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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?"
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.
The problem is that much of this diet stuff has been agenda-driven, rather than driven by actual studies and data. There hasn't been much actual "science" performed.
For instance, the original Food Pyramid said that grains should make up the bulk of your diet. This was agenda-driven, not science driven. The point was that we were subsidizing farmers to grow grains, and so had quite a lot of grain, and quite a lot to sell.
In the 80's, consumption of fats and cholesterol were big "issues," but we now know that fat and cholesterol doesn't just go into your bloodstream as fat and cholesterol. Your body metabolizes and transforms them into other chemicals, which then may or may not affect the fat and cholesterol in your body. No study on metabolism had been done prior to this. No study of the affect of consuming these things had been done prior to this. The whole thing was very hand-wavy and inaccurate.
In the 80's you also had another lobby (discussed in "Fat Head" but I'm too young to remember the name). These people represented themselves as scientists, but actually were pushing a vegan agenda. While veggies *are* good for you, there was no science behind what they were selling, either. They just wanted you to stop eating meat. Their materials spread like wildfire, and are part of why McDonald's stopped using beef tallow to fry its fries. Instead, they switched to rapeseed oil. Frying in beef tallow is much healthier, as consuming foods fried in rapeseed oil will increase your blood cholesterol.
If you're taking this "flawed science," you're only taking it because the people who are presenting it dressed themselves up in lab coats. These folks weren't performing any studies to back their inaccurate claims.
As attractive as the diet is in the French Quarter, Voodoo lacks the je ne sais quoi of the Catholic "fish on fridays" ethic.
Just sayin'
Sent from my ENIAC
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...
You are ignoring economies of scale and the benefits of longer shelf-life.
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.
No time to cook and yet the average American watches almost 5 hours of TV per day. (The number of hours watched per day actually climbs steadily as you get older, from around 2 to 7 hours per day.) You can even watch TV while you cook!
I also don't believe for a moment that "unprocessed" foods are more expensive. Rice, beans (dried or canned), frozen vegetables, canned tomatoes or paste, basic spices, and even most fresh produce costs less than highly processed foods like chips or microwave meals. Meats and dairy may seem more expensive to buy straight out, but those highly processed foods are not bargains loaded with lots of good meat and quality cheese; they have just enough to get you to buy the thing and lots and lots of salt.
I think the problem is education. I suspect there is a growing population of people who really don't know how to take basic ingredients and turn them into a meal. It does change the equation a bit when you have to take care of kids. That's one of the things that my parents and grandparents did: cooking was family time.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
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.
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.
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.
Utter bullshit. The easiest way to control weight is to exactly follow the scientific advice. I lost a lot of weight (about 25 kg over 6 months) by a simple system:
(Change in Weight (kg))/7700 = Calories I ate - Calories I used
The calculation is really simple and entirely based on nutrition science. For "Calories I ate", I used the free USDA nutrition database from, I think, Dept. of Agriculture (yep, here. http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/). For "Calories I used", I used the standard age-adjusted formulas you can find at the back of any nutrition text. For detection activity I used the android phone, Tasker and a small timesheet app.
Just for the kicks I kept a graph of the loss weight, and the fit to the "theoretical" weight loss has an R-squared upwards of 0.87 over more than a year. The body response is so precise, that even the occasional heavy meal registered the next day. No magic, no voodoo, just sticking to the 'scientific rules'.
7700 is the kCal in a kg body weight, if you're curious.
As for the nutrition, I stick to the good ole food pyramid. My (slightly high) cholesterol went to norm in the first year, and no problems whatsoever in 5 consecutive yearly checkups since I started the routine.
Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, it works, bitches.
This, absolutely this. I believe the number one reason many people choose to disbelieve that energy balance is the primary determinant for weight gain/loss is simply that they don't like the answer it gives them: That to lose weight, you have to eat less food and that this means sometimes feeling hungry.
Magic, pills, voodoo, fad diets, resonant crystals, homeopathy... ANYTHING but having to exercise self-restraint.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Well, it's not exactly easy when food is so damn abundant, and lots of prepacked things are "portioned" for more than one person but are sized where one person can eat the contents easily.
I think that for prepackaged food products, if there's no way to reseal the packaging provided, then the calorie content and other information on the packaging needs to state the total for the entire contents, not for some obtuse 2.5 servings. For prepackaged food where there is a way to reseal, the number of servings needs to be prominently displayed on the front and both the nutritional information per-serving and the total sum for the entire package need to be displayed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Magic, pills, voodoo, fad diets, resonant crystals, homeopathy... ANYTHING but having to exercise self-restraint.
Okay, I'll try to keep this simple. The idea behind most diets is that different foods, of the same calories, 'satiate' better - more hunger suppression for longer, than others. Ergo, if you eat more of those foods, you're less likely to cheat on your diet. It's all a mental game.
Trick is, carbohydrates, unless you stick to the really complex ones, tend to result in a blood sugar spike that leaves you feeling hungry again in a relatively short period of time. Fats, proteins, and the most complex carbs tend to stick around longer, don't spike your blood sugar, and therefore satiate you for longer - you're less likely to get a hankering for a snack a short period later.
Think of it like the difference between quitting smoking with the patch and dead turkey.
I don't read AC A human right
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
Are you joking with this nonsense about "buying and preparing actual ingredients"?
I tried that once and I nearly missed half an episode of American Idol. All that cooking takes too much time and requires standing up and an occasional period of mental concentration.
I love prepacked television dinners.
No, but reducing dieting to just the laws of thermodynamics makes a mockery out of the whole thing. It's like the Seahawks coach explaining that the secret to beating the Patriots is to score more points than them. While technically true, it doesn't help anybody.
I switched to low carb (not no carb) and higher fat (not all fat) diet. It makes me feel full longer. The fat and protein make me feel satiated and I don't feel hungry. Consequently I eat less. So far I've dropped 35 lbs and am continuing to lose weight. I also resumed swimming regularly. Yes you have to eat less than you burn. But what you eat can significantly affect how hard that is. If you are always feeling hungry, you'll never keep at it. And occasionally I do have a carb binge. Go to the movies and eat a large bag of popcorn, or have some pie. Then I put that behind me and do good for a couple more weeks. Eating low carbs has the added benefit of lessening the feeling to eat chips and pies and popcorn, etc. But every now and then is nice and I don't have the urge again for a long while. From this I have come to believe that our institutionalized consumption of carbs, including pastas, breads, and sugar has made us addicts of them, and that they aren't needed. At least not needed in the kinds of quantities we have traditionally eaten them.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Science actually figured it out about 100 years ago: it doesn't matter much what you eat because unless you embark on a weird diet you will get all the nutrients you need; and the way to maintain weight is to eat the right _amount_ of food. People worry about third order effects and ignore the first order principles. It's not "science's" fault that people don't want to bother learning what's already known about how things work.
The problem is that eating has one major other function besides nutricion: stress release. And then another power kicks in: positive reinforcement. Eating makes us feel less bad (less stress) and thus makes us feel good or at least better. There are some very tricky mechanisms that work to keep us in this trap. Once you start to eat more to feel better, it will be very difficult to undo that habit. And it's all about habits. If you start running daily, and you feel good about it, it's positive reinforcement once again, and it may compensate. Changing your daily habits is the way to go.
Maybe if you're a 1%er who has rigged the economy to screw over the middle class, you can post like you're not a foaming at the mouth idiot, but for the rest of us, it's practically impossible.
FIFY.
Well, that wasn't a problem with PTFE being non toxic, it was a problem with PTFE decomposition products being toxic. Wooden spoons are non toxic too, but if you set fire to a bunch of them and breathe in the results, hilarity will ensue. Likewise with stainless steel: if you manage to oxidise it heavily enough I think you will find that the higher oxidation states of chromium won't do you a lot of good either.
Stickiness is rarely a problem if you lubricate properly before cooking and deglaze afterward.
It's not a huge problem: I'm perfectly capable of cooking without non-stick, but it often makes my life easier, so I use it where appropriate.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The worst you can drink is "juice" a lot of shit with sugar, lots of empty calories (1L packet can easily be 5000 calories, the individual ones can be 800) and is actually the fastest way to get fat without noticing.
The worst you can drink is pasteurized juice, which contains no enzymes which help break it down. Of course, just try to find unpasteurized juice.
Also, most juice drinks aren't juice. They're juice from concentrate, with added sugar. It's pretty hard to actually pick out the drinks which are just actual juice.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even without the added sugar, fruit juice is not good for you. It would be better to eat the original fruit than to take a bunch of them and run them through a juicer so you can get an instant sugar high. When you eat the original fruit it takes your body longer to extract and use the 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.