Sun, Oct-14-07, 08:19
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Senior Member
Posts: 109
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Plan: SCD/Lutz/Atkins/PP hybrid
Stats: 115/115/120
BF:
Progress: 0%
Location: SF Bay Area
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Originally Posted by Nancy LC
It also upsets me that this book is so complex because I realize that'll keep people from reading it. But, like Taubes says, part of the entire reason we're in this state of foolishness is because people keep trying to oversimplify and make easy to follow rules rather than understanding that things are complex!
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Both very true, and very good points, Nancy!
The book is chock full of wonderful passages, but Taubes has a relentless tendency to repeat himself by piling on the data and quotes from those scientists who did see the light. The irony though is that for all of his amazing effort at documenting his assertions (one could go to the epilogue and skip all the reading, but the tour de force is worth every second in my view), he still gets labelled as an "Atkins nut" by most reviewers. (Never mind that Atkins was right- he is now used as an epithet by mainstream, I think partly because he is now dead and can't defend himself, and partly because much of the media has declared "Atkins" as a "fad diet" that has come and gone, as indicated by food chains dumping their Atkins-approved menu sections.) It was good to see that both the NY Times and Wall Street Journal recently gave favorable reviews of Taubes, however.
Anyway, here is a favorite Taubes quote of mine, from pages 76-77, where he both quotes and paraphrases Francis Bacon:
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Good science... is rooted in reality, and so it grows and develops, and the evidence grows increasingly more compelling, whereas wishful sciences remain 'stuck fast in their tracks,' or 'rather the reverse, flourishing most under their first authors before going downhill ever since.'
Wishful science eventually devolves to the point where it is kept alive simply by the natural reluctance of its advocates to recognize or acknowledge error, rather than compelling evidence that it is right.
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What is frightening, I find, is that the mainstream tends to assess validity of a theory based on the volume of pubmed studies or citations rather than by an objective assessment of the evidence. On the Charlie Rose episode, for example, Ornish said he will be a convert the day there is published evidence. Well, there is plenty enough published evidence out there already, superior in quality, but it just loses out by sheer volume.
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... {then he describes how that fat is comprised of different types of fats, like monounsaturated, saturated and polyunsaturated, and their effect on LDL and HDL cholesterol}... In sum, perhaps as much as 70 percent of the fat content of a porterhouse steak will improve the relative levels of LDL and HDL cholesterol, compared with what they would be if carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed. The remaining 30 percent will raise LDL cholesterol but will also raise HDL cholesterol and will have an insignificant effect, if any, on the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard or bacon.
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