes, preliminary studies were used as justification, but it's not the scientist's fault that media and private interests ran with unconfirmed data as long as the scientists made clear that the studies weren't definitive. The main failure on science's part is a failure to be more vigilant in refuting bad information.
"I would love to see some citations that show your varied meal plan would be 100% nutritionally complete."
You don't need citations for the completly obvious: most people by "just eating", I mean, common sense, nothing fancy supervised by a nutrionist, lack any known avitaminosis illnesses, which proves the point.
You need the "help" of things like alcoholism, food deprivation or isolated environments (i.e. old school sailors) -or, nowadys, obviously unhealthy food decisions, to develop any kind of avitaminosis.
Given 28 main dishes a week (7 days, two main meals, two dishes -a first and a second, a meal, plus 14 desserts), say, 12 mainly of vegetables, 8 of pasta/carbohidrates-related, 5 of fish, 3 of meat, plus fresh fruit as dessert; all most varied in-season products you can easily find in the market. Add some bread, milk and eggs from time to time, water at leisure and forget about pre-cooked/frozen solutions.
Now, follow the above and the old adage: leave the table almost as if you were to start dinning again and I guarantee not only a nutritionally complete but also fully healthy diet.
The claim is that the biggest failure of science (the kind that everyone loves, as quantified by Facebook "likes") is its contributions to diet and fitness, which could be summed up as: The health benefits of food and exercise fluctuates as a function of the current weather in Denver. The conclusion is, much like Coloradan weathermen, that science is justifiably not to be trusted. Adams is convinced that people, being good enough at pattern recognition to ignore the forecast yet not good enough to know whether to bring an umbrella or a parasol, are not able to discern which science to believe and which to deny. He suggests that since people should not change their skepticism, science must improve. It is a tragedy that Science (and I mean Science the way philosophers refer to truth and to Truth) cannot improve. It is a divine numbered process set in stone, and I personally do not feel confident enough to risk pulling a Moses just yet.
Despite some unnecessarily patriotic support for the human tendency to be personally irresponsible, a solution was seemingly lost with the greatest generation. [1] People as a whole never have, never will, and never should put faith in science (or even Science). Science will not work without skepticism, and it is meant only to convince the educated with evidence. The uneducated (that's the 99.983% of us who don't read Nature) may become educated or remain ignorantly skeptical. Those are unfortunately the rational options. It was earlier than the 1930s when evidence that smoking was deadly began to emerge, yet smoking rates increased dramatically. There were decades of unhealthy skepticism as tobacco funded studies and paid doctor-actors (think Phil and Oz, not Who and Quinn) muddled the issue. It was not until the Surgeon General took the authority to tell people the truth that the smoking trajectory began to reverse. [2][3][4] And that's the heart of it, it takes someone respected and trusted to become a meteorologist (Dalton, Celsius, Roker) and not a weatherman ([5]).
Science did nothing wrong. [6] Science is not to blame for the grievances of people who grew up without a smartass friend having ever haughtily parroted, "you know gravity is just a theory." Not because lifespans continue to increase [7] or because the US leads the world in quality of life measures. [8] It would be circular reasoning to use scientific measures to judge science itself. Science is not to blame because Science is not an authority and it should never be accepted based on faith. The people who don't read Nature have to rely on faith in authority to believe what is true, and they need an educated authority who will not let them get wet. The enemy is not Science. The enemy is the person we all respect, the person we trust, the person whose authority over us has mislead us for decades as our health declines and we join her in morbid obesity. The enemy is Oprah. [9]
[1] "Science failed my generation on the topic of food and exercise the same way science failed my parents generation with cigarettes."
[2] 1957 Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney declared reason to believe of a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
1964 "Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General" is released to national attention.
http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/NN...
[3] http://trends.collegeboard.org... Readers of Nature are considerably less likely to smoke.
[4] http://www.ep.tc/realist/56/20...
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
[6] http://www.manolith.com/2012/0...
[7]