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>All of your questions are actually unanswerable with certainty from the current state of nutritional science if you replace the word 'vitamin' with 'nutrient'.
by ralfn 9y ago
>All of your questions are actually unanswerable with certainty from the current state of nutritional science if you replace the word 'vitamin' with 'nutrient'.
Well, my questions were open ended in nature. "We don't know" would be a perfectly objective thing to say about a lot of stuff.
But even if there are very few 'confirmed' food facts (i.e. we dont know anything), that does not exclude the possibility that there are many 'rejected' food beliefs, since those statements are not open questions.
For example: many people belief that the more vitamins they eat the healthier they get. Every scientific experiment falsified this statement! That doesn't mean we know what makes people healthy, but we can still know that 'health is a proportional relationship to vitamin intake' is a bullshit belief not backed up by any experiment.
Science can and has rejected hypotheses, without the requirement that they replace it with anything. "We don't know" is perfectly acceptable. "Drink this high vitamin juice, it will make your life last longer" means the person uttering those words is either a fraud or an idiot.
- smallnamespace 9y agoAlthough going to the other extreme and equating truth with scientific verification is also not a helpful belief system. There are plenty of things that are true that haven't been subject to rigorous, peer-reviewed scrutiny, because of the lack of practicality or the cost associated with it.
- narrowrail 9y agoI realize this is an argument from authority, but it still holds sway with me: My cell bio professor (M.D./Ph.D from Harvard) used to emphasize often the fact that 90% of vitamins end up in your toilet. Not a crowd-pleasing thought, apparently.
- dragonwriter 9y agoMany vitamins function as catalysts rather than (or in addition to) functioning ad reaction participants, so even if 100% passed out without undergoing any chemical change, they could still be useful. The statement may not be inaccurate (I don't know what the real number is), but it's something of a non-sequitur in the discussion of whether vitamins are useful, or of whether vitamin supplements are useful.