No real gentleman weighs more than 300 pounds.
–William Howard Taft
It’s been all over the news the last few days: William Howard Taft, our 27th president and later supreme court justice, struggled with his weight just like you and me, the lowly peons, do.
It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
–Thomas Sowell
A little insanity is good early in the morning. It keeps you young. It revives your zest for life. When I was staying with Brother 4 a few weeks ago, their 1-year-old provided that for me in the form of various games such as “Crazy Head.”
Now that I’m away from their place, I am forced to search for insanity in the news. Thankfully, it’s not hard to find. I was assaulted by an insane article a little bit ago in Time. The gist of the article is a common one:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
Fat is not the problem. If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
–Dr. Walter Willett
I’d say the biggest of all questions I get is an objection to the amount of fat I eat. I totally understand this: even if you aren’t paying attention you still can’t help but have noticed that it’s blamed for all society’s ills.
Ask Me How It Happened 