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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?"
Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
Alex, I'll take "Flawed Science" for $1,000.
Sent from my ENIAC
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".
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.
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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.
Not even that, Scott Adams doesn't know a scientist from a self-proclaimed and popular expert. Most our "health advice" would cause real scientists to look for all the peer reviewed experiments and compare findings. For example, a long held "truth": "too much salt is bad and gives you high blood pressure", has been found to be false for normal healthy people, and the proper controlled study for that only done recently.
I think some of the issues are that:
-The necessary biochemistry needed to really analyze the effects of nutrition is still in development.
-Food processing in general is a recent adaptation (less than a lifetime), and the effects of it are just now being understood.
-The number of degrees of freedom (food types, component chemicals, varied responses to each chemical, factorial responses to multiple combinations, genetics) combined with the inability of really knowing what test subjects eat over a long time make rigorous experimentation impossible.
-The fact that the human body can metabolize so many chemicals effectively with such delayed responses...it takes years for someone who was thin to get fat sometimes. Many of the food companies know that Twinkies are delicious, and they were not shy about pushing that crap down easily impressionable young kid's throats.
It's getting more informed now, but if you look back the food pyramid wasn't necessarily bad, even today it's okay to have proteins, vegetables, breads, and dairy, it's the proportions and processing that are under scrutiny.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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!
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.
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...
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
Nutritionist is a meaningless title. It has no standing, no required qualifications, certifications or training. If however you had said Dietician then those people are worth listening to. Because they actually know something and have qualifications.
Nutritionists are in the same category as Homoeopaths and Chiropractors.
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.
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.
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
He could probably find one for transfats being bad for you though.
However, that is a completely different kind of problems. There are 3 transfats that humans commonly encounter and we have special enzymes to deal with the trans position so we can process it.
The only problem with artificial trans fats is they have the trans bond at a different position and our body does not process it correctly. This ends up causing malformed cholesterols which then aggregate on your artery walls and cause damage. It is not the cholesterol that is bad but misshapen molecules that aggregate.
Any transfat that is not trans in one of the positions that we have an enzyme to handle should not be allowed in food. They are just incompatible with human enzymatic processing and that is the only reason to ban them. There is at least one trans fat in milk and another in beef and those are fine since we have special enzymes to process them.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Am I the only having trouble figuring out if this post is satire?
I stole this Sig
It's almost as if the previous poster just wrote, "not all fats are the same".
Which is, by the way, absolutely true. "Fat" is a very broad class of molecules which have differing health consequences. Even subcategories like "omega-6 LA", "omega-3 ALA", "saturated fat" and "trans fat" each represent many molecules, and it's likely that by breaking them down further one will find further variation within each group. And this is already happening.
The problem here is not what Scott "Global Warming Is A Lie" Adams makes it out to be, it's about his usual confusion of what scientific research is saying and what the public's belief that science is saying is
Nutritional science had in the beginning to work out the most broad truisms, and has since worked to refine them further and further. They found, for example, that animals withheld certain chemicals would develop deficiencies, isolated and identified these necessary agents, and labelled them as vitamins and minerals. Naturally companies immediately started capitalizing on this by making and promoting multivitamins, but there never some body of peer-reviewed research behind their claims, there was never some metastudy published in Nature saying "everybody needs to take daily multivitamins!" or anything even close to that. Likewise, early scientists also studied the significant differences in health between rural populations eating diets high in fruits and vegetables, and city populations with diets high in salt and fat. So they were able to break out these two very specific diets into "this one is associated with less disease than that one". It's been a long process ever since to refine it further and further down into specific causative elements in the diets.
The specific criticism of the 1992 Food Pyramid is a glaring example on Adams' part. The Food Pyramid isn't a scientific publication, it's an infographic made by a government agency. It's been criticized as being poor right from the beginning, not due to changing science, but just simply a bad product. But it was just one in a long line of USDA products, and it's the only one of them to show an unusually large grains segment. It should be noted that USDA infographics have changed more over time due to differing political realities than due to any changes in science - for example, the diet promoted by the USDA during the Great Depression was heavily influenced by cost, while during World War II it was influenced by food rationing. USDA products always have some basis in science, but they are not themselves science and are full of compromises and oversimplifications. The main oversimplifications of the 1992 pyramid was not the WHO report that it was based on, but that they conflated different recommendations together in a confusing manner. In particular, the fruits and vegetables sections were supposed to be seen as minimums, while others were supposed to be seen as maximums, and the fat on the top was only supposed to represent pure fats (butter, for example) but not fats found in other foods elsewhere on the pyramid. The WHO reports have been updated since then based on the latest science, but their recommendations have remained quite similar (mainly just more precise in breakdowns - for example, breaking down different types of fats). The fact that the USDA infographics have changed so much is not a reflection of changing science, but simply the recognition that the 1992 pyramid was an awful product.
I would have you sign my banana, but it's on the roof.
I think you don't understand the difference between "alkaline" and "alkalizing". If your body is to maintain a constant pH, how can it do that if you eat something with a lower pH?
Probably because the homogeneous liquid called "lemon juice" doesn't actually end up in your blood. Instead it ends up being broken down into its components, the divided sum of which doesn't have the same ph that it had when it came in. The same is true of any substance with a varying ph.
Your kidneys, lungs, and liver all play a vital role in determining the ph of your blood, and don't allow it to exceed a certain range (the blood itself is a buffered solution, which resists changes to ph anyways.)
Any diet book, website, or tv show you've seen that tells you to try to make your blood more alkaline should NOT be trusted. Your blood is kept slightly alkaline, and pushing it further in that direction can be deadly. Fortunately nobody dies from that because diet rarely impacts the ph level of your blood.
But it's still possible to adjust your blood's ph anyways. A common way of artificially doing that when somebody's organs aren't properly controlling CO2 levels (which affect the acidity) is to take sodium bicarbonate pills, because the sodium bicarb binds with the CO2 in the blood near the intestines, effectively sapping it from your blood, raising its ph.
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/