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Unfortunately, bullshit like 'ancient wisdom' has become popular of late thus the parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme/fundamentalist rel

Unfortunately, bullshit like 'ancient wisdom' has become popular of late thus the parents not vaccinating their children, a return to extreme/fundamentalist religiosity, and general dangerous cargo cultness like treating cancer with green tea. That's a false dichotomy. It is possible to look to ancient practices with an eye towards using those as foundations for research. We didn't do that; instead, we let threw out all of that knowledge, the good and the bad, and we have 100 million sick people in the US and over a billion around the world. I'm a firm believer that we can find good answers in science, but we are doing a piss-poor job and have been for 50 years. In fact, I'd go so far to see we've done very little nutritional science over the last 50 years; instead, we've done nutritional marketing in white coats. If people are rejecting what nutritional researchers are saying, they have only themselves to blame. Things have gotten a little better in the last decade, but large organizations like the AHA, ADA, AND, and, of course, the US government, still seem to be stuck following the marketing literature of companies like Conagra and Monsanto rather than the science.

demallien 12y ago
We didn't do that; instead, we let threw out all of that knowledge, the good and the bad, and we have 100 million sick people in the US and over a billion around the world. I'm not sure what you expected scientists to do. None of the "traditional wisdom" was confirmed as true, it all had to be tested and was considered suspect until such testing had taken place. On top of that, traditional diets had shortcomings. It's hard to produce enough calories for today's population to survive, without a larger proportion of those calories coming from grains. Faced with this change in the food landscape, and with faith in traditional wisdoms rightly shaken, nutritionists have been basing their advice on reasoning from first principles, and preliminary results. They got it wrong badly. But at least we were on the path to a better understanding of nutrition. It's been too slow, and nutritionists were not skeptical enough of preliminary results, but lucky us, these are problems science knows how to fix.

demallien 12y ago

We didn't do that; instead, we let threw out all of that knowledge, the good and the bad, and we have 100 million sick people in the US and over a billion around the world. I'm not sure what you expected scientists to do. None of the "traditional wisdom" was confirmed as true, it all had to be tested and was considered suspect until such testing had taken place. On top of that, traditional diets had shortcomings. It's hard to produce enough calories for today's population to survive, without a larger proportion of those calories coming from grains. Faced with this change in the food landscape, and with faith in traditional wisdoms rightly shaken, nutritionists have been basing their advice on reasoning from first principles, and preliminary results. They got it wrong badly. But at least we were on the path to a better understanding of nutrition. It's been too slow, and nutritionists were not skeptical enough of preliminary results, but lucky us, these are problems science knows how to fix.