And Yet Again

I say it so often, I think maybe I should just stop and let it be. 

Correlation is NOT Causation.

Yesterday, this article popped up on my news feed.

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

Once again it is a case of one person crying wolf and everyone else taking up the cry, with little evidence to back it up.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes.

As usual, the proclamation came down from on high - the almighty Surgeon General - and few questioned it.  Of course this was the days before the internet.  This was a time when "studies" could be conducted and "results" touted and the general public had almost no access to the basic information, not to mention the actual study itself and how the conclusion was derived.

...as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

The thing that has bothered me most about all the diet fads over the years is the fact that even though our diets have changed so tremendously over the last 30 years, people are gaining weight, not losing weight.  There is still heart disease, there is an even greater onset of Type 2 diabetes. 

Yet, even with abundant evidence that "diets" tend to make people miserable and tend to fail at a tremendous rate - those who tout their particular type of eating - never seem to see these little annoyances. It's always the failure of the person, not a failure of the diet.

So, how does a faulty theory become "common wisdom"? 

First you get one prominent person with this view in a position to spout his theory to the world as "fact".

The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease “does not stand up to critical examination,” the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report.

Then you get reporters involved - critical thinking is not their specialty:

The association’s report was big news and put Dr. Keys, who died in 2004, on the cover of Time magazine. The magazine devoted four pages to the topic — and just one paragraph noting that Dr. Keys’s diet advice was “still questioned by some researchers.”

Then you get the even more clueless legislators involved (because they get their "scientific background" from news sources):

After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. “McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy,” Mr. Taubes writes...

And thus a mindset is born. 

Anyone see a parallel here with the Environmental Evangelists?  It looks so amazingly similar it's quite disturbing. 

However, we now have the internet and we have people who are able to speak up and be heard - even though they are subject to ridicule for actually voicing a dissenting opinion.

In the case of dietary fat, the lone voice of dissent was a brave soul who was nearly completely ignored, because he was not in the majority.

Mr. Taubes told me he especially admired the iconoclasm of Dr. Edward H. Ahrens Jr., a lipids researcher who spoke out against the McGovern committee’s report. Mr. McGovern subsequently asked him at a hearing to reconcile his skepticism with a survey showing that the low-fat recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of “the world’s leading doctors.”

“Senator McGovern, I recognize the disadvantage of being in the minority,” Dr. Ahrens replied. Then he pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.

Of course Dr. Ahrens was never heard by the general public. Even though he worked in the field and was a true expert.  His problem?  He didn't agree with the "majority".  Yet, instead of putting his arguments out there and letting the "majority" show why they were right and he was wrong - they simply dropped his argument and plunged ahead.

Because they knew they were right.  Now don't you feel so much healthier after reading this? 

Posted by: Teresa in Food and Drink at 12:04 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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