Larry Hoover's nutty ideas.

[Nick]

If you think that calling me a "nut" is a scientific term,
then go right ahead and make yourself happy, because you won't
make yourself healthy the way you are thinking about
nutrition. Read "Tainted Truth" or "Heart Failure" or "The
Cholesterol Conspiracy" or "The XO Factor." I wish I was the
first person to point these fallacies of "modern science" out
to people, but real scientists, (that is, people who are
looking at the big picture, and thinking physiolgically, have
been saying similar things for many years now). Your prized
epidemiological studies are questioned not just by me, but in
"mainstream" publications, such as "Diet and Health" by the
National Research Council. Moreover, what better
epidemiological study can there be than the millions of people
who for thousands of years have eaten diets high in saturated
fatty acids, for example, with almost no incidence of heart
disease? That's what critical thinking skills forces one to
confront - something you appear not to be blessed with much
of. And how healthy are Americans today in light of all your
great epidemiolgical studies? Give me a break - you are the
proverbial "Emperor," strutting about in the nude in front of
your subjects. I'm the little kid who calls you the ugly, fat,
naked guy, and you can't take it - stick to science, not
name-calling, fella. If you look at Americans' diets, you see
things that are unhealthy physiologically, like way too much
refined oil-based omega 6 fatty acid consumption, too much
pasteurized/homogenized dairy, too many calories (which, along
with complete protein, seems to be real bad news), and it's
clear what to avoid if you want to be as healthy as possible.
Everyone must make up his or her own mind, but I will make my
opinion known, and supply the scientific evidence for it. Just
out of curiosity, do you think Gary Taubes is a "nut?" Yes, he
is mistaken in some areas, but nobody is perfect, and he has
pointed out that "fat" does not necessarily make one fat
(again, old news) and that a high fat diet is not necessarily
unhealthy (depends on the fatty acids consumed, along with
other factors, of course). The trick is to figure out the big
picture - the Romans called this ability simplicitas. I teach
the history of science at the college level, so I am in a
different position - I look at the big picture rather than
being wowed by the number of people in a particular
epidemiological study. Since I agree that eating some nuts
(particular ones) is a good idea, I am not disagreeing with
the results of that study, anyway, just the notion that omega
3s have anything to do with it. Americans don't eat black or
English walnuts, and because no other nuts have more than
trace amounts of omega 3, the authors of the study should say
that omega 3s are not responsible, but that magnesium and/or
vitamin E are the reasons. Otherwise, it makes no sense, just
like so many conclusions reached by epidemiological studies.

[Larry Hoov]

"nick" <spam@spam.net> wrote in message
news:JSVu9.7457$mt.1542@news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net...
>Moreover, what better epidemiological study can there be
>than the millions of people who for thousands of years have
>eaten diets
high
> in saturated fatty acids, for example, with almost no
> incidence of heart disease?

Precisely my point, with respect to epidemiology.

>I teach the history of science at the college level, so I am
>in a different position - I look at the big picture rather
>than being
wowed
> by the number of people in a particular
> epidemiological study.

Then you should be totally embarassed to have so misused the
language of science in the thread in which I called you a nut.
I am a contract scientist whose job it is to critique the
methodology, and interpretation, and context of the published
work of fellow scientists. My job *is* the big picture.

> Just out of curiosity, do you think Gary Taubes is a "nut?"

No. He's right on the money. Here are some quotes:

"Indeed, the history of the national conviction that dietary
fat is deadly, and its evolution from hypothesis to dogma, is
one in which politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the
public have played as large a role as the scientists and the
science. It's a story of what can happen when the demands of
public health policy--and the demands of the public for simple
advice--run up against the confusing ambiguity of real
science.... Once politicians, the press, and the public had
decided dietary fat policy, the science was left to catch up."

The problem never was the science, Nick, as I have been
stating in every case in which I have criticized your
conclusions. Picking the wrong correlations, or
misinterpreting their direction, or ignoring the fact that
items may correlate because of a common cause, or by chance,
are not science. The correlation alone is science. Hypotheses
built on correlation are not science, in the strictest sense.

> I am not disagreeing with the results of that study, anyway,
> just the notion that omega 3s have anything to do with it.

Oh, really? More from Gary Taubes:

"This interpretation--that the connection between diet and
health far transcends cholesterol--is also supported by the
single most dramatic diet-heart trial ever conducted: the Lyon
Diet Heart Study, led by Michel de Lorgeril of the French
National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and
published in Circulation in February 1999. The investigators
randomized 605 heart attack survivors, all on
cholesterol-lowering drugs, into two groups. They counseled
one to eat an AHA "prudent diet," very similar to that
recommended for all Americans. They counseled the other to eat
a Mediterraneantype diet, with more bread, cereals, legumes,
beans, vegetables, fruits, and fish and less meat. Total fat
and types of fat differed markedly in the two diets, but the
HDL, LDL, and total cholesterol levels in the two groups
remained virtually identical. Nonetheless, over 4 years of
follow-up, the Mediterranean-diet group had only 14 cardiac
deaths and nonfatal heart attacks compared to 44 for the
"Western-type" diet group. The likely explanation, wrote de
Lorgeril and his colleagues, is that the "protective effects
[of the Mediterranean diet] were not related to serum
concentrations of total, LDL or HDL cholesterol."

"Many researchers find the Lyon data so perplexing that
they're left questioning the methodology of the trial.
Nonetheless, says NIH's Harlan, the data "are very
provocative. They do bring up the issue of whether if we look
only at cholesterol levels we aren't going to miss something
very important." De Lorgeril believes the diet's protective
effect comes primarily from omega-3 fatty acids, found in seed
oils, meat, cereals, green leafy vegetables, and fish, and
from antioxidant compounds, including vitamins, trace
elements, and flavonoids."

And, in conclusion, Taubes makes the same point I've been
making over and over again......Correlations do not prove
hypotheses. They can only disprove them. As a teacher of the
history of science, you should know that science is
falsifiable, never provable.

"One inescapable reality is that death is a trade-off, and so
is diet. "You have to eat something," says epidemiologist Hugh
Tunstall Pedoe of the University of Dundee, U.K., spokesperson
for the 21-nation Monitoring Cardiovascular Disease Project
run by the World Health Organization. "If you eat more of one
thing, you eat a lot less of something else. So for every
theory saying this disease is caused by an excess in x, you
can produce an alternative theory saying it's a deficiency in
y." It would be simple if, say, saturated fats could be cut
from the diet and the calories with it, but that's not the
case. Despite all expectations to the contrary, people tend to
consume the same number of calories despite whatever diet they
try. If they eat less total fat, for instance, they will eat
more carbohydrates and probably less protein, because most
protein comes in foods like meat that also have considerable
amounts of fat."

"This plus-minus problem suggests a different interpretation
for virtually every diet study ever done, including, for
instance, the kind of metabolic-ward studies that originally
demonstrated the ability of saturated fats to raise
cholesterol. If researchers reduce the amount of saturated fat
in the test diet, they have to make up the calories elsewhere.
Do they add polyunsaturated fats, for instance, or add
carbohydrates? A single carbohydrate or mixed carbohydrates?
Do they add green leafy vegetables, or do they add pasta? And
so it goes. "The sky's the limit," says nutritionist Alice
Lichtenstein of Tufts University in Boston. "There are a
million perturbations.""

"These trade-offs also confound the kind of epidemiological
studies that demonized saturated fat from the 1950s onward. In
particular, individuals who eat copious amounts of meat and
dairy products, and plenty of saturated fats in the process,
tend not to eat copious amounts of vegetables and fruits. The
same holds for entire populations. The eastern Finns, for
instance, whose lofty heart disease rates convinced Ancel Keys
and a generation of researchers of the evils of fat, live
within 500 kilometers of the Arctic Circle and rarely see
fresh produce or a green vegetable."

In all your demonizing of epidemiology, you totally ignore
the fact that you depend on it for evidence of your own
hypothesis. Pointing out your fallacies is part of science.
If you'd have paid attention before, I wouldn't have
believed you to be a nut/twit. I'm still waitning for you to
prove me wrong.

Larry