Thursday, August 27, 2015

A Substitute for Intellectual Curiosity.

 "..a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded."--Dwight Eisenhower



The Mayo Clinic Proceedings of July, 2015 is devoted to nutritional and obesity research. This is from the abstract:

"Herein, we present evidence that M-BMs are fundamentally and fatally flawed owing to well-established scientific facts and analytic truths. First, the assumption that human memory can provide accurate or precise reproductions of past ingestive behavior is indisputably false. Second, M-BMs require participants to submit to protocols that mimic procedures known to induce false recall. Third, the subjective (ie, not publicly accessible) mental phenomena (ie, memories) from which M-BM data are derived cannot be independently observed, quantified, or falsified; as such, these data are pseudoscientific and inadmissible in scientific research."
(N.B. M-BMs means memory-based dietary assessments)

The summary is that the conclusions drawn by the federal government’s controversial Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) rest on fatally flawed assumptions about unusable data and, as such, are scientifically useless. This information is significant. The anxiety over fat and cholesterol has lead to banning whole milk from schools and the rise of non or low fast yogurt. It is why doctors and nutritionists wanted to put everyone on a low-fat diet and why so many restaurants feature a “heart healthy” section of low-fat foods. It’s why restaurant foods are fried in vegetable oils.  It’s why hospitals feed low-fat to patients, including diabetics.
But more important, it has given us false hope, the belief that we can influence our health in a way the researchers and our esteemed government must have known was untrue.
Or both are inept and/or corrupt.

In a recent interview with researcher Edward Archer, he said this: “The government funded researchers control the field by funding only those researchers that use the same flawed methods; they stifle progress by rejecting contradictory evidence, and immediately impugn the integrity and competence of researcher who disagree.”

This is--or should be--very unsettling.

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