October 09, 2007
We take cream in our coffee here...
There's a really interesting piece in the New York Times, Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus. It covers the findings in a new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories
....With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.
But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.
Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied because it couldn’t be reconciled with the low-fat dogma....
This is of course cool for Charlene and I, both of us being low-carbers, and longtime skeptics about low-fat. The reason "the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied" is because, to put it more bluntly, it has not been politically correct to do so. If you follow the subject you soon see that diets line up with politics in the most fascinating way. The big bureaucracies are low-fat and so the left tends to go that way. Low carb diets, like the Atkins Diet, have always been "counter-cultural, and tainted with capitalism—Dr Atkins products are sold for profit.
And doesn't this quote remind you of a certain other "scientific consensus" we've been hearing a lot about lately?...
....It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.Posted by John Weidner at October 9, 2007 08:40 AM
We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.
If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.
Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus....
Well, the food pyramid was probably an improvement over what had come before - a balanced diet is important - it's not like that was wrong, it was just incomplete. The problem is that the theory ossified, and then got applied where it wasn't applicable.
I've lost 20 pounds in the last two months, by the simple combination of exercise (six days a week in the morning - three heavy days, three days of jogging only) and a balanced diet that includes modest portions of pretty much anything. I've tried to mix in more veggies and more fish (which the food pyramid would have told me to do), but I had mashed potatoes last night, lasagna and garlic bread on Saturday, etc...now, maybe I could optimize my weight loss if I went all Atkins, but it seems to me that a balanced diet of modest portions with exercise will, in the long run, be the most effective method out there...
Posted by: Ethan Hahn at October 9, 2007 09:54 AMIt only makes sense to go Atkins if you are in a good position to control your diet. Otherwise you will end up eating carbs like-it-or-not, and immediately re-gain your weight! It's very hard to do when travelling, for instance, because you don't really know what's in the food in restaurants.
Posted by: John Weidner at October 9, 2007 10:44 AMThe thing is, the older you get, the more your metabolism slows down, and the easier it is to get fat on less food. You have to ramp up your physical activity to make up for this, but of course, the older you get, the more easily you tire...
That being said, I think that portion control and avoidance of pre-made meals would solve most obesity problems. The fat epidemic really started some time in the Eighties. That's when the fast food lifestyle really caught on, and frozen meals (Stouffer's et al) actually started tasting good. Before then tv dinners were usually one very small step above high school cafeteria food, and there wasn't the variety of fast food places we have now, and fast food wasn't all that appetizing. Also people didn't go to restaurants as much -- they were a special treat, or something one indulged in only on vacations; only rich people could afford to eat out every day. As well, restaurant meals started to get larger and larger until today at most places except real haute cuisine restaurants (which stick to older culinary practices) individual diners can expect to be served what would once have been considered enough food for three dinners.
When people restricted themselves to three meals per day, and those cooked and eaten at home, and when the "no snacks between meals" was still a fully enforced rule, there weren't as many fat people, and there certainly weren't as many fat kids. I remember really having to beg for one single candy bar or a few chips between meal times; today's parents seem to be operating under the impression that if they don't stuff their kids with food at all times they are bad parents.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at October 10, 2007 12:46 PMGolly, you're all commenting on DIETS? I fully expected commenters to mention the obvious connection of the "overwhelming consensus" phenomenon in regards to "Global Warming." You got a hint of that in the post, didn't you?
THAT's what I noticed immediately upon reading the piece in the Times itself. Ironic it should be in the N.Y. Times, don't you think?
Time and time and time again for decades now we have been mislead about "studies" and "scientific evidence" that required us to spend enormous amounts of time and money for no good reason at all. I love science and the scientific method. I really wish that scientists as a group would show it as much respect as I do, and also have the "group courage" to tell politicians, activists, and journalists to "stuff it" if those olks tried to fit incomplete data to fit their distorted narratives. I'm not holding my breath.
Golly, you're all commenting on DIETS? I fully expected commenters to mention the obvious connection of the "overwhelming consensus" phenomenon in regards to "Global Warming." You got a hint of that in the post, didn't you?
Hang out around John's blog for a while, and it'll be obvious that we all got that, and just didn't have much to add to it...this isn't a new topic for him, by any means!
