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Does anyone else remember when the Center for Science in The Public Interest pressured everyone to move away from saturated fats to trans fats? The people lead
by LordKano 11y ago
Does anyone else remember when the Center for Science in The Public Interest pressured everyone to move away from saturated fats to trans fats?
The people leading the charge on this are the primary reason why we went to trans fats in the first place!
- redblacktree 11y agoWhoops.
- ams6110 11y agoExactly. I have really lost faith in the FDA. Saturated fat bad. Trans fat good. Trans fat now VERY bad. Saturated fat actually OK. Eggs bad. Eggs good. Coffeee bad. Coffee good. Sacharrine causes cancer. Sacharrine OK. Meat bad (especially red meat). Meat good. I now just eat what I want, and don't worry about it unless I start vomiting.
- tkyjonathan 11y agoBe safe and go low-fat whole plant vegan. Statistically, the healthiest option for you.
- drcube 11y agoStatistically, eh? Got a cite?
- pjonesdotca 11y agohere are several http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/dxrates http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/dxrates
- nostrebored 11y agoMost of which are terrible. Population studies are generally awful, especially when you're using the population of people on a restrictive diet vs. people eating whatever the hell they want to. Especially when you consider the number of vegans who are actually active vs. the rest of the population, which is quite substantial in my anecdotal experience. I think what you can see from these studies is that avoiding processed foods, being a healthy weight, and being active are good for you. Also, what about the studies showing the children of vegan (it might even be vegetarian, can't recall) mothers have lower birth weights, IQs, and are shorter than the general population? What about the rates of B-Vitamin anemia? I think that the benefits of being a vegan are the benefits of being concerned with your health. I'd be interested to see a comparison between an equally fastidious group of meat eaters.
- gadders 11y agoOnly if you want to look emaciated.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoJokes on you. I know powerlifters who are deadlifting hundreds of lbs, and they only consume a vegan plant-based diet (google "vegan powerlifting"). Animal proteins are an inefficient method of consuming nutrients. You may like meat, but its not efficient, and data has shown that it can cause cancer in your GI tract given enough time. EDIT: There's a reason Soylent is vegan; not to appease animal lovers, but because its healthier for you and more efficient. [1] http://blog.soylent.com/post/102285900727/announcing-soylent-1-2-development-of-the-soylent http://blog.soylent.com/post/102285900727/announcing-soylent...
- stinos 11y agoAnimal proteins are an inefficient method of consuming nutrients Care to explain why exactly? I've always been thaught - ok, doesn't mean it's correct, or related, which is why I'm asking - that one difference between meat and vegetable eaters is the length of the large/small intestines: shorter for 'pure' meat eaters like cats, longer for herbivores like cows. And somewhere in the middle for humans as they are considered omnivores. Reason for this would be that it takes longer to digest/break down plants, which I assume is done by the intestines to extract nutrients for it?
- toomuchtodo 11y agohttp://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb2/pb2ch9_ss4 http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb2/pb2ch9_ss4
- gadders 11y agoEfficient how? You could make an argument that eating meat is a less efficient use of resources such as land and water, but I doubt that eating a whole meat-protein full of the correct amino acids is less efficient than eating a combination of vegetable proteins to get the same effect. And yes, you do get vegan powerlifters, but they are very much the minority and an outlier.
- nsxwolf 11y agoEven if what you say is true, quality of life must still be balanced with quantity of life. Your food is disgusting, full stop. I am not interested in living without food that tastes good.
- LordKano 11y agoIt's completely subjective. Some people like the taste. If someone wants to go full vegan, good for them. Just don't try to force that choice on everyone.
- nsxwolf 11y agoObviously no one short of a tyrant can actually force veganism on anyone, but vegans saying "eat like me or die" is close enough.
- LordKano 11y agoOh, there are "ethical vegans" who would, if they could get a 51% majority, make the consumption of meat illegal. They're the "meat is murder!!!!" types. I don't have a problem with the "I have made a personal choice to not eat animal products" type of people.
- jdhawk 11y ago> Just don't try to force that choice on everyone. You're missing one of the primary tenets of being a vegan
- stinos 11y agoMaybe you just never had a properly cooked vegan meal. Seriously, tastes may differ, but it's simply hard to believe there is no vegan food out there at all that you would not like. (for the record, I do eat meat)
- fl0wenol 11y agoMaybe you can make really good vegan dishes, but for myself there is no competition for animal fat for many existing types of cuisine, both in the preparation stage and in the flavor/mouthfeel of the final product. I'd even say there's legitimate reasons to use MSG for certain preparations and flavors. Sparingly, mind you.
- smtddr 11y agoMeh, I think the whole low/non-fat trend is also a scam.... but who knows. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/why-eating-a-low-fat-diet_b_634011.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/why-eating-a-low... http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2013/07/02/lowfat-milk-may-not-be-as-healthy-as-we-thought-says-harvard-expert/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2013/07/02/lowfat-...
- Shivetya 11y agoyet humans supposedly increased in brain size by eating meats, oh it reduced stomach sizes too. I tend to low fat vegetarian, though dairy is kept, but even I won't forgo meat all year round. It is silly to do so. The key as with all foods is moderation http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/04/eating-meat-led-to-smaller-stomachs-bigger-brains/ http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/04/eating-meat-le...
- reagency 11y agoYes, whole meat is a great choice when you live in Savannah and there is no produce besides grass. Not hamburgers and bacon. For the rest of us, there are vegetables and grains.
- ams6110 11y agoDisagree. Humans have always been omnivores.
- stephengillie 11y agoBread is simultaneously healthy and not healthy.
- CWuestefeld 11y agoDon't forget salt and sodium. The gov't is still trying to work up sodium regulations, while the scientific evidence supporting it withers and dries up (kinda like a salted slug)
- jimrandomh 11y agoIt's not so much that it's drying up, as that the illusion of there ever having been evidence is more and more widely disbelieved. These nutrition fads aren't actually coming from science; they're coming from the intermediaries that claim to be telling us what science has found, but which are actually just making stuff up.
- digikata 11y agoIIRC, Eggs went from bad to good due to changes in industry accepted feed. Not due to misapplied science (well maybe misapplied at the point of the high-cholesterol feed construction). I don't think is is the best link, but it was quickly available: http://www.nutraceuticalsworld.com/contents/view_online-exclusives/2011-09-19/chicken-feed-eggs-cholesterol http://www.nutraceuticalsworld.com/contents/view_online-excl... Really it points out the disconnect between industrial food production vs human health and, in this case, a nice story about how one disconnect was resolved.
- sliverstorm 11y agoWhat do you expect them to do? Evidence at the time suggested food X was bad. Should they spend another fifty years running trials to make sure, discover it was indeed killing people, and yes we knew about this fifty years ago sorry we didn't say anything sooner? It's a tough position and I sympathize with them. I suspect no matter how soon they do or don't pull the trigger, hordes of people will wind up incensed.
- glenra 11y agoI expect them to tell people about it, continue studying the matter, and ultimately let people make their own decisions. Or as an intermediate step: require warning labels or warning signs. If we let companies sell cigarettes with warnings, we should let companies sell donuts and movie popcorn with similar warnings. The problem with going from no information to full ban is that sometimes (quite often) the health authorities are wrong. Let us make our own decisions about what tiny statistical risks we want to take in exchange for what marginal improvement in cost and/or tastiness some ingredient enables. If everybody agrees it's not worth the cost, the outcome will be the same as a ban. If only some people think it isn't, labels will let those people avoid that risk without inflicting their standards on the rest of us.
- tomjen3 11y agoEverything causes cancer. Somehow we are okay with this level of scientific knowledge.
- pbreit 11y agoEating whole foods in moderation works pretty well.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoNot too long ago Carl Sagan and others were on TV breathlessly begging people to worry about global cooling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1970s_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1970s_awareness http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/01/global-cooling-compilation/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/01/global-cooling-compila... Obviously, research changes and consensus changes. Being wrong in the past doesn't mean you're wrong today. Or being right in the past doesn't mean you're right today.
- LordKano 11y agoThat's precisely why science needs to continue for its own sake and not as a tool to push political agendas. Just think how bad things would be if someone had taken that 70s era belief in global cooling and used it as a justification to require us to dump more CO2 into the atmosphere to mitigate it.
- carapat_virulat 11y agoThe thing is, there is no guarantee that by doing nothing things will be better than by doing something. We no longer believe than nature is somehow an eternal system that humans disturb. We know there have been huge catastrophes before without any kind of human intervention. The only good thing about doing nothing in principle is that when something bad happens there's nobody to blame. Of course it may be the case that we have good reasons to believe that doing nothing is always safer than doing something, but we need some data and some models to support that belief, it's not enough holding it a priori just because many people still believe in "Mother Earth", even though they consider that "Father God" is dead.
- anon1385 11y ago>Not too long ago Carl Sagan and others were on TV breathlessly begging people to worry about global cooling. No he wasn't: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/07/28/if-you-wish-to-make-up-facts-from-scratch/183472 http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/07/28/if-you-wish-to-make-... There was never a widespread consensus about global cooling: >A 2008 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society actually reviewed the climate research published in the 70s and concluded that "global cooling was never more than a minor aspect of the scientific climate change literature of the era, let alone the scientific consensus" and "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then." WUWT is a climate change denial site run by conspiracy theorists. It's not a good place to get facts about anything.
- jerf 11y agoI actually think this is not just a sort of wild accusation... it's a really important point. Why should I take the new rules seriously when the old rules were so, so very wrong? I do not have an unmeetable standard... a clear, direct apology explicitly stating that the previous standard was the result of bad process, combined with clear statements of what is being done to improve the process and ensure this doesn't happen again would be fine. In the meantime, though, I will not permit these people to just sort of tip-toe away from what they have (collectively) done to us, nor am I particularly impressed by efforts to change the consensus at a speed that to my eyes appears carefully calculated to ensure that nobody ever actually has to apologize, or even admit that they were wrong. In other words, at a speed that clearly indicates they're perfectly fine with millions more dying of preventable diseases rather than admit clearly that they were wrong. Unsurprisingly, I'm not inclined to account that as "virtue", nor to pay very much attention to what they have to say now. If you care about your health, ignore the government standards and do the research to build your own consensus based on the latest science coming out, which is in ever-greater dissonance with the decades-old "official" consensus. Don't wait for our political leadership to calculate how they can move without ever having to admit fault! (Yeah, I'm pissed about this. If the nutritional consensus forced on us for decades really is wrong and really is, as I rather suspect, the primary cause of the obesity epidemic, this is, fully literally, Nazi-scale evil unleashed on the world. Millions of lives cut short, millions upon millions more with their quality-of-life trashed. I can personally name names for both those categories; the latter category includes damned near my entire immediate family, and they're working pretty hard on getting moved into the first one, and I simply can't convince them of the real problems with the entire authority system for their entire lives telling them something else. It would put the US government right up there on the 20th century death toll list... and that is a hard list to get on to because the competition is quite stiff! Every day they dither around trying to figure out how not to have to admit fault is that much worse.)
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI'm particularly impressed with the force of this announcement - scientists haven't reached a consensus that trans fats are safe. That's it? That justifies a ban? Sounds like they're hedging their words now, so when they're inevitably wrong again they can blame 'the scientists'.
- vermooten 11y agoYou scoring points against the Center??
- lmkg 11y agoYeah, that's how science works. We start from a position of ignorance, and we incrementally gain new pieces of knowledge. Years ago, we learned about the health risks of saturated fats and moved away from them. More recently, we learned about the risks of trans fats and are now moving away from them. The people at the Center for whatever are updating their position based on the latest findings rather than sticking to outdated facts that have been disproven. I wish more policy-makers would do that. Our knowledge and understanding of the totality of nutrition and health is still pretty small, in part because there are lots of interacting components and because many aspects of nutrition are correlated with ethnicity and lifestyle. Nonetheless, it has been demonstrated that trans fats are bad for your health, independent of other factors. We shouldn't keep consuming them just because science didn't manage to uncover this fact until recently.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- anon1385 11y ago>And for some reason, the new truth is usually the old position of ignorance. I doubt it's 'usual'. It's just more obvious and widely publicised (often for political reasons from people who don't want any regulation at all). There are plenty of times when the initial position was right and doesn't get changed.
- jimrandomh 11y agoNo, this has never been anything but non-scientists using science's name dishonorably. There has been and continues to be a large mismatch between what primary source studies say and what is reaching the public.
- ams6110 11y agoBut they were 180-degrees wrong on trans fats. They were touted as a healthy replacement for saturated fat. A fundamental tennent of all heath care/policy is "first, do no harm." If you change or do nothing, people are no worse off than they were to begin with. If you want to change something, you better be damn sure you aren't making matters worse.
- quadyeast 11y agoMargarine was the healthy alternative. The damage done to the American public's arteries must be immense.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- madaxe_again 11y agoAlso drove the demise of the great whales. Most of their blubber was used to make margarine.
- madaxe_again 11y agoSource, as I can only assume downvotes because folks think this is bullshit: http://www.scran.ac.uk/packs/exhibitions/learning_materials/webs/40/margarine.htm http://www.scran.ac.uk/packs/exhibitions/learning_materials/...
- madaxe_again 11y agoAlso drove the demise of the great whales. Most of their blubber was used to make margarine.
- hackuser 11y agoI don't remember. Is there some evidence? I ask because it's popular to claim that the results of scientific research are unreliable, but usually, IMHO, upon investigation those claims are wrong. Either they are conflating the results of one study with settled science, or conflating some popular unscientific rumor with real science. Also, why focus on the Center for Science in The Public Interest? Who are they?
- guelo 11y agoNo. Nobody remembers a 25 year old lobbying campaign by a tiny nonprofit. I'm sure whatever propaganda outfit you got that info from paid researchers many hours to dig that one up.
- LordKano 11y agoI'm old enough to remember it. I saw the news reports. I heard about it on the radio. No researchers were necessary to access my memory.