Science's Biggest Failure: Everything About Diet and Fitness 958
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?"
Science... Yah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
Alex, I'll take "Flawed Science" for $1,000.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Informative)
When it comes to diet and nutrition you may very well be better off with "voodoo" and "alchemy".
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Funny)
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'
Re: (Score:3)
Re:je ne sais quoi (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Daniel 1:12-26
Just sayin...
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Informative)
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/ [usda.gov]). 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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Magic, pills, voodoo, fad diets, resonant crystals, homeopathy... ANYTHING but having to exercise self-restraint.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Informative)
Heck, even the Atkins type diets will, if followed properly, lead to a person naturally eating fewer calories, even if ketosis will result in more calories leaving the body.
Right now, I am on a diet that resembles this, sometimes I even skip a meal. Having freed oneself from the carbohydrate roller coaster is massive that way. But I've done Atkins before and ate more than 2,000 calories a day and still lost 10lb/mo. The idea that Atkins works because of calorie restriction is false. Calorie restriction works whether you're in ketosis or not.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:3)
"Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [lifehacker.com]?
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.
Re:"Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: "Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: "Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:4, Interesting)
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... [theconversation.com]
Re:"Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Energy Balance" an overly simplistic view (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Calories are energy and kilograms are mass. Conflating them in a non-relativistic way is just plain wrong. That they happen to be somewhat monotonically related when talking about food and body weight is misleading at best. I don't know if it stems from "nutritionists" ignorance of physics and actual science o
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:3)
Simple, traditional diet that worked for your grandparents and their parents
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Some of those listed(notably pellagra) are diseases that came to prominence because 'traditional' diets are not, in fact, all that stable. European populations, and their colonial offshoots, all have five centuries or less, sometimes a lot less, experience with new world crops. In the case of corn, they adopted the crop from the natives; but did not adopt the local processing techniques.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It's also how you find the money to do so.
Cooking for yourself is almost always cheaper than buying it ready-made. Consider how much hamburger + bread + potatoes + oil you can buy for the cost of a McDonald's meal.
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I've been cooking omelets on the electric cook top for a number of years. I've never been very good at it, because of the egg always burning to the (stainless steel) pan. I've even tried using coconut butter, because of the higher temperature it breaks down at. No luck.
Recently I had to break out the camping LP gas cylinder because of a prolonged power outage. Same pan, same fat, same time - so much better results, perfect omelets. No egg getting burnt to the metal, I could have wiped the pan with a paper
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I disagree about the pans. I have a collection of aluminium, stainless steel, teflon coated and enamel pans (I cook a lot).
I have a couple of good quality teflon coated aluminium pans, as in I paid some decent but not outrageous money for them, and they've lasted for 6-7 years so far. One is begining to be a little bit less non-stick than it used to be. They certainly haven't blistered and when they do I'll throw them away since they'll be useless. But not harmful: the coating is PTFE which is very inert an
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You can even watch TV while you cook!
Sure, but it's hard to rest, watch TV and cook at the same time. TV is "down time" for a lot of people, the thing they do to switch off after a long and tiring job. It's not an ideal way to relax and recover energy, I'm just explaining how it is.
There is no reason why prepared meals can't be healthy. Cooking is a chore... Sure, it can be enjoyable, but often it is just another bit of housework to get done. Some manufacturers already offer healthy microwave/oven meals, it's just that the crappy ones are slig
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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They can't be. It's simple math and economics. Anything that is more ready made has more labor put into it.
Really, factory labor is your only input to calculate cost?
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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a can of green beans is more than beans, I'll bet that a significant portion of the net weight is water and salt.
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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We (family of 3) tried not cooking for ourselves for two weeks, then cooking in every night for two weeks. The cooking in cost more, but the food is definitely better self prepared
Shouldn't you compare like to like? Either make the same crappy level of food you were eating out, or eat out someplace that uses food to make their food.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:5, Interesting)
They are actually more open about it [latimes.com] 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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Informative)
Check out a guy named Ancel Keys, who's 7 country study was enormously influential, as well as Dr Jeremiah Stamler, who published a self-help booklet in 1966 (sponsored by the corn oil industry) telling people to alter "habits even before the final proof is nailed down" with regards to saturated fats and heart disease.
Sometimes, it only takes a handful of people in white coats who are well meaning and respected to change public opinion.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Science... Yah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Science... Yah! (Score:4, Insightful)
They believe in models they don't understand and couldn't even be specific about which of the models they believe in.
The deniers don't understand the models any better. It's the same faith working here, but in the opposite direction. Now, if you want to discuss the actual scientists, it's a different matter.
The skeptics understand that the predictions made by the models have yet to be accurate. So while the believers have faith, the skeptics have evidence.
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When you deny chicken-little theories that "the sky is falling", the onus is not on the denier to come up with a better sky-is-falling theory, because the null hypothesis is that the sky is not falling.
Yet climate scientists have succeeded in convincing everyone that CO2-causes-all-climate-disasters is the null hypothesis, without providing any compelling pr
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Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
There are two things to say about this:
1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it is easy to wander around in the noise.
This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you
The credibility of science? (Score:3)
I think he means the credibility of scientists.
Re:The credibility of science? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The credibility of science? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The credibility of science? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:The credibility of science? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not the fault of science (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not the fault of science (Score:5, Funny)
When I see a study attributed only to anonymous "researchers", I read that as "undergraduates".
Re:Not the fault of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah exactly, his cynicism is off the charts (and misplaced)
Science did not tell us to avoid natural fats in our diet, it was the: USDA, FDA, AMA, etc. etc. It was government and industry associations, sensational journalists who won't or can't deal with basic stats, not scientists. On the contrary, there is a body of scientific works that are basically saying 'told you so.'
The jump to connecting this to climate change had zero supporting evidence in this article. If there was a pattern of provable deceit by a majority of scientists, then show it...
Re:Not the fault of science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the fault of science (Score:5, Insightful)
It was absolutely the best science that the 1970s had to offer. The fact that it turned out to be wrong was due to a large number of factors, but not that it wasn't "science". One good article of many is: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303678404579533760760481486, which references a lot of large controlled scientific studies that, yes, had issues, but were still the best of the time. There were ALSO studies that came to other conclusions, but remember that there are real studies by real scientists (by any useful definition) that come to all sorts of wrong conclusions. There will always be someone to say "told you so", no matter how ludicrous their position seemed by the majority at the time -- even if the majority includes most of the scientists; if those scientists are later wrong.
People equate science with truth, and that's simply wrong. Science is a process, a mechanism to expand our knowledge, but it's fallible, and rarely results in absolute truths. As the linked Scott Adams article says, Science is about nudging us towards improvement, and I agree. The public face of science is, unfortunately at times, journalism, government and other, equally human equally (if not more) fallible entities -- but those people did listen to scientists; they didn't just make stuff up (most of the time).
Science has an image problem, though, and it IS self-inflicted. We're coming across as arrogant to the scientifically illiterate, rather than nurturing, and it's turning people away. We label people "deniers" when they're genuinely curious, and they get defensive, and it's all downhill. We get combative and then pretend that it was someone else's misunderstanding when our consensus is wrong. Science is the right approach, but when it loses a popularity contest, particularly in a democracy, it's can get pretty bleak for a while. There's no reason that needs to happen, but denying the problem isn't the answer. We should embrace the dialogue that Adams is a part of here.
Re:Not the fault of science (Score:4, Insightful)
One notable example is milk. There is no scientific study anywhere that shows that milk is necessary or even healthy for adults. Yet milk has become so ingrained in our culture that it's almost become a sign of healthy eating (when it's not). This is largely due to the advertising efforts of the milk industry (which is one of the largest industries in the USA and many other countries). Milk contains saturated fat which has proven negative effects on health (yes, even skim milk has saturated fat). The only good thing about milk I can think of is calcium, but you can (and should) be getting that through other means, such as vegetables.
Most 'nutritional information' you know is a result of industry advertising and is not true.
Re: (Score:3)
>Milk contains saturated fat which has proven negative effects on health
Oh please, keep up.
Saturated fat is exactly the thing that has been demonized, yet hasn't been shown to have negative effects on health. In reality it is the fat that doesn't oxidize and therefore doesn't contribute to atherosclerosis. There are lots of other related facts, but you need to get past your fat-o-phobia before you can move on.
Re: (Score:3)
The amount of fat in milk is how much?
Wow ... to get an noticeable amount of fat into your body, lets say the same amount a bar of chocolate has, you need to drink 20 liters of milk. To calculate that into gallons is left up to you.
Milk is one of the healthiest products in existence, unless you are intolerant to it.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, pretty much everyone who is paying attention to nutritional science is arguing with that.
Yes. I get the sense around here that people need to understand the concept of "confounders" in scientific studies.
Take hypercholesterolemia, for example. For years it's been thought that LDL concentrations in the blood are a risk factor and there have been multiple studies attempting to establish the relationship. The confounder? LDL isn't just floating sludge... it's "packetized". These "packets"/particles can come in varying particle sizes. They didn't think of that when doing the initial studies (over a
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I suggest you check what that actual advice was.
Sugar is a carbohydrate. You are not going to be healthy on a diet of "Twizzlers" even though they are low fat, high carb and vegan-friendly.
Re:Mod parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most GPs aren't scientists. They are basically "meat mechanics". They learn the best practices in their field when they go to school and if they are good they keep up with changes to practices. But they are people too and are still susceptible to falling prey to fads and superstition even if their education provides them some resistance.
Vitamin Testing (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Vitamin Testing (Score:5, Insightful)
When you eat properly, there is no need for any vitamin supplement, period. You can get all vitamins and minerals and whatnot from your food - people have done just that for thousands upon thousands of years. There's no reason why we suddenly can't do that any more.
Re:Vitamin Testing (Score:4, Insightful)
Contrary to your paleo-bullshit, people have been dying, or having their life expectancy significantly shortened, due to nutritional deficiencies for thousands upon thousands of years too. (I.E pellegra, scurvy, goiter, etc.... etc...)
Re: (Score:3)
He did not mention anything about paleo or what ever.
He simply pointed out that extra pills with vitamins are unnecessary as ordinary food already contains vitamins.
Doh! You did not know that? Then my first advice: stop insulting people who know better than you. Finally: get an education. Reading is not that hard.
The problem isn't science (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The problem isn't science (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The problem isn't science (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
"Cartoonist Mistakes Dumbed-Down News for Science" (Score:5, Insightful)
better headline, fixed that for you.
Re:"Cartoonist Mistakes Dumbed-Down News for Scien (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Broscience .. (Score:3)
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.
How science screwed up the fat-heart disease link (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... [wsj.com]
My 5-year rule (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The backwards approach to fitness is the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
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.
100% true (Score:3)
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.
One of my favorites (Score:5, Funny)
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
-- Redd Foxx
Why worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Science has never had great PR (Score:3)
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.
Take a look at my sig. (Score:3)
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.
Scientists aren't trained to give practical advice (Score:3)
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.
Diet and Exercise (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nutrition science isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Nutrition science isn't (Score:3)
The old pyramid was one serving each of meat, vegetables, dairy, and bread. Now recommendations skew towards 50% protein, 35% vegetables, and small amounts of dairy and carbohydrates.
Re: (Score:3)
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 o
Re: (Score:3)
Keep those pee sticks purple!
People gave me a funny look at work today as I ate the very nice steak I had prepared the night before, sans vegetables.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only having trouble figuring out if this post is satire?