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I'm 43 and for the last and a half year I started to have difficulty in learning new subjects. And one day in last February after I finished lunch which include

I'm 43 and for the last and a half year I started to have difficulty in learning new subjects. And one day in last February after I finished lunch which included 2 slices of bread, I decided to solve that problem and began an intensive search on Internet. I read dozens of articles talkin about the bread's bad effects on brain and finally came across Perlmutter's videos on youtube. He was telling not to eat any bread even on breakfast! So the day after I ate no bread even on breakfast and guess what, starting from that day I started to learn new subjects again. I know, not eating any bread leaves a feeling of hunger, it's almost as if I haven't eaten any food. But thats only because I've been eating bread all my life every single day and so the body got very accustomed to it. But after 3 months I also realized that body doesn't need it to feel full. Friends in my vicinity get also disturbed by my saying bread is harmful to the body. But I am myself the evidence that bread is no good for the body.

sukilot 11y ago
Great so I will enjoy bread, and when I turn 80, I will stop eating bread, and enjoy a miraculous recovery of brain function.
kazinator 11y ago
Your personal anecdotal story does not constitute "extraordinary evidence". Your observations are not even gathered in such a way that they could constitute a piece of evidence at all.
- kazinator 11y ago
  For instance, regarding "learning subjects". You believe that some change in eating habits has improved your ability to learn. Does your belief have a rational basis? Subjects (let us call them "topics", to distinguish from "test subjects": people being experimented upon) are not some amorphous substance that you "pour" into your mind; they are all different. You also cannot erase a topic from your mind so you can fairly re-test the pouring after making some change, like diet or whatever. If you have difficulty with a topic X today, you can find the same topic X easier after some passage of time simply because you were exposed to X, and let it "settle in your brain" for a while. There is no way to to have a valid, objective test using the same person and the same topic, where we can determine that the same topic X became easier to learn due to some external factor, like not eating bread. The test is confounded by the subject's prior experience with tackling X: the "after" situation is different from "before" because of prior experience. There is no way we can test different topics X and Y, either. If you have difficulty with learning topic X, and then some external factor changes (like not eating bread), and you have an easier time with topic Y, that doesn't conclusively show anything. The test is confounded by both similarities between X and Y (applicability of the prior experience with tackling X to tackling topic Y) and by their differences (difficulty in Y is unrelated to difficulty in X). If you want to study this properly, you need large, random samples of people. You need control groups as well as test subjects. One group doesn't consume bread (or anything with glutent) and another does. Both learn similar topic in a similar setting. Does the test group show different progress from the control group? Different in a significant way? Even studies done at this level still have confounding problems that give us reason to be skeptical of their claimed results: such as improper sampling methods, lack of proper control over information leakage in experiments, poor accountability for the round-the-clock behavior of human subjects, and abuse of statistical methods to draw unwarranted conclusions. Then there is the poor amount of data you have gathered (if we can call it data). How many times have you quit eating bread and observed the difference on learning or other cognitive tasks? Sounds like you've only done this once. You've done this once, and, what is more, you're biased: prior to the experiment you already believed the "gluten-brain" hypothesis already from your Internet readings, and were looking to confirm it. In honest research, even if we personally believe in a hypothesis, we must work on focus on eliminating the serious objections which tend refute the hypothesis, and not simply look for a few shreds of observations which suggest that it might be true. If we cannot eliminate the objections, we have to face the fact that the hypothesis may not be true after all.

sukilot 11y ago

Great so I will enjoy bread, and when I turn 80, I will stop eating bread, and enjoy a miraculous recovery of brain function.

kazinator 11y ago

Your personal anecdotal story does not constitute "extraordinary evidence". Your observations are not even gathered in such a way that they could constitute a piece of evidence at all.

kazinator 11y ago
For instance, regarding "learning subjects". You believe that some change in eating habits has improved your ability to learn. Does your belief have a rational basis? Subjects (let us call them "topics", to distinguish from "test subjects": people being experimented upon) are not some amorphous substance that you "pour" into your mind; they are all different. You also cannot erase a topic from your mind so you can fairly re-test the pouring after making some change, like diet or whatever. If you have difficulty with a topic X today, you can find the same topic X easier after some passage of time simply because you were exposed to X, and let it "settle in your brain" for a while. There is no way to to have a valid, objective test using the same person and the same topic, where we can determine that the same topic X became easier to learn due to some external factor, like not eating bread. The test is confounded by the subject's prior experience with tackling X: the "after" situation is different from "before" because of prior experience. There is no way we can test different topics X and Y, either. If you have difficulty with learning topic X, and then some external factor changes (like not eating bread), and you have an easier time with topic Y, that doesn't conclusively show anything. The test is confounded by both similarities between X and Y (applicability of the prior experience with tackling X to tackling topic Y) and by their differences (difficulty in Y is unrelated to difficulty in X). If you want to study this properly, you need large, random samples of people. You need control groups as well as test subjects. One group doesn't consume bread (or anything with glutent) and another does. Both learn similar topic in a similar setting. Does the test group show different progress from the control group? Different in a significant way? Even studies done at this level still have confounding problems that give us reason to be skeptical of their claimed results: such as improper sampling methods, lack of proper control over information leakage in experiments, poor accountability for the round-the-clock behavior of human subjects, and abuse of statistical methods to draw unwarranted conclusions. Then there is the poor amount of data you have gathered (if we can call it data). How many times have you quit eating bread and observed the difference on learning or other cognitive tasks? Sounds like you've only done this once. You've done this once, and, what is more, you're biased: prior to the experiment you already believed the "gluten-brain" hypothesis already from your Internet readings, and were looking to confirm it. In honest research, even if we personally believe in a hypothesis, we must work on focus on eliminating the serious objections which tend refute the hypothesis, and not simply look for a few shreds of observations which suggest that it might be true. If we cannot eliminate the objections, we have to face the fact that the hypothesis may not be true after all.