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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?"
In the case of nutrition, diet, and exercise, the primary problem isn't science reporting, it is government programs based on questionable science, from bad nutritional recommendations and bad labeling requirements to idiotic agricultural subsidies, public school curricula and lunch programs, and more.
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.
No diet is perfect, and you'll miss some essential vitamin or mineral no matter how careful you are. And let's face it, most of us eat often for flavor or convienience rather than nutrition.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
BULLSHIT.
The FDA's advice that a low fat diet is good for heart disease? Nonsense. Not tested. A guess. Wrong.
That fat in diets cause obesity? Nonsense. Not tested. A guess. Wrong. Backwards.
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...
This also sounds like voodoo:
1) Are my grandparents healthier? No, all 4 died below the average life expectancy for their gender. 2 from diabetes, 1 from lung cancer and 1 from liver failure. Anecdotal insofar as large numbers are concerned, but you said "my grandparents". Life expectancy has been increasing, statistically, so on average we are still doing better all things factored in (http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html). How much of that is science and how much of it is brushing teeth and regular baths? We don't know...
2) As the united states became more industrialized, we gained access to foods that would have been an impossibility for us in various regions. As a result my grandparents (or really their parents) would have primarily eaten what they could grow and trade for regionally. This would conflict with all food pyramid/discs/oblate-spheroids/etc. that are published as "healthy balanced diets" today. Granted, we have no way to know how much of the government recommendation is based on science, and how much based on say, a corn lobby. Maybe "eat local" should be a movement.
3) As it happens, depending on your definition of grandparents, the "caveman diet" is one doctors have recommended once or twice in the past 15 years. But cavemen weren't known for long, happy lives and we're again not really sure as a matter of science, if that's better or not. It just has that sort of "conventional wisdom" vibe.
This is how non-science has failed us. Actual science in this case probably takes too long to be interesting or to help boost your companies profits and thus is relegated to whatever researcher who can scrounge up the funds to do it. Then get heard over the noise of BS. What I read from Scott Adams resonates pretty strongly, it is very hard for the layman to make heads or tails of actual science amidst the trumpeting cacophony of marketing bullshit.
"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 ?
They are actually more open about it than you think.
Some "scientists" want the food pyramid to be reconsidered in light of climate change and the carbon costs of the food.
No matter what you think about climate change, it has shit to do with what food is healthy and what is not and what is the best mix for people to follow.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Daniel 1:12-26
Just sayin...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Simple, traditional diet that worked for your grandparents and their parents
Just be sure that your ancestors didn't come from an area with high incidence of nutritional deficiency diseases. You don't even need to go all that far back. Pellagra stacked up an impressive body count in the American south in the first half of the 20th century, and beri-beri had similar effects in more rice-heavy areas. Scurvy and cretinism were a bit more niche; but also pretty much sucked. In any of those cases, some modest supplemental modifications to simple traditional diet are strongly recommended.
I also don't believe for a moment that "unprocessed" foods are more expensive.
You shouldn't, because they aren't. Basic food like oatmeal, carrots, eggs, etc. are not more expensive than TV dinners. It is also not true that low income people "don't have time" to cook. Households in the bottom quintile have an average of 0.4 people with a job (for the top quintile, the figure is 2.1). Besides, you can prepare oatmeal, carrots, or an omelet in the same time it takes to microwave the TV dinner. There is also an inexpensive and healthy drink that is significantly cheaper than soda: tap water.
My wife an I both work full time, yet we find time to cook from scratch every evening. It is a great time to talk, spend time with the kids, and pass recipes and skills to the next generation. We get most of our produce from the backyard (mostly root vegetables and citrus this time of year), and keep a small flock of chickens for eggs. How do we find the time? We don't have a cable TV subscription.
It's not just reporting.
The FDA and medical community has told us with all seriousness for decades that there is a link between cholesterol and heart disease - there really isn't.
"Scientists" told us in the 60s that nursing babies was stupid; animals and poor people nursed. Smart, civilized people used "scientifically formulated" synthetic formulas!
Scientists said "DDT is killing baby birds, stop using it!" when in fact it was poorly designed experiments that left birds calcium deficient and thus - yes - laying fragile eggs.
Scientists have said things like "stop using baby talk to speak to children, it hinders their development", while others cheerfully opined (using their "sciency" wisdom) on the geopolitics of the Cold War (Union of Concerned Scientists) - something for which they were no more qualified to comment than Kissenger would have been qualified to design a moon rocket.
I agree with Adams, I've been saying it for years: science is critical to the success of our society, but the moment (around the early 1950s) that scientists started opening their yaps on political subjects, they were trading their credibility for politics. Now they've spent that currency, they can't understand why people question their motivations (as if they were like "normal" people motivated by power, ego, money, etc. - right?).
Eisenhower famously warned us about the military-industrial complex, he was absolutely right.
Of course, the NEXT BIT of that same speech is less-often quoted:
-Styopa
Really, Junior? Because the last time I was at the grocery store, a pound of apples cost less than a bag of Doritos.
Which one is healthier?
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
Or I could just call you a liar:
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/smallpox/9241561106_chp4.pdf
Shall I quote for you?
As has been described in Chapter 1, an attack of smallpox in persons who had been vaccinated was usually less severe than
in the unvaccinated. Much more important, from the point of view of the ultimate eradication of smallpox, was the fact that vaccination
within the previous 5 years usually com- pletely prevented disease. Some vaccinated persons experienced subclinical infections, as
judged by their serological responses (Heiner et al., 1971a). These subjects did not transmit the disease to others, although
the subclinical infection substantially increased their level of immunity. Even if their immunity had not been boosted by
subclinical infection or revaccination, many vaccinated individuals were protected against clinical smallpox for a much longer period than 5 years.
Or perhaps here:
http://www.who.int/biologicals/areas/vaccines/smallpox/en/
The Recommendations (formerly Requirements) for Production and Control of Smallpox Vaccines were last revised in 1965. Since that time an intensified global eradication programme implemented from 1967 to 1980, and led by WHO, has resulted in the global eradication of smallpox. This was achieved by the globally coordinated use in national immunization programmes of effective vaccines that met the quality specifications in the 1965 Requirements. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was reported in 1977. In addition to the availability of effective vaccines, an efficient infrastructure was established worldwide embracing the production, supply and administration of smallpox vaccine. Good surveillance, diagnosis of disease, training and public health information were additional important elements in successfully combating smallpox.
Provide some actual links to back up your claims or shut the hell up.
It's true that some people burn more energy than others, and that those people can (in fact, must!) eat more to maintain a steady weight. That's what "energy balance" means: energy consumed minus energy used! Maybe you naturally burn 10,000 calories a day. If so, you need to eat less than 10,000 calories to lose weight, and more than 10,000 calories to gain weight. More likely, you burn 2000 calories a day, same as the rest of us, and so you should eat less than 2000 calories a day if you want to lose weight.
No matter how much you talk about the different ways the body metabolizes food, or all the different ways different peoples' bodies work, you can't change the fact that to lose weight you personally must eat fewer calories than you personally burn. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. It's a fact.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
You're absolutely right that some foods have different effects on perceived 'fullness' and hunger levels for the same amount of energy consumed. And sure, this may make it marginally easier or harder for someone to stay at their target energy intake.
It doesn't change the fact that, whether you use a patch or you go cold turkey, in order to quit cigarettes you have to reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The whole "fat is bad" mantra that started in the 80s is actually one of the root causes of the obesity epidemic in the US. The "fat is bad" mantra lead to food companies removing fat from their foods. But in order to keep the taste levels high, they needed something else. And that something else is a whole family of chemicals extracted from corn including High Fructose Corn Syrup.
There is evidence that HFCS and the other corn products contribute to obesity much more than either fat OR cane sugar but the corn industry is so powerful that no-one of any substance has the guts to challenge them and really fight.
IMO the excellent documentary Food, Inc should be required viewing for American school kids. Show them where their food REALLY comes from.
I agree with you that the science is good. But the human body is complex, and people are simple.
I eat a lot (I am The Finisher at dinner parties) and never dieted. Dieting trigger's your body's hoarding mechanism, where it doesn't know when it's going to get its next fix so it packs everything away just in case. My digestive tract tends to just take what it needs and dumps the rest.
Sure there are a bunch of other things I do to remain relatively svelte 6 ft ish 200lbs. I'm usually doing interesting things, so I don't eat or snack out of boredom. When I do eat, I take it slow, so I don't usually keep eating after I get full. No fast food. Lots of Asian food. A good amount of Asian blood that has had a few thousand years of agrarian culture over the hunters and gatherers. I walk and bike and take the stairs whenever practical. An hour of martial arts every other day.
So I have gained 10 lbs in the past few years, mostly since I started drinking (only on non-martial arts days) and started eating candy at work. I'm starting to replace the candy with veggies and the beer with hard liquor, so maybe that along with breathing a little more deeply should even it out again.
Your body's 'hoarding mechanism' is only triggered if you lose more than (roughly) 5% of your body weight over a month or so. If you stay safely within this limit and you're okay.
Almost. It's not the calories that you eat that matter, however. It's the calories that you ABSORB vs the calories that you burn.
And the calories you absorb can differ significantly from the nutrition labeling, depending on how you process (e.g. cook) the food, see: http://theconversation.com/why...
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
[citation needed] As I have said previously on slashdot. Australia uses only cane sugar and obesity levels are similar. I think the issue is simply swapping fat for sugar.
Once, in college, I left a Teflon-coated pan on the burner for too long.
This is 2015. Nobody should be buying or using Teflon pans anymore. Get some pots and pans with modern non-stick ceramic coatings. They are completely non-toxic, don't degrade, and clean up even easier than Teflon.
The body has no 'hoarding mechanism' that is triggered by 'dieting'.
The body always tries to 'hoard' or safe or store surplus. Depending on the food composition it can do that, or can't do it.
Sure there is. Read up on visceral fat vs. subcutaneous fat. It's really quite fascinating.
The visceral fat cells grow in your gut to store starches for slow release during winter hibernation. Once your body is convinced that it needs to bulk up on visceral storage, those cells get first dibs on any energy absorption from food in your intestines and then they grow as much as they can. Of course, if you never go into hibernation or suffer through winter food shortages, they become a problem. They don't die when you diet, they just get slightly smaller and start to complain. They might even be evil enough to withhold nutrition from the rest of your body, persuading you to eat more when you don't really need it.
Subcutaneous fat is stored all around your body. Those cells aren't as vicious and greedy as the visceral fat cells, since they compete for energy along with the rest of the cells in your body. And they also tend to be located near your muscles for quick release when you need it.
There are also differences between brown fat vs. white fat, where brown fat has a higher metabolic rate to help keep you warm in cold climates.
The body does a lot of interesting things to stay alive, and my point is that lifestyle can be a much more important influence than diet. And I kind of feel sad for people who are frustrated by trying to hack their diet alone.