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I have no serious issue with fad-diet pundits and talk show hosts giving bad advice based on extremely weak science. My issue is when the government does this,
by wyager 10y ago
I have no serious issue with fad-diet pundits and talk show hosts giving bad advice based on extremely weak science. My issue is when the government does this, and sets regulations, dietary guidelines, and school lunch rosters based on bunk.
Changing the diets of millions of children at once should require airplane-construction levels of confidence, at the very least. Instead the FDA and FNS are running off low-confidence garbage and acting as if they have an authoritative standing, playing with potentially trillions of dollars of future utility differences spread across tens of millions of schoolchildren.
- noonespecial 10y agoWhat makes it worse is that they spend precious credibility on this nonsense so when something that should be as simple and important as "Polio will $%*& up your whole family, you should get this vaccine" comes along, they've got so little left that otherwise rational people doubt them and are suckered by quacks.
- paulddraper 10y ago> Changing the diets of millions of children at once should require airplane-construction levels of confidence The safe default for airplane construction is not to build it (or not fly it). There is no "safe default" for a diet...it's not like you can stop eating. So they'll serve their best guess of a good school lunch.
- gozur88 10y agoWe have thousands of years of experience in feeding children. Changing a dietary recommendation should require iron-clad evidence.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoFor most of history, children have been fed badly. Its a hyperbolic exaggeration of the first order to claim millennia of experience.
- opportune 10y agoI feed my children only sunshine and they usually stop complaining after 2-4 weeks.
- paulddraper 10y ago> Changing a dietary recommendation What if the original dietary recommendation lacked iron-clad evidence?
- zaphar 10y agoThen goal one is to get some iron-clad evidence so your next recommendation doesn't make it worse. Just because a mistake was made the first time isn't an excuse to make the same mistake a second time.
- paulddraper 10y agoOnce you have iron-clad evidence of a diet better than all other diets, you've reached the end. Congratulations.
- gozur88 10y agoYou don't need to be better than all other diets. You just need to be better than the previous recommendation.
- zaphar 10y agoThis is a red herring argument. You don't need iron-clad evidence of a diet better than all diets. You only need iron-clad evidence for smaller specific recommendations. This doesn't have to be an all or nothing diet. In fact with nutrition it probably can't which means advice should be both well-researched and more nuanced than it currently is. Neither of which changes the point that making recommendation with little to no quality research is more likely to make it worse than make it better and you'd be better off just staying where you are until you understand the problem better.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoHumans have survived and thrived on a wide variety of diets both now and throughout history.
- wyager 10y agoA better (i.e. less risky) approach is to have smaller administrative units (like states) deciding what to feed kids (assuming we can't find some way to not have the government, with its inherent ulterior pork-barrel motives, feeding children). Even if the odds of any given administrative unit making a bad choice are the same, we're at least very unlikely to malnourish every child in every administrative region.
- nradov 10y agoJust to play devil's advocate here, if the old dietary guidelines were bunk and the new replacement guidelines are also bunk then are we any worse off?
- Gustomaximus 10y agoQuite possibly. There will be levels of mis-advice. You may be moving from limited damage fallacy to a seriously damaging one.
- wyager 10y agoNot necessarily, but the point is that the government shouldn't be giving this advice in the first place. We'd be better off if we recognized that there is no objective answer. That will encourage us to follow actually good risk-mitigation strategies like per-state food programs.
- andreareina 10y agoThey're dispensing medical advice[1], so I do have serious issues with fad-diet pundits and talk show hosts giving advice based on weak science. [1] It's medical advice, quack miranda warning[2] be damned [2] http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2008/01/14/quack-miranda-warning/ http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2008/01/14/quac...