Science writer Gary Taubes has a knack for subverting conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, he published a groundbreaking feature article in The New York Times Magazine arguing that decades' worth of government-approved nutritional advice was flat-out wrong, ideologically motivated, and contributing to rising rates of obesity and diabetes. Traditional dieting guidance attacking fatty food and praising carbohydrates, he wrote, was based on "a big fat lie." – The Man Who Hated Carbs Before It Was Cool
Of course Dr. Atkins had been saying essentially the same thing for 30 years before Taubes wrote his article for the NYT. But Dr. Atkins was considered an outsider in the AMA community. But Dr. Robert Atkins had the last laugh; looks like he was right about the ill effects of sugar and carbs all along. But since “good carb” science was settled, and he wasn’t deferential to the rest of the medical community that disagreed with him and because he wasn’t always polite he was ridiculed and viciously attacked personally. His nutrition plan was referred to as a “fad diet” and called “dangerous.”
He reminds me of our President.
But back to Gary Taubes; after Dr. Atkin’s death in 2003 he more or less took over his mantle. He argues that sugar is the root of many health problems. In his book The Case Against Sugar he contends that it got that way thanks to big sugar and big government – the usual suspects, money and politics. As is often the case in these situations science goes by the wayside and facts are what we say facts are. And that brings me around to this week’s Monday Moanin’: the deplorable state of science.
It started when I read an editorial in my local paper on Saturday that laid out this “fact:”
…the debate about whether climate change exists, and whether humans are causing it, has been closed in the scientific community for years — at least 97 percent of scientists say it does exist and we are causing it, according to a 2016 examination of nearly 12,000 research papers.
First of all, debate is NEVER closed in the scientific community. Idiot. Science is an open proposition; things are assumed to be true until they are proven not to be. Scientific inquiry is a continuous process.
Remember, at one time 99% of nutritionists thought this food pyramid was correct.
Until they decided it was upside down. Alas, after a generation of brainwashing it’s hard to convince people to the contrary. Gary Taube, discussing that issue:
In the science in which I was raised—physics and chemistry, the hard sciences—the last thing you want to do is get an assumption accepted into the theory of how things work without rigorously testing it, because then people will build on it and it will grow and infect the whole thought construction.
In a field like nutrition and obesity research, you've now got these enormous institutional dogmas built in that I and others are arguing are simply wrong. How do you get the institutions to change their belief systems?
Nevertheless, the big lie worked so well with nutrition they used the same model for climate “science.” The result is a generation that has been brainwashed by “incontrovertible facts” about global warming that are neither incontrovertible nor facts. And they will go to any lengths to discredit anything that might stand in their way. This is how the sugar industry handled it:
A sugar industry executive (copped) to spending a half-million dollars on research trying to find anything that an artificial sweetener does that's damaging. They would give female rats the equivalent of 60 cans a day of soda and then hope that they would produce rats with birth defects so they could say it was as bad as thalidomide.
All the global warming industry has to do is continue to hide the “data” of its flawed studies while promoting the “results” and continue to claim that 97% of “scientists” agree with their flawed data so the “science” is closed.
When facts are fungible there in no science.
Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!
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