Americans have always been skeptical of science, mostly because Americans are naturally skeptical about extravagant claims. There has always been a paradox at the center of the American identity. Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.
This turns up in popular culture. Watch old films and you often see scientists presented as overconfident in their abilities, unethical in their pursuit of knowledge or foolish in how they ignore the risks of the work. In popular culture, the scientist is Dr. Frankenstein, a mad scientist, or a naïve fool. These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are not the most trusted people.
Probably the biggest driver of this is medicine. Despite trillions poured into the medical establishment, we do not know that much about the human body. The three main drivers of health and longevity in the West are antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation, not great scientific breakthroughs. We have gotten better at treating things like cancer and heart disease, but we are a long way away from curing them. Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.
This persistent ignorance, however, has not stopped the medical profession from lecturing the public on health. Public health officials have spent the last fifty years anathematizing tobacco use. The claim was it caused cancer. Therefore, eliminating smoking should lower cancer rates. Smoking rates have collapsed in America, but cancer rates have remained the same. Lung cancer rates have not changed much at all, which is where we should have seen the benefit.
Something like smoking is where you see the problem most clearly. Science has figured out why smoking causes emphysema. The ash builds up in the lungs. People figured this out long before we considered medicine a science. We still have no idea what it is in tobacco that causes cancer. There is no honest answer as to what is in cigarettes that gets people hooked on them. People who smoke pipes or vape do not display the same dependency that we see with cigarettes.
Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research, one would think by now that we would have unriddled the whole tobacco puzzle. Even if our libertarian impulse would prevent the banning of tobacco products, we should be able to ban the highly addictive additives put into some of these things. The best we have is nicotine supplements designed to keep the addict hooked on nicotine. You cannot blame people for thinking this is not entirely on the level.
Of course, there has been no bigger blow to the reputation of science than the army of grifters and conmen shouting “trust the science” during Covid. People with impressive credentials in medicine told the public that you must wrap your underwear around your head and stop drinking after a certain hour to prevent Covid. They also invented a vaccine that does not inoculate you against the infection and has some chance of killing you with myocarditis and blood clots.
It is not so much that these cranks and lunatics were all wrong about Covid, but that there have been no consequences. The seriousness of a profession is determined by its willingness to maintain its own standards. No one trusts lawyers because crooked lawyers rarely face punishment. The one profession with less policing of the ranks than the law is medicine. The same people making bizarre claims about Covid will be out doing the same act during the next manufactured crisis.
Another blight on science and related to medicine is the area of nutrition. There are two sides to the nutrition debate. The official side promotes the Standard American Diet, which is designed to boost agribusiness. The other side is the army of grifters and snake oil salesmen pushing supplements and fad diets. Nowhere in American life is the old “heads they win, tails you lose” dynamic more obvious and pernicious than in the realm of human diet and lifestyle.
Start with the official side of things. Everyone reading this has probably got a lecture from their doctor about cutting out fat and salt from the diet. The food pyramid tells us to eat more grain and minimize red meat. Generations of Americans were told to replace butter with margarine. None of this is based on science. In the case of margarine, we know this crackpot idea was pushed by agribusiness looking for a way to make money off what at the time was a waste product.
The response to this oogily-boogily is just as insane. Fad diets used to promise weight loss with minimal sacrifice. Now they come up with nonsense claims about the science of health and fitness. The latest is the carnivore diet, which claims we need to eat like our ancient ancestors. That means just meat and some dairy. Our ancient ancestors did not live on meat and dairy. They ate whatever they could find. More important, for ten thousand years we have survived on bread, not meat.
When someone with “MD” after their name is often seen pushing crackpot ideas like the carnivore diet or some witch’s brew promising to make you smarter, it is no wonder that we call doctors “quacks”. When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.
When you combine the conflation of medicine with science and the shoddy reputation of medicine, it is no wonder that Americans have a negative view of science. How can anyone “trust the science” when the people screaming “trust the science” on social media are both wrong and crazy? Replace the phrase “trust the science” during Covid with “trust the crazy homeless guy who screams at people in the middle of the street”, and you would have the same effect.
That raises the other big problem for science, the expert. America is plagued with people claiming to be experts. Pick any noun and search for it along with the word “expert” and you will find someone claiming to be an expert in the noun. Of course, all nouns are equal in the expertise game, but some nouns are more equal than others, so you will have better luck finding a “racism expert” than someone who can tell you a good way to keep the squirrels out of the attic.
The modern age is now flooded with experts whose expertise ranges from the annoying to the ridiculously impossible. Diversity experts, for example, are not experts in the sense they have a mastery of the subject. They just repeat the magic words from the catechism in a hectoring tone. The extremism expert is claiming to be knowledgeable about a subject that does not exist. Extremism is undefinable. How can you be an expert on something that is no more than a moral signal?
It is no wonder that Americans are skeptical of science. The main ways they interface with science are horribly corrupt and stupid. Granted, medicine is not science and the people claiming to be experts in social causes are crackpots, but they are presented to Americans as the product of science. Science has now become the authority for all things annoying and offensive. If science gives us the carnivore diet and the racism expert, maybe science is more trouble than it is worth.
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To add to my previous comment, funnily enough the only STEM types I saw that were critical of the entire Covid-19 nonsense were engineers. The scientists (PhDs) and physicians all toed the party line like the professional prostitutes that they are.
You make the classic mistake so many people do, Z, of conflating engineers with scientists. “Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.” The people who actually provide the solutions to all practical problems = engineers, not scientists. “These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are… Read more »
As one of the Es in STEM, I too love all these, “scientists,” with their wunder tech that can solve every single problem on Earth as long as they never need to exit a carefully-controlled laboratory environment.
Why do I have the impression that Z-man had a doctor’s appointment today?
“So Mr Z, your BMI is 30 and your BP is 130 over 90. I’m going to put you on statins and blood pressure pills. Cut out the meat, fat, and salt.” 😏
And no more booze!
Do we have the same Doctor? 🤔
M’Lady: “You need to cut back on your drinking. What happens if your doctor tells you no more alcohol?”
Me: “I’m finding a new doctor.” 😏
Of course I abstained from alcohol this week for two whole days and M’Lady asks “Are you OK? Is there something you’re hiding from me? No alcohol for two days?”
Can’t win, don’t try. 🤦♂️
For most of agricultural history, wheat was meant to be made into beer, not bread. Suddenly the story of Cain and Abel can be understood…
So true! As well as the conflict between grazers and farmers (sheep desertify fertile land with overgrazing), it also is shorthand for hunter-gatherers versus wheat growers.
The fat, greasy, bad-smelling wheat grower would show up in the village.
Eventually, the men would sell him their women to get some of that beer.
Lung cancer is not the reason to avoid smoking. Very few smokers get lung cancer. The two reasons are: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – everyone who smokes enough will get it, and many smokers die of it, and arteriosclerosis with resultant strokes, heart attacks, heart failure, and sudden cardiac death – far, far more common in smokers than lung cancer. The number one cause of death in the USA is cardiovascular disease, and the two greatest contributors to cardiovascular disease are diabetes and smoking.
A distinction the SCIENCE! crowd misses and I never hear mentioned is the difference between scientific principles, and the application of these principles to solve a given problem. I work in a physics-based field and see this all of the time. I have participated in working groups to write official governing…documents…to guide the application of certain physics-based principles. It can be maddening to find agreement; around a table are a dozen “experts” on the topic and all understand and agree on the underlying immutable physics (i.e. science), but can all disagree on the way to apply them to achieve the… Read more »
OT:
Speaking of bad political science, the Duran are reporting Cookies Nuland has been promoted to #2 at State.
More interestingly, they are reporting rumors that F the EU is directly in charge of the vaunted counteroffensive.
God help us all.
Standard FAGe (Failed American Globalist Empire) protocol. Fail up to being the next first Woman ________
Doesn’t matter. The conflict is all but over. There simply are no more Ukrainians left to die for their country. The only thing that will prolong it is direct intervention of troops from NATO. Doubtful.
Escalation is the only choice the GAE has
No more Ukranians left to die for Zelensky’s country and Zelensky’s folks only die in large numbers onscreen in unverifiable and improbable ways that you damned well better not question.
usNthem, below: “Now days, they’re mostly just employees of some larger “health care” organization and more frequently, female.” With 40 years’ experience, the medical brother revealed a very interesting pattern. A pattern, about meetings, and priorities. On why when women take over, nothing ever gets done. The head nurse always starts. She explains her feelings on the matter; the others nod. She explains in full. The rest wait, listening; each is allotted their time, because each will get their turn. The next femme. Then the next, and so on, until all are heard. Female timing is different. This cannot be… Read more »
Flagpole?
Pretty sure what your brother is describing is what has been correctly dubbed, “the longhouse.”
Ah! Yes. Yes indeed, quite.
I have 3 doctors in my family, they put padding on the conners of their furniture so the kids won’t bump their heads, they wear masks at church, and when I see them on the holidays I always bring up the fact that the most important course in medical school is the course on billing the patients. They always respond with a uncomfortable laugh and change the subject. Total joke. Low quality people on another quest to grift what’s left of the country.
I’ve had to visit a bunch of doctors recently and it is literally this. The only thing they care about is how and when you are going to pay. I’ve given up on the medical institution.
I had many “friends” in college who were pre-med. None of them particularly clever, though they were particularly full of themselves. Many of them are now practicing physicians (doctor is a term applicable to scholars, not physicians*). They of course all toed the party line when it came to Covid-19. I even had to argue with a few of them on Facebook. They did not enjoy having their authority challenged. “Friends” cut from my life, Facebook deleted. I’ve never really understood the especially American adoration physicians enjoy, considering they’re quite dim-witted. But then again, if I presume most Americans are… Read more »
I feel the same way about medicine and doctors that most people feel about lawyers and the law profession. Medicine is not a legitimate science or technical discipline. As such, it is largely fraud. The difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers do not have a legal monopoly on the practice of law. No where is the fraud of medicine more evident than with vaccines. The medical profession claims that vaccines are “safe and effective”. Yet a law was passed in 1986 that gave complete immunity to the vaccine manufacturers from product liability. Not even other medical products (remember… Read more »
However, Z-man is wrong about bread vs. meat…Agriculture showed up about 10,000 years ago, and eventually supplanted the hunter-gatherer lifestyle…The result was that agro-humanity lost 6 inches in height and life expectancy dropped from 35 to less than 30…The rulers hunted and ate lots of meat, and notoriously the Normans in England were bigger, stronger and lived longer than the peasants…Humans 15,000 years ago ate plenty of meat and fish and any vegetables or fruit they could find, as we know from their midden heaps…
I agree with you. But it does not detract from the overall message he is conveying here.
Medicine as a true technological discipline would not be called “medicine”. It would be called “bio-engineering”. There is real bio-engineering work going on. It is mostly focused on anti-aging and regeneration.
Yes, Pyrrhus is right. Also, I totally disagree with Z when he calls carnivore a “fad diet”. It might be a very boring diet to someone like Z, but it is not fad. Maggie White, an 85 year cattle rancher from Canada, she’s been strict carnivore since she was 20. Is that a “fad diet”? Check out “Dr. Chaffee Maggie White on YouTube.
T Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn, both in their 90s, have been whole-food plant based (WFPB, vegan in other words) for several decades. I’m not sure what’s going on with these extreme diets. They do seem to work for a few people here and there. But overall, I don’t think either works all that well for the majority of people and either fully vegan or fully carnivore seems to be harmful for most people. One thing I will say is that these fad diets (yes, that’s what they are) tend to attract a lot of mentally ill people. Frank Tufano… Read more »
I reckon farmers didn’t lose 6 inches in height, but 6 centimeters. Our ancestors were omnivorous, not carnivorous, this is what Z was saying, and this is what the paleo diet morons ignore. No one denies that hunter-gatherers ate healthier than agriculturalists, but they were far from a meat-only diet. Don’t forget that we are mostly descended from people who did comparatively well on an agriculturalist’s diet, and to quote the great Henry Harpending: “we evolved more in the last 5,000 years than we did in the last 100,000 years.” Paleo diet theory seems to deny that any recent evolution… Read more »
The absolute best way to lose faith in doctors & the medical system is to become a lawyer and deal with them regularly.
Ha, bingo. Truth cluster bomb there.
I’ve learned to hate them by having medical problems that I can’t precisely diagnose myself.
I do have friends who get real, science-based medical treatment because their mothers were famous actresses, their brothers are top “research” oncologists, etc. Celebrity lifespan is up!
I go to doctors to beg for permission to buy pills that don’t quite work.
I’m a patent lawyer (a “patient liar”). I had an MD client early in my career who was furiously attempting to obtain a patent. This surgeon was in the process of being removed by the licensing board in his third state and back then it was three strikes and you’re out of medicine permanently in the US. He showed me some of the prior de-licensing files. This fellow had left a trail of maimed and dead in two states equivalent to the Battle of Shiloh. My boss kept him as a client regardless despite I wanted to line the bastard… Read more »
Or to interact with them in college when they were still pre-meds. Morons at age 18 don’t suddenly turn wise or intelligent with the conferring of degrees.
“Greetings my fellow countrymen! ! I am an expert on far-right Dissidents!
Did you know that science skepticism is being politically weaponised against blacks and jews?”
When this chit show blows, it is going to be epic. The hate and fury the left is stoking is going to boil over soon…
Fake science is inseparable from fake money. If the fake money disappeared so would the fake science, immediately. As long as the fake money persists, the fake science will be with us. There have always been and will always be quacks, but I’m talking about the Scientism of the regime that is dependent on the fake money the regime supplies. Treatment of heart disease has been mostly successful, for people who seek it. Nothing you can do for the guy who doesn’t go to or ignores the doctor. For instance, Robert E. Lee died at 63 of heart disease, and… Read more »
So on cost/benefit of heart disease treatment, Dick Cheney alone marks a massive cost pit of extending that sellout son-of-a-bitch’s life.
No doubt he put his own personal touch on GAE militarism, but if it wasn’t him it would have just been someone else
The greater calamity is the bitch he spawned who harangues us still. Had there been no Cheney rep for her to coattail, we could have been spared.
The guy who pretty much invented the maths of statistical distribution, called upon in the original Congressional hearings about cigarette advertisements, said there is no significant, demonstrable correlation between lung cancer rates and tobacco usage. (That, I believe, is where the noxious canard of “ain’t causation!” comes from. It has been heavily abused to discourage us from practicing the general art of Noticing.) Not to say there isn’t “a” difference; a smoker’s chance of developing lung cancer is a few percentage points above a non-smoker. It would be silly to claim otherwise; oral and lip cancers in dippers and chewers… Read more »
The ‘scientific method’— observing some aspect of the world and noting what you see, distinguishing facts which can be shown to be true from unproven conjecture, coming up with a theory that plausibly accounts for what you’re observing, explaining why you believe that theory is the most reasonable explanation for those facts, submitting your theory to a community of scientists who devise various ways to test that theory, to either confirm or disprove it— this is unquestionably the most reliable way human beings have devised to learn about the world around us. Prior to the advent of the scientific method,… Read more »
-” Prior to the advent of the scientific method, people were just guessing; about where human beings came from, about what causes the weather, about why people get sick, about the nature of the starry skies, etc.”
Yeah… not sure the scientific method has actually answered too many of these issues…
There is no ‘scientific method.” Feyerabend explained why. Newton and Einstein didn’t use this “method.” This “method” is another myth pushed on the rubes and marks out there and also serves to provide a rationale for science as a unified discipline (rather than as made up of disparate disciplines that don’t have much in common with one another).
He’s right. The intellectual split that occurred when scholasticism was supplanted by natural philosophy was predicated on the belief that the independent fields of study would reunify eventually in some grand instauration. This never happened. In many ways, this is one of the hallmarks of modernity.
Completely agree with the comment. The big change during my life has been the religious reification of “Scientist” into an identity guild/mafia, in line with Z’s poast above discussing the birth of the professional expert. Of course this happened with “Journalist” well before that, and (perhaps most destructively of all) this artificial group/trade consciousness has congealed around on “Politician.” The orange beast did not hire on enough seasoned consultants from Dupont Circle, etc. We used to laugh at but not discourage athletes and stage actors and TV news anchors from protesting their professional dignity and sense of fair play within… Read more »
Understanding the scientific method (which you’ve summarized pretty well) helps one understand the the basic tension of the modern world. That tension is found in the fact that the modern West needs *something* to replace the old Christian moral framework and has decided that “science” is going to be it. You can see a problem right away here. Science, in the limited sense you describe, is NOT a moral framework. It doesn’t even get close to addressing the questions the old religious ideas touched on. Furthermore, the actual scientific method isn’t even accessible to people of average intellect. A pretty… Read more »
Excellent examples of the difference.
“in what field?” wins
“
“…their claims to reflect ‘the science’ were lies, pure and simple; and they relied on peoples’ justifiable belief in the explanatory power of science to sell those lies.
And it was science which eventually revealed them for the lies they were.”
Stellar, Real Bill- fits right in with my own agenda, in spades. Thanks!
I am a physician who shares Z’s politics.
This piece is FULL of errors.
For starters–no, humans have NOT eaten bread “for ten thousand years.”
Carnivore is WAY WAY closer to a path of health than eating carbs.
CARBS KILL is a great way to approach food.
As do seed oils, food made from petroleum byproducts.
If you are suffering from diseases of modernity–stop eating like a modern.
Find local sources of real food, and eat that. Your health will be restored.
Promise!
Physicians backing carnivore are NOT quacks.
Sorry Z–you do NOT know what you are talking about here.
Totally agree…and as to supplements, if food contained the nutrition it had a century ago, or more, and we ate a balanced diet and got adequate sun, they wouldn’t be necessary for most people..In fact, however, none of those things are true for most of the population, and supplements, particularly vitamins C and D, make a substantial difference…
Lee: “This piece is FULL of errors.” Two words: Protein Poisoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning Yep. Blood Urea Nitrogen. “BUN”. It’s a thang. To counteract PP on a carnivore diet, you’re gonna hafta eat the SATURATED FAT, because you’ve already ruled out the carbs. Searching on “saturated fat cancer” at PubMed gives 4386 hits. https://tinyurl.com/3cpj9944 And I don’t know of anyone who thinks that whole grains are bad for bowel ailments, ranging anywhere from constipation*** to the various bowel cancers. [And trust me, you don’t wanna go wading into the Paleo forums on the question of “Butter versus Olive Oil”.] =============== ***Which is… Read more »
I’d like to add one quick point on Protein Poisoning. If you’ve got a family member who’s eating a very high protein diet; for instance, a child who is training for a strength sport [football, wrestling, MMA, swimming, triathlons, etc], and trying to maximize muscle mass; then get some urine dip sticks to keep an eye on the kid’s protein levels. Roche markets their dipsticks under the “Chemstrip” label, and Siemens markets their dipsticks under the “Uristix” label. The cheapest dipsticks start with just two tests: Protein & Glucose. Whereas the expensive dip sticks can have 10 or more tests… Read more »
My wife has stopped eating at the cafeteria at work due to declining hygiene standards (also known as hiring more diversity). Instead we buy these “Farm-to-Fit” meals. They’re basically just wholesome meals sourced from local farms with very few ingredients but a definite low-carb bias. She’s lost 5 pounds without even trying to. I agree that this is something Z probably got wrong.
Lol the lack of self-awareness on display here.
Z: physicians are quacks who promote fad diets like carnivore
Physician: I promote the carnivore diet
Ok, quack, whatever you say
How many carnivores are there in the Zman audience? Come on, speak up! I switched to carnivore a year and a half ago and lost 40 pounds. It was the easiest thing I ever did. It dropped by BMI from 30 to 24 in 6 months. I went from obese to normal and reversed my indicators for metabolic syndrome. Tens, no, hundreds of thousands of people have done the same thing. Probably millions have done it. The testimonials are endless. Eat meat and improve just about anything that ails you. Humans have been apex predators for more than three million… Read more »
Its hard/less appealing to eat the amount of calories you ate on SAD when you eat carnivore. This is also true of basically any restricted diet whatsoever. You could lose the same amount of weight if you ate only potatoes, or twinkies, or beef jerky, or grapefruit. Calories in vs calories out, simple as. Intermittent fasting, restricted diets, keto, whatever… any of it can absolutely work and should probably be followed so long as its a way that youre personally more likely to follow and restrict calories. Exercise also helps although its hard for most regular americans (read: sedentary piles… Read more »
The SAD has an awful lot of “empty calories” though so I think, in general, the reverse is true. Those Farm-to-Fit meals we buy are all around 500-800 calories and are quite filling. They’re full of things like green beans, squash, lean meat and fish. By contrast a typical starchy white bread “dinner roll” might have 400 cal and yet is smaller than your hand. At the extreme of the SAD, of course, you have those (very sad indeed) people who consume Big Gulps of soda that have as many calories as a whole day’s food ration and hardly fill… Read more »
Those Big Gulps are loaded with sugars, from cane sugar to the refined, corn-based products, that provide no nutrition but a lot of calories. They are obviously not filling, so people tend to eat foodstuffs–particularly processed fast food products–to satisfy their perceived hunger. The result is consumption of hundreds, if not thousands of excess, non-nutritious calories that are then stored as fat. Look around and you’ll see the result; obesity is the new normal. With obesity come all the other health issues like diabetes and cancer. There is no doubt that cancer cells multiply far faster when fed a steady… Read more »
I have cut out most carbs save the occasional indulgence. I have a buddy who beat a very serious cancer and part of the permanent treatment and recovery regiment is a keto diet. The chemo tube was removed and he is 12 years onto recovery. It is one data point, but he and his doctor swear by it as an effective cancer preventative/treatment. You can’t stay in constant ketosis, and you can waver in moderation. Even as a detox a few times a year it is a good thing. Also, do salt water enemas once a year. Clean out all… Read more »
Lads, it’s not the Ice Ages anymore.
Remember, some of those medievals were big, big boys.
Besides, all a trucker needs to be happy is hot coffee and bad chili.
It’s war, I tell you, it’s war!!
SkepticMan: “I switched to carnivore a year and a half ago and lost 40 pounds. It was the easiest thing I ever did. It dropped by BMI from 30 to 24 in 6 months.”
Care to give us a synopsis as to what it was which you EXCISED from your diet?
4 times per day (((Starbucks))) lattes each with 256 tablespoons of pure corn syrup and 512 tablespoons of tropical oils?
Just curious.
I excised everything except bacon, eggs, beef, and hard cheese. Now it’s mostly beef and cheese, a few eggs, and sometimes bacon.
Yes, but what was the caloric nature of the “EVERYTHING” which you excised?
I do Keto combined with Intermittent Fasting and feel the best I’ve ever felt in my life. I have just decided that Sugar is the enemy and avoid it like the plague. I just do not crave it anymore.
A literal 3 star chef, rated in Michelin’s, told me straight up: “sugar is poison.”
I am essentially carnivore. I do eat some asparagus and onions because I like the types of bacteria that they feed. Red meat and eggs makes up 99% of what I eat for my own nutritional needs. You don’t need anything else.
Humans were meant to be in ketosis.
I am a physician who shares Z’s politics.
This piece is FULL of errors.
For starters–no, humans have NOT eaten bread “for ten thousand years.”
Carnivore is WAY WAY closer to a path of health than eating carbs.
CARBS KILL is a great way to approach food.
As do seed oils, food made from petroleum byproducts.
If you are suffering from diseases of modernity–stop eating like a modern. Find local sources of real food, and eat that. Your health will be restored.
No bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. Seems eminently reasonable. It’s not as if those are staples or anything.
If you try taking rice away from an Asian or a Jamaican, it WILL be WW3.
(In Kipling’s memoirs about the famine in India, the British were constantly confounded by starving South Indian mothers, their breasts dry of milk, who would still yet trade a pound of wheat for a few handfuls of rotting rice.)
Ostei Kozelskii: “No bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. Seems eminently reasonable. It’s not as if those are staples or anything.” Potatoes are one of the few foodstuffs our White occidental ancestors of the Far North could have counted on for Vitamin C in their diets. Without potatoes [plus broccoli & Brussels sprouts & spinach], our Far Northern ancestors would have quickly gone extinct due to Scurvy. Of course our ancestors wouldn’t have understood any of this in a moderin deductivistic sense, but they would have been keenly aware that, empirically speaking, folks who ate only meat had a bad habit… Read more »
This is incorrect. Fresh meat has ample vitamin C. Ask the Eskimos, or Ernest Shackleton’s shipmates marooned on Elephant Island for four months, or the remnant of Vitus Bering’s crew that survived on fresh seal meat for more than a year in the Aleutian Islands.
The key: FRESH meat. It has everything the body needs, which cannot be said of potatoes or rice, let alone pasta and bread.
Recommended reading: Gary Taubes’ ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’, Stephen Finney’s ‘The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living’, Nina Teichholz’s ‘The Big Fat Surprise’, for a start.
Bro, the reason the Brits are called “Limeys” is because a series of genius-tier ships’ doctors [John Woodall, John Fryer, James Lind, etc] noticed that sailors who added lime juice to their diets didn’t die of Scurvy.
And the subsequent addition of lime juice to the British naval diet allowed Britannia to win the Napoleonic wars and rule the entire world for well over a century.
Point being that lime juice is NOT a meat extract.
Potatoes were brought to Europe from South America.
“ When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.” “Real difference” is the key here. Big Pharma loves to conflate “relative” with “absolute” effect when touting their drugs. Suppose for example, you have “high” blood pressure. Let’s assume it’s not acutely high as in some sort of trauma, but just naturally high… Read more »
Compsci: “there are good doctors out there” Yes, there are. But they are becoming rarer than hens’ teeth. There are even good nurses & female doctors, as well. [PRO-TIP: All of them want desperately to see masculinity in you. Show them masculinity and you WILL get laid. I guarantee it. However, the existential tragedy now is that all of those beautiful talented fertile females are V@XXINATED…] On the other hand, the reptiles in human skin suits, atop the pyramid of the medical industrial complex, are uniformly satanically evil. It’s shocking how quickly the serpents seized control of the reins of… Read more »
The problem is not science, it’s scientists. By reading the official (and most likely massaged) mortality rates, I used the scientific method to deduce that there was no reason to vax. I suspect that a part of the Anglo skepticism about science is linguistic: in Germanland, the term “science” only refers to the hard sciences, so it’s implicit that medicine, psychology, economics and sociology belong to different magisteria of knowledge. This unlucky conflation is compounded by the tendency of the soft sciences to mimic science-speak as to cloak their quackery in borrowed finery. Said Noam Chomsky: You’ve got these guys… Read more »
Well, I’ve never been a fan of Chomsky–quite the opposite–but that plainspoken statement about the social sciences is an excellent explanation for the incoherency of pomo speak. I’ve long known this to be the case, but it’s interesting to hear a guy like Chomsky enunciate it, too.
it’s interesting to hear a guy like Chomsky enunciate it
Yes, rather ironic, considering that he’s also speaking about himself.
Equally ironic, it was Chomsky who (briefly) made me a neocon. Back when I was a Commie, I despaired at our leaders all being slack-jawed imbeciles and it was a great relief to have Chomsky explain that no, they’re not cretins, just incredibly evil and duplicitous.
(((Chomsky))) was all on board with the covid jab and stated in October ’21 the unjabbed should remove themselves from society and that the unjabbed getting food after that ‘was their problem’.
To hell with that rotten SOB.
I’m not defending Chomsky or his worldview, but the guy is older than Kissinger and quite senile by now.
One needs to separate the man from the science. Chomsky was/is a terrible lefty individual, but was a linguistic genius in his time. Hell, he all but invented the field. I remember as a young student in CS having to study him—and it was tough.
OMG no he did not “practically invent the field” of linguistics.
Chomsky and Foucault had a “debate” back around 1970. The chief topic was the Vietnam War, and given that both were opposed to US intervention there and for very similar reasons, there was no debate to be had. But what I found interesting was a remark by Chomsky after the “debate.” He said–and I paraphrase–I actually liked Foucault, but he might as well have been from another planet because I couldn’t understand anything he was saying. And it was not because Chomsky didn’t understand French.
Yes. In the link above, Chomsky mentions that the Parisian intellectuals were the last to still proudly declare themselves Leninists and Stalinists, and they spent their time exploring ways to express simple truisms as convoluted and impenetrable as possible, a process Niklas Luhman calls “self-mystification”.
Chomsky gives an example of a guy who objects to the notion that some pharaoh died of tuberculosis, because tuberculosis was only invented in the 19th C.
There are two fundamental reasons that Science and scientists cannot be trusted. First, without the ability to see how matter and energy interact in real time, down to the subatomic level, there is no empirical basis for understanding the natural world and its physical reality. And even if we could view those interactions, no true wisdom can be derived without an infinite number of observations, as the human socio/political/economic complex is in constant flux. So everything we think we know is ultimately just a guess. Second, Science is part of the Communications Apparatus, along with the news media, the education… Read more »
Hey, Mr. or Mrs. down voter: what’s your disagreement with my screed above? I’m genuinely curious. Doesn’t seem like anything I said can be falsified (“science!”). Are we in the presence of a true believer in The Science, or its Method? Let’s debate, shall we?
I thought so. That’s some real courage of your convictions, eh?
Your epistemological nihilism is absurd. Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and can’t be measured, the Uncertainty Principle notwithstanding. And as for the relatively chaotic nature of human society, that is really neither here nor there with regards to the practice of science or any other serious endeavor, just so long as there is the infrastructure, financing and physical security in place to perform it. As to the rest of your screed–at least your honest about the nature of your post–it does apply pretty well to science in postmodernity and in totalitarian states, but is… Read more »
Appreciate the reply OK. The point made above is that nothing is knowable with absolute certainty absent the ability to observe at the lowest material level. Of course, it is possible to make educated guesses that allow a measure of control over reality. The Bomb proves the point. But omniscience would allow medicines tailored precisely to a particular person’s biochemistry and neurology. And the ability to manipulate human society precisely. Of course, the parable of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge exists for a reason: absent immortality, humans will always be tempted to act as selfish materialists… Read more »
ATTN: Joseph R. Chloupek The truly scary thing is that many quantum physics dudes are starting to suspect that the future influences the past. If that proves to be true, then our future physics and mathematics textbooks won’t be 500 or 1000 pages long; they’ll be more like 5 million to 10 million pages long. And you’ll need to read hundreds of those million-page tomes in order to earn a PhD. We might require AIs simply to go on 1-in-a-bazillion needle-in-a-haystack quixotic empirical searches, looking for candidate solutions to equations, and using up all of the energy produced by our… Read more »
Exactly, B. That is what I was saying above. When we can manipulate matter and energy so that a feather can be converted to an aircraft carrier, or an automobile manufacturing plant into a bubble, then humans could cure disease or injury instantaneously. Ultimate power.
Until that day arrives, we are helpless in either understanding or effectively using our environment. And as a result, faith in any science is unjustified. Hurts to admit to helplessness, but it is as it is.
I don’t have much problem with what you say in this post. Its claims are less radical than those in your initial post, i.e. absolute knowledge versus knowledge in general.
Re: Diets and nutritional maladies, I also wonder about gout. It was a crippling problem in the medieval and Early Modern periods; more than one noble lost more than one battle because he was too bedridden with gout to take command. And modern people do of course get it. I get it myself sometimes. But that’s the weird thing: For me, the cause is a combo of alcohol and red meat, which explains why medieval / Early Modern aristocrats got it. But you’d think with the obesity etc. rates everyone would have gout now, and it seems few people do.… Read more »
Actually going to a rare visit to a doctor after podiatrist was useless to get help on what I’m sure is gout even though uric cid levels are normal.
You can imagine I will be dubious of any recommendations because I know the side effects may be worse. Nothing before but four episodes this year is enough. I don’t fear doctors but fear I may follow everything they say to do.
Years ago Jared Leto was in some indy movie playing Mark David Chapman – the guy who shot John Lennon. He tried to pack on all these pounds for the role by eating pints and pints of ice cream every night. It’s always been a source of great amusement for me that he ended up with gout because of it.
There are other paths to obesity besides meat and mead.
“But you’d think with the obesity etc. rates everyone would have gout now, and it seems few people do. Wonder why?”
Most fatasses’ diets are 90% sugar, starch, and fat. To get a mighty gout bunion that makes the ladies swoon you need to be able to destroy an entire pot roast in one sitting.
My current view is that yes, humans ate whatever they could find in prehistoric times, but the thing they prized above all else was animal fat. That’s why hunting was a big deal. The best hunters were at the top of their societies. Hunting was the sport of kings in medieval times for good reason. If the king could prove his prowess with a lance against a wild boar, that validated his position with his rivals. In any event, eating meat is more satisfying than a diet of tofu or lentils.
Ding! ding! ding! There is a reason that predators such as lions go after the organ meat – it’s a high fat, high nutrient bonanza. Jeepers, they don’t get scurvy or pellagra, do they?
The way I understood it, cancer is primarily a problem of immunodeficiency. That doesn’t help much once you’ve got it, I suppose, but you shouldn’t get it until you’re quite old, if at all. Genetic predisposition, too, but I wonder if anybody has looked for a link to immune function in such individuals. Still, if eradicating cancer is job #1 of the immune system, it’s probably the best tool to treat it, and getting it to function properly would be the direction I’d research. They also called it a lifestyle disease back when I was studying these sorts of things.… Read more »
I recall reading that 1 in 30 died of it circa 1900.
That seems waaay too high. Cancer is a disease of old age, really. As folk pointed out, once your immune system declines, you’re screwed, and that happens to all of us as we age. In the first decade of the 1900’s, heart disease, stroke, influenza got most people. And, of course, the average life expectancy was 50ish or so. Folks didn’t live long enough to get a high rate of cancer.
Check out the CDC stat’s here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends/index.htm
I’ve always thought there should be (at least) two separate categories when talking about cancer: one for the folks over 70 and another for everybody else. We all have to die of something, someday. A 90 year old dying of cancer is not at all the same thing as a 20 year old doing so. This sort of thing can get lost when one looks at cancer deaths as one number. It’s plausible that cancer deaths can increase just because more people are living longer.
Quick search, short, interesting read:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/researchers-report-dramatic-rise-in-early-onset-cancers/
And I’ll raise the specter, since I’m sure nobody is researching it: maybe we’re becoming dysgenic at the same time. All the easy living and lack of natural selection. Just a little?
The Big Bang hypothesis is worth mentioning as a possible example of scientism running wild in a profession which fails to police its own adequately. Influential believers such as Neil deGrasse Tyson say that all the data support the BB. Well, what about the helium data and the lithium data?
Watch the first video of the playlist linked here. The author gives the BB hypothesis failing marks, and not just for its predictions about light element nucleosynthesis.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBg1fqjrUVrnOnOzcry3ilvOH6iOxV56m
A timely topic. The Covid lockdowns and webinars on Covid had a lot of grifts including charging the panels with “fees” for taking part in the webinar.
https://www.science.org/content/article/costly-invite-scientists-hit-with-massive-bills-after-speaking-at-covid-19-conferences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R1Q3l_cQZA
“ Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.” The reason cancer exists is rather simple. Genetic damage that leads to unregulated cell growth. The problem is that the genome is so complex, that there are too many different genetic components that can break that all lead to cancer. Then fixing what is wrong at the scale of a few million cancer cells imbedded within the 30 trillion healthy cells is largely beyond our ability. Imagine if when your car broke down, you had to fix a few million tiny gearboxes that you needed… Read more »
This is sort of related but is statistics a form of a science. I don’t claim that it’s as replicable but is at least somewhat useful. As long as you have the humility in what you’re doing, it’s half the battle. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how best to measure music popularity over a long period of time. One of the things that statistics has trouble capturing is the “hit vs standard” phenomenon. So for example you had hits in the 50s by Teresa brewer Patti page etc that haven’t aged well and have… Read more »
After thinking about this subject for many years, I’ve come to the opinion that not only is statistics not a form of science, it’s not even a form of math. It’s more like a very trimmed, quantitative form of historical literature that allows you to tell a story about something after the fact.
Statistics is one of the ugly sisters of Cinderella (mathematics). It’s a search for patterns, and often patterns of cause and effect, when one doesn’t have a clue as to what is going on. It’s the science of dullards.
What youre talking about is epidemiology NOT statistics. Statistics is a branch of math built on the same bulletproof deductive frame as Euclidean geometry or number theory.
Epidemiology is the (mis)application of statistics by people who frequently dont have the math background to even understand the statistics. Its a women’s field where a perfect tool is used in frequently retarded ways.
Hammers are great tools but this does not make them an appropriate way for your aunt to open her first evenings bottle of rosemount shiraz.
Aye. However–and without weakening your point one bit–most of our aunts quaff Rosemount from the box, and I’m told it is deucedly difficult to open a box o’ that stuff with a ballpeen.
“… statistics not a form of science, it’s not even a form of math.” Well, then you’d be wrong. The mathematics behind the broad field of statistics is solid and often complex. That statistics is mostly (yes, mostly) misused and misunderstood is not to the contrary. If you think statistics is simply pulled out of the air, then you simply have no formal acquaintance with the subject. Without statistics—which is grounded in probability, we’d have very little of the pleasures we currently enjoy of the modern world. For example, insurance, which is based on probability analysis of loss events would… Read more »
Thank you. The idea that statistics is not a hard science is absurd and only comes from ignorance.
Tell that to an actuary, tough guy.
Maybe, that’s a legacy of payola. Most of the hits of those eras may have been synthetic and an outcome of unscrupulous people controlling the music industry.
Which is why they haven’t aged well.
An interesting question. According to the definitions, Stairway to Heaven was not a “hit,” because it wasn’t on some chart. But it clearly was a hit, long before streaming was a thing too.
many such cases. You also have songs where the most known version wasn’t a hit and the version that everyone knows wasn’t a hit at the time.
For example, the song “At Last” was a hit for Glenn Miller around 1942 or so. But the version by Etta James with like 400 million downloads was only a minor hit (No 42 on the billboard 100).
The streaming boom coincided with the general public coming to think of music as always “from” something else, not a standalone product. Those belatedly popular non-hits are songs used in movies, commercials, video games, etc.
Taylor Swift is the only remaining popular musician.
Taylor Swift is the only remaining popular musician.
If that isn’t a marker of societal decline… what else is?
It is quite remarkable how the “food pyramid” and the Covid restrictions perfectly align with the commandments of Climate Religion. I mean, the Venn diagram is quite precise. It is almost as if they are geared toward Gaia’s perceived health rather than your own.
all roads lead behind the same curtain.
Oy! The Green movement is like the Civil Rights movement,.designed only to do the WORST kinds of damage. Not merely useless or less efficient, the WORST.
Green is whales with broken eardrums on the beach,
cutting down forests for toxic silicon junkyards,
burning windmills on quarter-acre anchor of concrete that are kept spinning by bought electricity,
bunker-oil cargo ships dumping the trash in the ocean,
Green is a lithium pit mine the size of Ohio.
I’ve often been a critic here, but—to give credit where credit is due—today’s post is very good. I would endorse 99% of it, and I think Z-Man is at his best when he sticks to things like this rather than veering off into the more ethereal subject of religion, which requires a different kind of analysis. But, back to the subject at hand. “Science,” in the only pure and genuine sense of the word, is supposed to be contemplation, or theoria as the Greeks called it. This does not mean idly sitting around speculating about things without verifying them (as… Read more »
Beautiful post, like your other one today.
Electromagnetism is conspicuously absent from your short list of approved sciences. I trust that you understand the origins of Einsteinian relativity in a bizarre result of Maxwell’s work. The speed of EM in vacuum will be the same relative to any observer no matter what his motion or that of the emitting source of EM. So you need EM to be neglected, forgotten, and buried to exorcise the relativity hobgoblin. A problem is that chemistry is very much a science of electronic reactions. It’s only natural for a chemist to think, from time to time, about charges. Soon he’s gets… Read more »
You nailed it with the statement of fact that it is antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation that have improved our material comfort and longevity. Everything else is just a make-work project funded by government debt and propelled by the Managerial Sinecure Conveyor Belt. I just finished, “Reprogramming the American Dream”, by Kevin Scott. Scott is a brilliant software engineer. The premise of the book is that if we are smart about AI we can use it to maintain small-town, rural America and enhance the lives of the people there who were shafted by 1960s and onward post-America. Outside of software systems,… Read more »
“Greco-Roman-Nordo/Germanic civilization whose highest aim is the good.” I mean, look what we named the Highest. The God. Not some weird name, not some unspoken name- we named it “the Good.” (from gott or güt) You mentioned Yuaval Hariri. Here is my abiding suspicion; let me me claim it as from my ignorance. “It”- that which Hariri works for, that which drives him and fills him and guides him- is striving to create a new life form. New vessels far more susceptible to Its habitation. This is why Whites must be either absorbed and diluted, or eliminated outright. As part… Read more »
What an excellent post. Very nice review and I believe your impressions are accurate.
The YouTube channel, “Evil Food Supply,” is doing great work exposing scams like the food pyramid, plant-based ‘meat’, and flouride in the water supply.
Must check it out.
Science idolatry parallels or replaces fundamentalist morality.
I myself am a morality expert and have been chagrined that others fail to regard me as such. Here in one of the last Covidian holdouts, masks and boosters are still required for attendance at various events. It was Keynes or Alan Greenspan who’s credited with saying that markets can remain irrational longer than we can stay solvent. “Markets” are a synonym for just about anything.
So my motto: If you can’t beat ’em, hide.
In the 90’s statins came out and everyone was calling them miracle drugs, practically Drano for the arteries. I remember a TV doctor over 20 years ago saying that “statins should be put in the water supply. They’re that good.” I’m out of the loop as I’m not on them but I have family members with high cholesterol who swear they’re poison and won’t take them. Clearly something changed at some point. I would probably research why I shouldn’t take them if I was prescribed that. My default is better living through chemistry. However, notice that the 105 year olds… Read more »
Some of those old guys just have great genes. I’d say taking cholesterol medicine is probably the better choice if you have really high cholesterol. It may be helping things in ways that the doctors can’t even explain because they don’t know.
But it seems like people live longer on them.
I think the evidence is in that people live longer on statins. So if a person has really high cholesterol it’s probably worth it.
Those stories of the 105-year-olds are always interesting. I think they just have great genes. Because there are plenty of other people who never go to the doctor and drop dead early.
no, that’s just it, in general, people do not lived longer on statins. there is one group that does – people who have already had a serious heart attack. statins interfere with the body’s natural use of cholesterol, like in forming insulation for nerve tissue; muy malo.
The body’s 3 basic building blocks are natural fats, cholesterol, and proteins.
Lipitor was approved using a study that indicated *the possibility* of a 1% increased risk in males over 300 pounds. One percent is statistically meaningless.
As a side benefit, Lipitor does destroy one’s liver. Need more hospital insurance?
“ One percent is statistically meaningless.”
Second time I’ve heard this. I get where you are coming from. But the put down is incorrect. Given a large enough sample size, “n”, the 1% can be said to be statistically *meaningful*. Whether or not that is meaningful in any practical or useful sense is the issue here.
And I agree, 1% is not persuasive to me to change my lifestyle, but we need to decry it on those terms.
Relative risk.
Worth the cirrhosis of the liver,
and are you a 300 lb. male who wasn’t born with naturally higher levels of cholesterol?
(Those born with chronic condition actually live longer, by the way, on the average.)
I believe the number of people who have liver problems from statins is a about 1 out of 100,000. Most of those problems are reversible. So I don’t think it’s fair to say it destroys the liver except in rare cases.
karl von hungus: Plus statins cause muscle pain/weakness and mental confusion in many oldsters. My very old mother remained reasonably mentally sharp until she was prescribed statins. Granted I do not see her in person and only communicated via phone calls, but her cognitive ability (imho) went into steep decline immediately thereafter.
IMHO, a fate worse than death.
I know there’s a very passionate group of people who are anti-statin. But it all seems very uncertain to me. A lot them from the “all natural” school of thinking. And they’re not always that credible.
I’m sure it’s true that statins interfere with things to some extent. But the question is how much. The goal isn’t to drive LDL down to zero. They’re also seem to be anti-inflammatory effects of statins which I believe even the opponents say is true.
I think the evidence is in that people live longer on statins
Do you have a link for that, its not what I’ve heard.
The Clot Thickens: Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. all you need to know about the cholesterol con.
This dynamic is playing out with Ozempic at warp speed. the media hailed it as the new obesity wonder drug a few months ago, now the side effects are coming out… and they’re really bad. We have to find a middle ground here. I’ve often heard that the best way to eat is the way your great-grandpa did, and I can’t help but think that’s true. At the same time, we have access to genuinely useful medicine and technology that he didn’t, which is great. Yet it’s not going to overcome an unhealthy, destructive lifestyle.
> . I’ve often heard that the best way to eat is the way your great-grandpa did He probably ate grass-fed beef, no seed oils, and far more nutrient dense vegetables than exist now. At this point you either need to have your own garden and source your meat well from local farmer, or have a 50% increase in your grocery bill. The latter may not be the worst thing in the world though. Food SHOULD be what you take the time to buy the best in, but it’s not easy to till a mom of 4 making less than… Read more »
Couldn’t agree with you more. I may be exaggerating a bit but I see the modern supermarket as a purveyor of disease and death. Cheap food is generally bad food and will lead to bad health. The problem is real food costs real money, and many (most?) Americans cannot afford it. That’s probably why many poor Americans I see are obese — they have to be, subsisting as they do on food-like substances and the svelte people are mostly upper middle class and above. The world of Soylent Green
Ignorance and apathy are greater obstacles to health than poverty. Poor folks can eat healthily enough if they want to. But most of them don’t give a dam’ about their own health, unless a white cop puts a knot on their head.
Fattening us up for our Green future!
I mean our future is literally, “to be Green.”
And aren’t natural fats a healthy choice that should be available to the wealthy?
Who here remembers their mothers or grandmothers cooking with Crisco? Turns out the name is a portmanteau of “crystallized cottonseed oil.” It was developed by the Germans as submarine lubricant, but they sold the formula to Procter & Gamble, initially to make soap.
Interested parties bribed the FDA to reclassify cottonseed and other PUFA oils from industrial waste to food-grade. And the rest is history.
The biggest health problem for secular sexually normal white men in 21st century west is sudden onset cranial lead perforation.
Which is to say, our problem is a macro spiritual one of being a defeated materialist people subject to regime promoted isolation, humiliation, and nihilism. We still have enough spirit to resist living in the sewer we’re being offered as a home.
Go to church, workout, disengage from consumerism
homeschool a bushel of kids who you teach to do the same… this will prevent premature death more effectively than statins and all the rest.
I’m not quite as skeptical about medicine as Z is, and my reasoning is experience. Around 10 years ago I had a cardio event of some sort. Rushed down to the doc-in-a-box and they did an EKG which came back irregular. They set me up with a cardiologist who prescribed an exhaustive round of tests, including stress tests. The results were not good. Blood chemistry–including cholesterol and triglycerides–severely out of whack, hypertension and incipient atherosclerosis. The doc gave me the usual spiel about reducing fat, sugar and salt intake, increasing exercise, and he put me on a drug regime of… Read more »
Ah, the benefits of certain health insurance plans. At least some of gooduns still get ’em too.
Blue collar working men used to drop dead when they were 55 in the good old Jackie Gleason days.
Remember when we were 65 we were supposed to look and sound like Wilford Brimley?
I, for one, am kinda glad a certain few are still spitting fire and kicking azz. Experience and guile will beat youthful enthusiasm every time.
Very true. If you look at the bios of Golden Age Hollywood movie stars, seems that a very high percentage of them snuffed it in their 50s and 60s. And most of them smoked like London chimneys. Don’t know much about their diets. Lots of red meat, I’d imagine, and even more alcohol. They probably didn’t get much exercise and obviously didn’t get the type of medical treatment we get today. On the other hand, they were probably far less likely to abuse drugs such as cocaine and weed.
Umm, I wasn’t talking about Hollywood stars. The Zblog audience is far too modest, sirs and ladies.
You may wish to investigate supplementing with Nattokinase (I take Boost brand; 4000FU). It breaks down fibrils in about six hours and has a half-dozen other benefits. Hospitals prescribe it. It’s powerful enough that one pill can kill, so consult with your doctor first. For me, it has measurable, clear prophylactic results. 0.02
Many thanks. Is that any way related to the Japanese vegetable “nakko”, said to scour out vascular plaque like Drano?
Yes. Japanese consume lesser amount in food. Supplement companies isolate and concentrate the active ingredients.
If you research nattokinase, you can find time lapse images of petri dishes containing fibrils and a small amount of natto. Six hours later the fibrils are _gone_ as if beamed to space.
Also removes arterial placques and rejuvenates vasculatures.
Almost all supplement mfrs claim powerful effects of their products. This sh_t is like Drano and it actually does what is claimed.
You can’t take it if you are on certain meds, e.g., hypertension and cardio-pulmonary meds. That would be bad.
My pet theory on obesity, kinda tongue in cheek but not really, is that air conditioning is a major driver. Pre-AC, how much of a person’s caloric budget was spent just on thermoregulation? Imagine going through a summer in Lagos without even an electric fan. It’d be one hell of an appetite suppressant, for one thing, and how much weight would you simply sweat off? Same deal in the winter — very inefficient fireplace heat and clothing made from natural materials. Not that I want to give up AC, but I bet that would solve most of the “obesity epidemic”… Read more »
You could add tons of other modern conveniences to the list. Walking further to find a place to relieve yourself, gathering food, manual labor, housework, balancing on a horse…
Physical activity of any kind is an appetite suppressant, a really good one. I worked on a landscape crew for a summer. I lost a bunch of weight (and this is when I didn’t have much weight available to lose; I went from “in shape” to “really skinny”). At first I thought it was because I was expending a lot of calories on the job… and I was, but I also realized that I was eating significantly less. Which is weird — I was burning off 4K calories (let’s say), but only eating enough for 1.5K (again let’s say —… Read more »
Sev-
My experience concurs with yours.
I regularly go out for a walk or jog in the afternoon/early evening heat and I consistently find that I have little appetite for anything beyond a light dinner after said activity.
Prior to entering grad school I was a beanpole. To such an extent that I was a bit self-conscious about it. But grad school changed all that. Went from an active lifestyle to a sedentary one. In my dorm room reading and writing constantly. No more pick-up basketball. I went from about 160 to about 195 and have remained there since.
Ditto. I now must concentrate on eating more. This really is difficult, more so than I ever imagined.
you don’t sweat off weight. but you do shiver it off. being in a cold environment will burn off tons of calories; so will a good case of the flu.
yeah Sev’s wrong about that. I worked mostly outside for 42 years, you can’t eat a heavy lunch or breakfast in heat, and you drink a lot. For 25 years I only ate salads for lunch. Winter, yeah you just burn the calories off, I always put on 5-10 pounds in the fall because I started craving high calorie foods.
Excellent point. Decades ago, I had a case of Graves disease, or hyper-thyroid condition. I went to a Endocrinologist, who told me I needed a radiation procedure which strips the thyroid and would cause me to need supplements for my lifetime. I (ignoramus) said I thought that sounded terrible, and I didn’t think I wanted to do it, so he got angry, and I left. Ultimately, I did some reading and made some lifestyle changes, but I’ve always maintained that the cure was effected by taking up spin classes. Spin doesn’t do much for weight in my experience, or slim… Read more »
This is precisely why I do not consider medicine to be a legitimate technical discipline. Note that the endocrinologist offered no discussion of the underlying molecular biology of the condition. What enzyme, growth factor, or hormone is causing your thyroid to be more active? Instead, he trots out a “cookie-cutter” treatment that is not rooted in any understanding of molecular biology that damages the thyroid where it does not work any more, at all. All medical conditions are based on molecular biology. Thus, a molecular biological solution is required to fix them. Anything else is fraud.
I’ve brought it up before but there does appear to be an environmental component to the weight issue. Any one thing, even heavily processed foods, aren’t great to be sure, but the issue is the problem keeps getting worse despite some of these ills being with us for generations (i.e., their effect should have topped out at some point). BigMed has no answer though, and doesn’t appear to want an answer either.
Dang. None of us ever thought of the caloric exchange in thermal homeoregulation. Good one!
Gotta keep that pilot light lit so the fueled power plant can cycle up and down.
Plus, REM sleep is cardio. Getting off the couch is aerobics. And going outside on a hot or cold day is the goshdanged Olympics.
I lost a lot of weight one time working out in the cold for a few weeks.
Well, 7lbs. In two weeks.
Once upon a time, I worked the night shift in Afghanistan, and slept in a tent during the day. (true story). The tent had AC, but it didn’t retain it well, and it reached close to 100F in there in the middle of the day. I lost a tremendous amount of weight during this time, I believe mostly from sweating while sleeping. The altitude played a part too, high desert it was. Colorado is the least obese state in AINO thanks to the altitude.
The worst crackpot diet was the one you mentioned: the low-calorie, low-fat food pyramid — that is, low meat. It’s a concentration camp diet nobody can stay on. Gary Taubes’ books showed the “science” was funded at Harvard by the sugar industry. No wonder we have an epidemic of diabetes.
Also, a funny mad scientist is Dr. Panzer in the Three Stooges’ “A Bird in the Head.” The name derives from it being 1945:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiukhlrVACk&t=29s
The truth is European humans did evolve for the food available. Whole grains, nuts, root vegetable, fish, meat, dairy, etc. Northern Europeans had more fish and meat and less bread and fruits than Southern Europeans. If you want a diet fit for you then eat what your people ate in the middle ages. Also spend six days a week doing hard labor.
Hard labor is key. The “eat what your ancestors ate” argument is useless without it. Medieval people got lots of calories — you could eat a medieval peasant diet and get fat (consider that some kinds of medieval beer, and the mead that Beowulf was always chugging, is probably pushing a thousand calories per mug). But then you look at archeology, and the crazy wear and deformation on their bones, and you realize why they never got fat eating 4,000 or more calories per day (as is the current best guess to daily intake IIRC).
I’ve read somewhere that by the end of a long Northern Winter everyone who hadn’t starved to death would have been in ketosis for a few months — all those smoked hams and cheeses being for the hunger months when all the perishable carbs were gone and no more to be had before springtime. As for the ‘Mediterranean Diet’ — apparently the geniuses who did the original study in Crete didn’t consider two factors: 1) Cretans spending most of their days climbing up and down precipitous crags chasing their sheep and goats and pursuing feuds and 2) More importantly since… Read more »
A race-base diet, eh? This sounds perilously close to crimethink. Double plus ungood.
I’m familiar with a hyper-athletic vegan gentleman of mixed Maori and European ancestry who assures me that he’s genetically pre-disposed to eat rice for evolutionary reasons. The Science says so, apparently. I have to resist pointing out that his true ancestral diet is in fact Soylent Green. Pigs being OK when people were in short supply.
When they say “trust the science,” they are trying to capture the trust people have in science by equating whatever it is they are promoting with actual science and engineering. It’s the same thing as giving Barrack Obama a Nobel Prize. They capture the authority and then wear it like a cheap skin suit. It’s a type of counterfeit money.
Real science gives us TVs, cars, finds and produces oil and builds 50 story buildings that have been standing for many decades and an electric grid that works so well that it becomes invisible to us.
Yes, I’m starting to think most science is done by engineers and workmen. Then after enough data has been collected and patterns are clear, they get consolidated and written up by a scientist.
The mistake is thinking that the scientist dreamed it all up himself. He’s almost more of a lagging indicator.
That isn’t correct though. Theoretical science is critical to engineering and inventiveness. There are some things that we can’t have without the theory. That said, science’s biggest contribution is its methodology, which is used in science and engineering.
You don’t have digital machines without Claude Shannon’s master thesis. Besides, throwing out the theoreticians is to throw a huge number of our men who designed this world and made it possible for our many men who are builders and tinkerers.
Robert, you couldn’t be more wrong. let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. edison was more of an engineer, and he wanted a DC based electrical system. Tesla was the scientist who determined AC was the way to go.
engineers are important, but their work is downstream from science.
“ engineers are important, but their work is downstream from science.”
Exactly. Engineers apply the science. Now, I admit that in some cases, the science is not yet known. Nonetheless, I separate scientific discoveries from application.
I’m not too impressed with modern engineers these days. I’m watching the completion of a major civil infrastructure project and the new system is a trainwreck compared to the old system it replaced.
It’s as if none of the engineers who planned this ever had to pull a 1000lb electric motor or service pneumatics. And the dumb retards they contracted to build the damned thing, well that’s another story. The future is fancy pants tech, poorly planned, and built in a slapdash manner by 70iq third world scab labor. And you can complain all you want, management DGAF.
Ah shoot. Somewhere I click-copied a list of the most important equations in the world.
Literally all of them were White Men, except the stuff Einstein stole from an Italian.
*Laughs in John von Neumann*
Not that I’ve got anything against Shannon… one of the greatest. Plus what he did with Roulette.
An earlier example of it being wise to have a theoretician on board would be Lord Kelvin having to come up with transmission line theory after the earliest sub-sea cables manifested unexpected ‘capacitance’ == impedance mismatch reflections.
Where’s Ned Ludd and Arnaud Amalric when we need them?
Unfortunately Arnaud Amalric was misheard in the heat of battle and ZOG has been sorting us out every since.
My parents and a friend are on the carnivore diet. I was highly skeptical, given nutritional deficiency unless you eat a lot of eggs, lack of fiber, etc. (Apparently there’s supplementation involved, but still.) All three have lost a lot of weight, fast but not crashing, all three report achy joints and stiffness associated with normal aging diminishing or disappearing, increasing energy— the stuff you want. In my parents’ case, both have gotten physicals and bloodwork, and everything seems OK so far. My mom was becoming a bit indoorsy; now she’s outside in the garden and flower beds every day,… Read more »
I’m with your Mum & Pops, Painter. Wife & I have followed a similar diet of meat, eggs, nuts & berries and are in very good health – no complaints, no weight problems.
God fearing too. I’m sure that helps. HE likes us. I don’t understand his ways, but HE knows we’re trying our best and he appreciates that.
There is nothing new about this diet. It has been around with different names since the 1970’s. It works until your get tired of eating steak and eggs every day. The reason you lose weight is you sharply reduce your caloric intake as your body adjust from processing carbohydrates for energy to using fat. By the time people quit the diet, they have plateaued. That said, American consume far too many carbs and especially highly processed carbohydrates. Simply cutting out things like snacks, sweets and bread can do wonders. It turns out that your mother was right. Eat your spinach… Read more »
start tracking what you eat and you will be surprised at the results; re:macronutrient ratios. i thought i was getting enough protein, and found out i was much lower than expected (and getting more carbs than desired). have to really fight to keep protein up and carbs down; e.g. take whey protein drinks daily.
Cottage cheese: curds and whey. The grayish liquid is the whey. Probably common knowledge, but a little college dairy science blew my mind. Started eating cottage cheese instead of drinking God-knows-what back when I did some weight training.
Read the label first. Cottage cheese producers are now diluting the dairy with vegetable gums, up to five gums in some Aldi cottage cheese l just inspected. These gums replace nutritious dairy with non-nutritive glue. It’s unconscionable give how cheap milk is to acquire. Nancy’s (Oregon) and Kalona (Iowa Amish) are available where I live and they make wholesome cottage cheese including the cultured type.
Did you hear about Saddam Hussein shelling northern Iraq?
No.
Yeah, there were some Kurds in his way.
(A rather old joke.)
Agreed. I do love spinach. Steamed with sautéed garlic and browned butter poured over it. Yum!
Butter is a superfood. Get grass fed if you can afford it.
Is good for you. In moderation. Shovel down mountains of the stuff and you *will* get kidney stones. It’s high in oxalates.
I restarted consuming bread and pasta. I mill my own flours from organic grains like einkorn and buckwheat. The whole grain is eaten together with the natural constituents. That’s what our ancestors ate, it tastes fantastic, boosts my egg and healthy oils consumption, and yields gigantic human waste product. If you have the time and money, you should consider milling flour just before cooking.
“She Blinded Me With Science”
– Thomas Dolby
Can someone explain what that the lyrics of that groundbreaking song mean? The lyrics suggest that her beauty and good housekeeping tamed or overshadowed science. Maybe “She Blinded me from Science” would be more accurate.
https://mojim.com/usy126240x12x7.htm
A modern take on witchcraft? A nerd’s understanding of women? Art is practically a curse word these days, except wrt self-expression and ego masturbation.
Oh, but folks lately I have been spotted
With a Big Mac on my breath
Stumbling into a Colonel Sanders
With a face as white as death
I’m afraid someday they’ll find me
Just stretched out on my bed
With a handful of Pringles Potato Chips
And a Ding Dong by my head
– Larry Groce
“Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto!”
I have noticed numerous times when scientists talk about relativity and other famous Einstein endeavors they never talk about it detailed terms or explain the current thing with the theory. It’s always ” as Einstein said, or noted or theorized”
As if he is an oracle who is cited. They can’t explain so they refer to the oracle.
there is a tremendous amount of hand waving in modern physics.
Right. And there’s a tremendous amount of mid-wit literature (*) marketed to people who want to feel and sound smart. I know a CFO who likes to opine on matters quantum and cosmological. I know he doesn’t know what a PDE is, let alone any of the other higher maths. Now I know what goes on with PDEs (was once a hack engineer), and also I know that I don’t know jack shit about Abstract Algebra and all the other high-falutin stuff that theoretical physicists use to play their Glass Bead Games… No big deal. I know I know less… Read more »
Is this of a piece with the witches’ tactic of using, “some people say…”(e.g. “hormone suppression of 8 year olds is completely safe and reversible”)?
GR and SR have lots of experimental confirmation over the years. There is very little woo-woo in relativity. The woo-woo is all concentrated in quantum theory rather than relativity.
My grandma always said, look at what kind of teeth an animal has & that tells you what their diet should be.
Humans are omnivores so eat what you like, you may not necessarily be healthier or live longer but following some extreme fad, veganism for instance, won’t extend your life it’ll just seem like it.
Eat drink & be merry for tommrow we will die.
On the topic of turning science into religion, didn’t the Jacobites try to impose a worship of science on the French population to replace Christianity? Didn’t the Bolsheviks try to do the same to the Russians? I’m too busy to research it now, but maybe one of our resident history jocks can assist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Reason I’ll conclude with a point that some of my atheist friends cannot grasp: science cannot replace religion, morality, or ethics because science can only explain how the world works and knowing how the world works does not tell you what your values should be. It’s surprising… Read more »
The dam’ Leftists have been on the right side of history for at least 240 years it seems. Funny how being on the right side of history so often results in epochal bloodbaths…
I tell ya, the Badthink is getting worse.
We’re going to go from a race-based diet to a race-based religion,
and that will bring our Doom!!
The Wrath!! The End Udda World!!
Got to add in: “… because science can only explain how the world works and knowing how the world works does not tell you what your values should be.”
Finest distinction ever.
Standing ovation.
In the last year I’ve noticed that many products in their advertising try to work the word “science” into their tag lines, e.g. “Science did that!”. Of course this is usually accompanied by images of strong women, often brown, working happily in a white lab coat to create this new world.
But science is never defined. The word itself is supposed to confer legitimacy by suggesting competence and results. Even after the divers failures of the Covid experience, science has claimed for itself a religious aura.
Thumbs up for using the word divers!
Lol. Most brown women in labs are looking for parrisites in stool samples.
They’re looking in the wrong place. The parasites are all in the front office.
Pythagoras was a negro, dontchaknow…
He ate beans; not okra and catfish.
Beans with mayonnaise.
“strong women, often brown, working happily in a white lab coat”
Hahahaha! Thanks, I needed that.
Lordy, they love playing dress-up.
They pursued a High Science career because all their smart brown men are out chasing white wimmen!
You simply cannot take anything a physician tells or suggests to you at face value anymore. At one time they were held in high regard – perhaps too high a regard, but at least they were mostly their own men. Now days, they’re mostly just employees of some larger “health care” organization and more frequently, female. Further, one can do one’s own research and weigh the options and consequences rather than categorically taking one person’s word for it. It’s harder and harder to rely on the supposed “experts” these days.
It’s not just soft sciences like medicine and economics and so on that are corrupted. I’ve been coming more and more to the realization that even so-call “hard” sciences like physics are largely nonsense. The outstanding example is string theory that may have seen promising at one time many many years ago but has since been seen to predict absolutely nothing new. Not only that but it’s total failure has generated a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense from the profession like multi-verses and the “anthropomorphic principle”. And still billions and billions are set on fire every year to smash a bunch… Read more »
What about all that invisible dark matter that explains so much. A while back they revisited that and thought maybe not. Today, they may all be onboard with it again. Capricious group for one that supposedly hold to hard facts.
More seeming pseudo-science. It’s matter but somehow magically it doesn’t interact with anything so there’s no way to actually observe any of it. You just have to take our word it’s there and there’s no way you can prove us wrong.
Don’t get me going on paleontology.
did someone say “paleontology”? 😛
They lost me with the square root of -1=I, an imaginary number.
Imaginary numbers are OK. They just get a bad rap because of the silly name. This so-called i is just a shorthand way of describing rotations. One i is just a turn of 90 degrees. Take another i and you’ve turned 180 degrees in total and are now facing the opposite direction – hence if you started pointing in the “1” direction then two i’s in a row will leave you pointing in the “-1” direction.
Just wait until you find out about exp(i*pi).
Anyway i or j depending on your preference turns out to be kind of handy for reasoning about all sorts of things. We’d be in a pretty pickle if we couldn’t do the maths for alternating current circuits and rotating machinery.. And FFTs seem to have some potential… Maybe one day 😀
Yeah there’s money in them there Dark Matter mines, which is why the math will be tortured to show it must exist and can be shown “for sure” after decades of more research grants.
The more they try to turn a science into public interest, the more corrupt it tends to be. As far as I know, string theory is just a bunch of garbage without a shred of evidence to back it up, just “beautiful math.” AFAIK, there has only ever been one experiment performed that had to potential to generate evidence for the theory and it failed. Something like string theory could only exist for so long as it has in academia and other government funded institutions. Same with the search for fusion power or even SETI. These things persist for decades… Read more »
Hey! That’s not true. There is nothing more edifying that the soothing voice of The Southpark Chef of Science, Neil deGrasse Tyson (is he really just a hyphenated black lesbian in disguise?), telling me that nihilism and buddhism are science and the world is better understood.
Come on now. Saint Tyson revealed to us the holy truth: that Pluto wasn’t a planet!
Millenia of white guys debunked. They had it wrong all along.
The “science” is about money and ideology for the most part. Regarding the Covid scam IMHO the population reduction theory can’t be overlooked. If the scam was only about money the powers that be could simply have come up with a “vaccine” that did not work but was not harmful. Instead they came up with one that is both ineffective and much more harmful than the original virus. This not to mention banning treatments that were effective and substituting treatments that were deadly. Many, if not most, of the Covid deaths, were due actually to hospitals killing people with Remdesivir… Read more »
Not only that, they made a cocktail of known, cheap treatments that they denied worked so they could release a government sanctioned version of it that costs $750. I know some elders who recently did their retirement dream cruise and got Covid. They had to quarantine for 6 days and couldn’t see their dream city. They took the $750 ivermectin/hydroxycloriquine (sp?), cocktail and felt better for two days. Now they are back and going to the critical care unit because they are still horribly sick. They also got sick after taking the vaccine. This thing is very sinister. Just look… Read more »
to me, the fact they even got the israelis to judas goat their own people is telling.
Heh. Just wait til the sterility rates kick in.
The secret to victory is to separate cause and effect in time. By the time the victims start to realize something happened, the perps are long gone, the event forgotten, and the cover lie enshrined.
The most flagrant example of scientific malfeasance in nutrition was when there was an egg shortage in the 60s, so President Johnson asked the health boards to declare eggs unhealthy, to which they immediately complied and still make the claim to this day.
Scientists follow prestige and grant money, and the peer review they are so proud of is now nothing more than gatekeeping in the modern age, not to mention unnecessary when the internet allows anyone to publish data and findings to a large audience.
Is *that* where it came from. Thanks. Food “science” like a temporary war tax.
Eggs, bananas, and breast milk: the three most perfect foods.
Good thing I regularly get 2 out of 3.
Yeah me too, I almost never eat Bananas
“Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research” Who pays the piper calls the tune. Scientific “research” is rarely objective — either the paymaster wants certain results or the scientist is on his own account deliberately looking for certain results, which may extend even to faking results (even Newton was not immune). As G.B. Shaw used to say, every profession is a conspiracy against the lay public. Science is no exception. I still don’t know what qualifies as science. Physics? Yes. Chemistry? Yes. Biology? Yes. Medicine? I don’t think so. Just putting on a white lab coat doesn’t make… Read more »
Let’s thank our lucky stars that there is not yet a quantum theory of gravity, assuming that one is possible. It would be a profound advance soon followed by foolish scientists rushing to tell governements about exciting new weapons or other insidious technology which could be made if only politicians would subsidize them (and the fools) with billions of dollars, euros, yen, and so on.
does quantum physics work? i see it mentioned in relation to computing, but no commercial products yet. is something real if it cannot be monetized?
My limited understanding of q computing is it does work but is too resource intensive for now to be commercially practical.
The facts speak for themselves: the USA is not a top-tier country when it comes to longevity. The worship of so-called experts did more damage than good. This is why I’m not a fan of technocratic authoritarianism.
Remember, none of the people paid to study the USSR predicted its collapse. This is a recurring problem with “experts”.
But yeah, this doesn’t mean go believe in some crackpot theory. It just means we all have to ultimately think for ourselves.
The hilarious thing about the CIA being completely wrong about the Soviet Union is they turned around and spent millions on studies to prove they were in fact right all along.
i used to work with this indian guy, and he made an offhand mention of how much cancer there was in the US (compared to India). so i looked it up, and he was right; there is much more cancer here, than there; and India is a shot hole country. something very wrong and very dangerous has been going on here for a very long time.
If I had to pick a single culprit it would guess processed slop.
Much higher diabetes rate in India, though. Constantly hogging down rice and bread, and Indians also have the helluva sweet tooth. Mebbe that’s why their ice cream (kulfi) is the best I’ve ever eaten.
Mebbe that’s why their ice cream (kulfi) is the best I’ve ever eaten.
The pistachio one is phenomenal. So is the mango one. The rice puddings are excellent. They have something else called “ras malai.” You have to try it before you die.
Yeah, the pistachio is my favorite. Lady Kozelskii dotes on ras malai. But hell, I just love Indian food in general. Too bad most of the recipes I cook at home just don’t quite measure up to the stuff I get in good Indian restaurants.
The aspect of who has it worse is confounded by the populations being compared. Until they control for the genetics, we have no answer.
Life expectancy in India is less than 70 for men, and that is an improvement over the 60 or so not that long ago. If cancer and age are related, and there is some indication they are, that probably is the reason. Men in the US live to about 76 now, down a bit from not too long ago.
We need to be careful here, the statistic you cite is “from birth”. Those of us reading here are far from “birth”, although for a few, the comment “born yesterday” still seems appropriate. 😉 In other words we’ve passed a few significant milestones in the game of life.
IIRC, the figure I was told and that was used in retirement calculations was (in my 60’s) a mean of 84 yo.
While taking a human biology class it was amazing how many times the answer to questions on body functions and processes were, “It just does that.” So much science has not learned yet.
Very true. I had a conversation with a gastroenterologist who told me, point blank, that he and his colleagues don’t really know how the esophagus works. Blimey.
shit, we can’t even cure a virus yet!
Talking about how he wrote women characters so well, Melvin Udall has it right about many experts: “I think of a man. And I take away reason and accountability.”