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Very interesting how people can all subscribe to an orthodoxy for so long, ignoring evidence to the contrary. Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triu
by Synaesthesia 11y ago
Very interesting how people can all subscribe to an orthodoxy for so long, ignoring evidence to the contrary.
Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
- zongitsrinzler 11y agoI think this is one of the worst thing about humans as a generation. If everyone accepted scientific evidence and research as the truth as soon as it was available I believe we would evolve much faster.
- atemerev 11y agoThere is no such thing as instantly available scientific evidence. Even in physics, hypotheses can take decades to decisively be confirmed or rejected (is string theory true? We don't know. Is holographic universe hypothesis true? Probably no, but we don't know. Is there an event horizon in black holes which light can't ever escape? Hawking recently famously changed his mind and now telling us it might not be). In biology, there is even less certainty and established theories routinely fail to reproduce. Is Central Dogma of Molecular Biology true? How it couldn't be with such a name? Well, no, there is now a lot of evidence against it. And don't even get me started on climate science.
- hypertexthero 11y ago[Planck's Principle][1]: > A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. — Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle
- popmystack 11y agoThat is an incredibly poor understanding of science.
- sjwright 11y agoLikely because it seems so intuitively logical that fat in your body comes from fat in your diet. Want to stop getting fat? Stop eating fat. It seems so obvious, despite being wrong at the fundamental level.
- Smaug123 11y agoAnd yet, as the article doesn't quite point out, eating all the protein you like won't make you more muscular (unless you also do regular strenuous exercise).
- sjwright 11y agoObviously you can't just eat your way to a six pack. If you're trying to make a point worthy of an "and yet" prefix, it's lost on me. You can get fat by eating too much protein. Or too much fat. Intense overeating of any macro-nutrient is a bad idea. The thing is, it's harder (though by no means difficult) to overeat fat or protein. The dangerous thing about carbohydrates is they are by far the easiest to overeat, and may have the greatest health consequences. That's a scary combination.
- Smaug123 11y agoOf course not a six pack, since the primary ingredient for a six pack is an absence of fat. I'm just talking muscle volume here. "And yet" was probably the wrong choice of words; I really meant "Indeed", I think.
- msandford 11y agoThe way I read it, it's poking a hole in the "you are what you eat" adage that people take at face value for "if you eat fat you get fat". By extension of this adage, then, if you eat fat you get fat. If you eat carbs you get starchy, and if you eat protein you get muscley. We know the second two aren't true, but the first one sticks for some reason.
- sndean 11y agoThe paper mentioned in that paragraph titled "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" [1] is pretty interesting. But also sad. Not sure how that problem will be solved... [1] http://www.econ.upf.edu/~fonsrosen/images/planck_complete_12-02-2015.pdf http://www.econ.upf.edu/~fonsrosen/images/planck_complete_12...
- tkyjonathan 11y agoThe problem is that the food industry has been pumping money into research while governments have withdrawn most of it. The whole "butter is good" article in the times was funded by the US dairy industry. Gov funded research still does not agree with it.
- pigpaws 11y agoah, but a LOT of publicly funded research is not freely available... (yet)
- anexprogrammer 11y agoI will take butter every time over margarine and other spreads. Simply on the grounds of how they are made. One is a food, the others entirely chemical processes. Nearly all the butter is bad is funded by the spread industry.
- chillacy 11y agoMargarine's production is more complex but it doesn't seem too wild: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Butter-and-Margarine.html http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Butter-and-Margarine.html Either way the milk is coming from a cow pumped full of hormones and antibiotics.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoAh, perhaps. Neither are allowed in the EU. Hormones not allowed at all, and milk disposed of until antibiotics no longer register in milk after treatment. Fairly recently UK was prosecuted for not checking antibiotic levels adequately.
- mistermann 11y agoI'm of the belief that butter is good (or at least, not bad).
- paulojreis 11y agoYou're quoting a physicist. Nutrition isn't a science as hard as physics. As a given science subject moves away to more complex system (human organisms, social organisms), the notion of light (or the truth) gets rather diffuse. It's harder to define something as the light (or the truth), because phenomena and its causality simply get harder to prove.
- tkyjonathan 11y agoI agree. Biology and Physics are very different fields. Physics - where every action has an equal or opposite reaction. Biology - many many variables where its difficult to measure the effect of one change.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Synaesthesia 11y agoYes that's true but there are still facts that can be established for nutrition or biology etc and I think his statement can still ring true for any type of science. They can all be victims to politics and other human failings. Although possibly more so for the less "hard" sciences as it's harder to prove an assertion. It's just amazing how the point that sugar causes obesity and other harms has been ridiculed for decades but is now starting to be widely accepted. Huge amounts of data were ignored, and now the case is pretty overwhelming.
- paulojreis 11y agoYeah, that's true. My nutritionist-wannabe facet is also mesmerized by this, and I can't avoid preaching this to everyone - try to limit added sugar as much as you can. Use artificial sweeteners if you really need; they may be problematic, yes, but sugar surely is!
- 2muchcoffeeman 11y ago> Use artificial sweeteners if you really need; they may be problematic, yes, but sugar surely is! People have really weird relationships with food, often taking concepts to the extreme. Too much sugar is bad, so limit added sugar intake as much as possible and prefer artificial sweeteners to sugar. Rather than sensibly moderating consumption we've gone from eating far too much of one thing, to trying to eat none of it, and indeed trying to replace it with something completely artificial. Not to sound like one of those "anything that's natural is better for you" people. It's just a lateral move.
- glaberficken 11y agoA very very powerful thing that most of us forget when we start reading all the conflicting evidence about carbs / sugar / fat: You can experiment on yourself for free! Obviously this won't prove how everyone's body works. But it will teach you something very powerful about how your own body works. Go off sugar for 3 months, make your mind and do it, and note the changes in your organism. Or go off carbs totally for a few weeks, and feel what happens to you. etc... Make up your own experiments, the only danger is that you may end up lying to yourself about what you ate, or not be sure about the composition of the stuff you ate...
- notthegov 11y agoExcept your kidneys excrete more electrolytes and water, and it can take weaks to adapt, and theoritically some people will never fully adapt. I would have to drink 1 gram of warm saltwater and my headache would instantly go away. So how you feel is deceptive. If I would drink a Vanilla Latte at Starbucks now, I would get a serious headache...
- glaberficken 11y ago>So how you feel is deceptive. Well, yeah you are right. At some point you will have to read and educate yourself a bit to try and guess what is happening to your body. But as a rule of thumb if you stick to a no sugar habit for 3 months your headaches should not last for more than a few weeks, if they don't subside and you keep feeling "unhealthy" obviously its time to get medical advice, but I argue the same would be true if you were to keep to a sugar heavy "current normal" sort of diet.
- rhinoceraptor 11y agoLite salt is better, it has sodium and potassium.
- notthegov 11y agoNusalt (potassium chloride) tastes like something that will kill you. But I drank it everyday and about 3 grams of salt.
- PepeGomez 11y agoThere is no evidence for what Lustig says. He produced one mediocre paper after multiple attempts. That's it. It's not science. It's just an attempt to distract from the real issue. It started with pet food. Attempts at making plant based foods for dogs and cats initially failed, becuase the animals didn't want to eat these unnatural diets. But a solution was found: the so called "palatants". When they were added to the food, animals ate it. Naturally, somebody thought of using these in human food as well. It didn't work as expected - it turned out they don't work by making the food tastier, they work by disabling the satiety response. Once the palatants get into your bloodstream, you won't feel satisfied no matter how much you eat until your body can get rid of these these chemicals. You may feel that your stomach is completely filled and stop eating, but you won't ever feel that you ate enough. Since adults would get suspicious if they got more hungry, it started with child menus. The idea was the same as with pet food - if children eat a lot of the food, their parents will buy it again. Now we have at least two generations of people who believe it's perfectly normal not to feel satisfied until their stomach can't hold any more food and that staying not obese requires arduous discipline. Our perception of normal weight has changed as well, for pets and human alike. Cats, when fed unaldutered meat eat to stay very skinny, with body shape that many modern guidelines show as "very thin" or "underweight". But many people today think of them as naturally fatty animals. Many of these chemicals are approved food aditives and are listed usually as emuglators, flour conditioners or something similarly inconspicious.
- leshow 11y agoExcept in this case Lustig is not correct and sugar is not some evil food out to make everybody fat and diabetic.
- julietcharlie 11y agoEven with all our rules, science is not exempt from the (un)conscious bias of man- a new scientific truth affects the structure of the group that practices in that field. But according to Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this resistance serves a purpose: "By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core."