The best Doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet and Dr. Merryman.
–Jonathan Swift
Did you see the exciting news? Obesity is now a disease! O Happy Day! Our problems are solved.
Category: bad science
Pardon Me; Your Bias is Showing 2
I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
― Michael Crichton
In the previous post I got all worked up over a news article claiming that eating red meat raises the risk of developing diabetes. I may still be slightly worked up, so you might want to go have some chocolate and get back to me tomorrow.
The article was biased from the outset, was not a real “study” at all, relied on notoriously inaccurate data, and ignored important variables altogether. Not to mention that no hypothesis was formed for the purpose of testing and truth-finding. No, we skipped that inconvenient step completely and just jumped to calling it a full-fledged theory and telling everyone how to eat based upon it.
Continue reading Pardon Me; Your Bias is Showing 2
Pardon Me; Your Bias is Showing 1
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
–Konrad Lorenz
It’s science today, folks. If you want to run screaming for the door, now’s the time.
I noticed two headlines in the news today. One illustrates total bias in the way something is reported; the other shows proper scientific reporting of a finding that may generate a hypothesis worth looking at. The first is designed to frighten you, the second is designed to inform you.
Meow Chow
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.
― Garrison Keillor
Last week the Roommate’s colleague rescued some kittens out of the trash. The poor little things were so tiny that anyone could see they were way too small to be taken from their mother. The lady had heard them crying in the dumpster.
She pulled the pathetic things out of the garbage. The garbage was behind the local restaurant…which didn’t bode well for Mother, I should say.
Paging Dr. Oz…
Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory—let the theory go. ― Agatha Christie
“Paging Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz to the ER, stat.”
Nurse, what’s wrong?
Doctor, thank goodness you’re here. One of your patients is doing very poorly.
Oh no! Which one?
Lipid H. Po. Thesis
NO!
ຕີເນດ
One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink.
– Marco Polo
I’m going to talk for a little bit about the glories of the coconut. Feel free to turn away at this point.
I never grew up eating them. East Tennessee is remarkably free of coconut trees. I saw some in China when I moved there, but I didn’t know much about them, didn’t know how to open them, and didn’t really bother looking into it.
Then in the course of studying up on my high fat, moderate protein diet, I kept running across coconuts and coconut oils. Lots of people swear by it for energy, for skin care, as a cancer cure, as an HIV cure, for curing the plague, for regrowing limbs, etc. Some of the claims were so far fetched that I didn’t pay much attention to this little fruit.
But I did note in my reading that some of the people groups whose traditional diets involved very high levels of saturated fat–and yet who did not have heart disease, obesity, diabetes, or cancer–got their saturated fat from a daily diet of coconuts rather than seals or cattle. The Tokelauan diet in particular was over 50% fat, most of it saturated. If you look at the very end of the study I linked to, you see that when the Tokelauans migrated to New Zealand their overall and saturated fat intakes sharply declined: and then they started developing arteriosclerosis.
Calories In, Calories Out
If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If you’re not familiar with the term “calories in, calories out,” or CICO, it refers to the dearly held belief that somehow the laws of thermodynamics demand that if we eat X number of calories (energy in) and expend Y number of calories (energy out) that our weight will change by Z according to how much we over- or under- ate our caloric needs. This formula is trotted out as the ultimate answer for obesity.
And it’s idiotic.
The China Study
China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.
–Charles de Gaulle
And that’s about the quality of the information we can glean from The China Study.
The China Study is a book by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell that purportedly proves without a doubt that the eating of animal foods causes all the chronic diseases of civilization, like heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. It’s supposedly based on the results of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project which was, interestingly enough, directed by T. Colin Campbell and involved China, Cornell, and Oxford. As you can probably guess, the study followed Chinese people in rural areas of China and recorded what they say they ate, when they got sick, and how they died.
And The China Study is pretty much the “inspired by actual events,” made-for-TV movie version of the China-Cornell-Oxford project.
Now if you haven’t heard of this book, you obviously don’t have any vegan friends because this is their favorite thing in the world besides tofu. This proves, proves mind you, that if you get cancer it is entirely your own fault for insisting on eating chicken.
Criminal Negligence
That’s not a lie. It’s a terminological inexactitude.
–Alexander Haig
If we hadn’t all been fed a bunch of never-proved hypotheses about fat, calories and exercise as incontrovertible fact; by people who thought we were too stupid to be healthy and wanted to stick their big noses in and tell everyone else what to do, we would never have ended up with something like this:
She seems like a sweet lady, and I’m sure she thinks she’s helping people. But this isn’t useful, it could be dangerous–especially for large people–and she didn’t get thin doing it. She was already thin and is active because she’s thin. She’s not thin because she’s active.
Dare I say it? If God had meant us to prance like horses, He would have given us four legs. We’re not meant to eat like horses, either. Put down that grass drink and go grill up a steak.
Plato says he’s hungry
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Insanity
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
–Albert Einstein
I woke up this morning to see similar headlines blasted all over the web. I would love to quote it for you, but I just can’t decide which particular headline to use.
The upshot of all the headlines is that the FDA has finally approved a new obesity drug, Belviq, for sale in the USA. And there are so many things to mock here that my head is swimming. It’s like that time I got dragged to go “fishing” at a fish farm. The pond was about 3 feet deep, 20 feet widem and 10 feet long and contained approximately 1,546,453 fish.
You could just put on your apron, grab one with your bbq tongs, and stick it right on the grill.
Ask Me How It Happened 