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posted by janrinok on Wednesday February 04 2015, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-never-close-my-eyes-again dept.

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame writes on his blog that science's biggest fail of all time is 'everything about diet and fitness':

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 it has a credibility issue that it earned. "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?"

 
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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday February 04 2015, @06:31PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 04 2015, @06:31PM (#141252) Homepage Journal

    Some of the problems have to do with capitalist culture.

    Consider that the reason the US has the First Amendment separation of church and state is not because we are officially atheist, as I understand is the case in France, but because the early colonies were settled by a bunch of religious crazies.

    We have the separation of church and state so all the various varieties of, uh, "Christians" don't slaughter each other.

    It's quite common for religions to have quite specific dietary rules. My father often pointed out to me that kosher food made a whole lot of sense when one did not understand food-borne diseases: anything that will kill a pig will kill a human, as our anatomies are so similar.

    Quite commonly american food is made by big businesses. It's been quite a long time since we had many family farms; now it's far more common for farms to be owned by large businesses; for example my uncle - quite a wealthy man - was the VP of Accounting for Boswell Cotton Corporation.

    A lot of what the US government tells us to eat, is a combination of what some religion says we should eat, and what some business would profit by were we to eat it.

    Finally, I have a close friend who is a nutritionist. She's not a dietician - she's a research biologist who studies nutrition in a laboratory, with electron microscopes, chemicals and the like. She tells me that nutrition is quite a lot more complex than most people realize.

    But we have the problem that were we to educate young people one what true, proper nutrition really is, they'd likely not understand it, and would not know how to feed their children.

    Have a look at the nutrition information on a bottle of soymilk. I regard it as quite nutritious, however according to the label, it has very little nutrition.

    Dark chocolate is clinically demonstrated to be good for your heart. The discovery of that led to Mars Chocolate funding the research required to figure how to make candy bars that retained the beneficial cocoa flavonoids. Have a look at http://www.cocoapro.com/ [cocoapro.com]

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:00PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:00PM (#141264)

    Have a look at the nutrition information on a bottle of soymilk. I regard it as quite nutritious, however according to the label, it has very little nutrition.

    From a paleo interpretation, unless you arrived on a spaceship, no one in your evolutionary ancestry ever any thing that utterly weird. If its safe, its accidentally safe, and if its nutritious, its accidentally nutritious. It may very well be safe and nutritious, however unlikely it sounds based on random luck. The best I can say for it is observationally it doesn't kill people as fast as hemlockmilk would kill em. Its a good example of "some business would profit by were we to eat it.", little other is known about it for sure.

    Chocolate is at least as weird of a product, but if you keep consumption levels down to flavoring or treat or supplement, it can't hurt much even if it is bad. I ate probably a quarter cup of corn syrup in the form of a pecan pie slice last christmas, thats cool, the problem with hfcs isn't that it exists, but that the average american eats about 30-40 pounds per year. As long as I keep it to a couple spoonfuls per year, its not going to be able to kill me... probably. Beer's an even better analogy, a six pack lasts me like six months, there's no way that level of intake can kill me or even screw up my diet, but those folks who drink 12 to 24 beers a day don't have long to live, generally.

    One interesting way to work on diets might be to list a years intake by mass or calorie and only worry about the big stuff.

    • (Score: 1) by MuadDib on Wednesday February 04 2015, @08:55PM

      by MuadDib (4439) on Wednesday February 04 2015, @08:55PM (#141308)

      Many other cultures have been eating soy products, especially tofu, for centuries if not millennia.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:05PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:05PM (#141332)

        And thats the problem, that being extremely evolutionarily recent.

        Compare to something like the changes due to fire/cooking which are just kinda getting completely figured out / solved in the teeth and intestine lengths and ratios, and thats orders of magnitude longer ago than soy cultivation. Its pretty recent. Apparently the wisdom tooth thing still hasn't been evolutionarily figured out WRT cooked food jaw shape.

        And thats before getting into the legendary dietary differences between humans from different geographic areas, most of humanity genetically can't deal very well with dairy products, and others have highly varying responses to ethanol metabolism.

        One interesting point of concern is soy allergy is one of the top ten or so most common food allergies, something like 6 to 8 percent of the population has an antibody response at one point or another, one level or another. Here's an interesting article:

        http://jn.nutrition.org/content/134/5/1213S.full [nutrition.org]

        Calling something food when you know it'll make maybe 7% of the population sick to one level or another is kind of weird. Its right up there with Olestra. Obviously its regional, anyone in asia who gets sick from soy died of starvation millennia ago, the survivors can handle it. Kind of like all my ancestors figured out the whole lactose digestion thing or starved before having kids, so unlike them I can handle dairy much better than they can.