Sat, Jun-17-17, 03:54
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Plan: P:E/DDF
Stats: 225/150/169
BF:45%/28%/25%
Progress: 134%
Location: NC
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Gary Taubes was asked to write a comment about the new AHA statement on Fat, and in his usual style, it was expanded into a long and brilliant response about the scientific method. Francis Bacon vs the "Bing Crosby epidemiology"  used by the AHA aboard.
Vegetable oils, (Francis) Bacon, Bing Crosby, and the American Heart Association
The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted and believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that the authority of those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed.
–Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620
... [followed by description of AHA statement and the studies used to defend their long held views on saturated fats. Taubes call this...]
Quote:
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A Scottish cardiologist/epidemiologist described this pseudoscientific methodology to me as “Bing Crosby epidemiology” – i.e., “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.” In short, it’s cherry picking, and it’s how a lawyer builds an argument but not how a scientist works to establish reliable knowledge, which is the goal of the enterprise. Not winning per se, but being right. It’s why I wrote in the epilogue of my first book on nutrition, Good Calories, Bad Calories, that I didn’t consider these people doing research in the nexus of diet, obesity and disease to be real scientists. They don’t want to know the truth; they only wanted to convince maybe themselves and certainly the rest of us that they already do and have all along. While all good science requires making judgments about what evidence is reliable and what isn’t, scientists have to do this keeping in mind that the first principle of good science, now quoting Feynman, “is that you must not fool yourself and you’re the easiest person to fool.” The history of science is littered with failed hypotheses based on selective interpretation of the evidence. Regrettably the AHA experts simply don’t believe that what’s true of far better scientists then themselves, could possibly be true of them as well.
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Entire post at:
http://www.cardiobrief.org/2017/06/...rt-association/
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