Slightly related to research and meta-studies. The other day I was wondering: what stops a researcher from publishing random numbers (following some distribution they pick) as the results of their experiments?
50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
91–100 of 307 posts
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sad that this is getting down voted. Science is wonderful, and it's behind many incredible breakthroughs in modern technology, obviously. But in my book, logic beats science every time. You can point to all the studies in the world, but if they conflict with my own literal experience, I am going to be at the very least skeptical of the science.
Because this smacks of the same logic that people use to deduce things like "homeopathy works." Develop a hypothesis. Find a few people on the internet who support it. Badah bing badah boom you are now a quack. The big problem with the GP's "logic" here is that, at least according to cursory googling (the best kind!), plenty of women with CF do report having thick vaginal mucous. Any doctor will tell you that a given…
Except you have it backwards. I didn't develop a hypothesis and look for a few internet people to support it. Instead, I did what worked and then tried to understand why it worked.
Thick mucus tends to be poor quality mucus. Mucus is supposed to be viscous. Women self reporting on vaginal mucus also fail to distinguish vaginal "goopiness" from mucus.
This is why i paid attention to anecdotal evidence that lack of vaginal mucus was ruining their sex lives. This was pretty uniformly reported.
It's possible there is some sex worker or fetish club member out there with CF who has sex with multiple men every day and is just not admitting it for done reason. But I spent several years on multiple CF lists and the consesus was CF causes vaginal dryness and this harms women's sex lives.
Your casual dismissal also fails to explain how an excess of mucus causes a compromised immune system. It seems obvious on the face of it that a lack of healthy mucus would be a problem because an important element of our immune system would basically be missing.
Mucus is a gating system. It's like saying "We have too many illegal immigrants in this country because Trump not only built his wall, he made many layers of fencing to go with it, which makes it easier than ever for them to get through. It was better when there was no wall. That did a better job of keeping them out."
(Not intended as political commentary. Hopefully just a readily relatable example of logic fail -- more fencing should not be worse for keeping out unwanted invaders.)
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what a social science study has to do with a biology study. If you feed rats sugar and 50% of them die of heart attacks and you have a control group where it's 10% you have found something about sugar and rats. I'm not sure what the number in this case were but the sugar lobby scientists did a meta study where they used the logic in your post to throw out the studies that made sugar look bad, while keepi…
I've seen terrible logic errors in biology models as well. It just tends to be drama when I talk about those examples. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. According to the CF Foundation website (last I looked), my body overproduces mucus and I am drowning in my own mucus and this is why lung clearance methods are prescribed. I have seen exactly one study that concluded that people with CF actually underproduce mucus. T…
I wouldn’t dismiss your claims, but I’d have some questions. First, have you had genetic testing to confirm that you have CF? If so, then that completely rules out a misdiagnoses of something presenting with a similar set of symptoms. Second I’d be curious what form of the disease you have, since that make make your experience different from someone elses’.
Concerns I’d have with accepting your theory about CF as it applies to people other than yourself (I’m not doubting your own experience) is that mucus and pus are fundamentally different, and this has been studied. For example one area of study is using various drugs to break down a key component of mucous called mucins, and this is based on assays of CF mucus. You would expect pus to be composed primarily of dead tissue and immune cells, especially neutrophils. No one is going to mistake a slide of pus and a slide of mucus, and no one will mistake a spectrograph of the two either.
In support of your idea is that the genetic basis for CF is known and can be replicated in tests, and the pathological mechanism involving over absorbing calcium and sodium ions is also known and reproduced. BUT... it’s also known that overproduction of mucus is not related directly to CFTR! What that means is that the observed overproduction is a secondary result of the underlying condition. That leaves room for the literature to be correct (probably) without accounting for all expressions of the disease. In other words you could be right, and so could the researchers and doctors.
One thing that occurs to me is that a thicker mucus as expected with CF might still create the perception of dryness. Accumulations or blockages resulting from it would be the result of overproduction, but still lead to poor “delivery on target” so to speak. It doesn’t help if one’s vagina is effectively dry because instead of producting a slippery material, an overly viscous substance is produced. Maybe in some people the net result is a lack of mucus where it needs to be, spread around, and resulting infections. It could be that the prognosis for people with a form less associated with overproduction also leads to a better prognosis, because it’s fundamentally an easier problem to solve than other forms or expressions.
It’s an interesting idea, although I’m sorry that you have to live with it.
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#94And 50 years later I still struggle to find yogurt that hasn’t been stripped of its fat at office snack fridges.
I often struggle to find yoghurt for children that is flavoured but not intensely sweetened... though even that's beginning to change in Australia with some great options from a few different brands.
Look at these macros—pretty impressive for a kids food:
http://www.tamarvalleydairy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Screen...
Unfortunately they only sell it in pouches—no option to buy the same product in a large tub.
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "selfish-lazy-greedy assholes" hypothesis doesn't do so well in the face of endocrinology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15987666
This doesn't change the fact that the underlying mechanism of weight gain is a net caloric surplus over a given period of time, which is (hypothetically, at least) addressable without addiction ever coming into the discussion. But if sugar/food addiction is relevant, there should be some data on its effects on non-obese, physically active individuals who maintain a lifestyle that allows them to burn enough calories t…
> This doesn't change the fact that the underlying mechanism of weight gain is a net caloric surplus over a given period of time
That's a necessary condition, but it doesn't really represent a useful model of the system of interest. It's a bit like saying that a car moves forward because the engine is hotter than the surrounding environment.
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#96And 50 years later I still struggle to find yogurt that hasn’t been stripped of its fat at office snack fridges.
I often struggle to find yoghurt for children that is flavoured but not intensely sweetened... though even that's beginning to change in Australia with some great options from a few different brands. Look at these macros—pretty impressive for a kids food: http://www.tamarvalleydairy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Screen... Unfortunately they only sell it in pouches—no option to buy the same product in a large tub.
Yogurt is fairly easy to make at home, especially with electric pressure cookers like instant pot.
Then you can guarantee what goes into it.
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because this smacks of the same logic that people use to deduce things like "homeopathy works." Develop a hypothesis. Find a few people on the internet who support it. Badah bing badah boom you are now a quack. The big problem with the GP's "logic" here is that, at least according to cursory googling (the best kind!), plenty of women with CF do report having thick vaginal mucous. Any doctor will tell you that a given…
Except you have it backwards. I didn't develop a hypothesis and look for a few internet people to support it. Instead, I did what worked and then tried to understand why it worked. Thick mucus tends to be poor quality mucus. Mucus is supposed to be viscous. Women self reporting on vaginal mucus also fail to distinguish vaginal "goopiness" from mucus. This is why i paid attention to anecdotal evidence that lack of vag…
I'm sorry, but no matter what you say, your experience on forums is not going to move my priors very much. Plenty of people hear plenty of things on forums. It's not an efficient way of obtaining reliable scientific knowledge. Every other person has their pet cause where they know better than doctors because they did X or Y and it helped, and they found other people on the internet who agreed with them. It's a common story, and 99.9% of the time it's incorrect.
People don't engage with you on this because it's pointless. You're not going to convince anyone who isn't predisposed to accepting your story, the same way a religious person who claims a divine experience isn't going to convince anyone who doesn't already want such a story to be true. In the same way, me telling Paul that he was probably hallucinating on the road to Damascus because he was dehydrated is not going to make him stop preaching the word of god. You don't have good evidence to present, besides hearsay about other internet people's anecdotal experiences. Read that last sentence. That type of thing is about three or four degrees removed from solid evidence. Surely you can understand how unconvincing this is going to be to a disinterested third party?
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often struggle to find yoghurt for children that is flavoured but not intensely sweetened... though even that's beginning to change in Australia with some great options from a few different brands. Look at these macros—pretty impressive for a kids food: http://www.tamarvalleydairy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Screen... Unfortunately they only sell it in pouches—no option to buy the same product in a large tub.
Yogurt is fairly easy to make at home, especially with electric pressure cookers like instant pot. Then you can guarantee what goes into it.
And home made yogurt tastes sooooooo good.
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#99Slightly related to research and meta-studies. The other day I was wondering: what stops a researcher from publishing random numbers (following some distribution they pick) as the results of their experiments?
The general thing that's supposed to stop this is replication -- when an experiment is published, another researcher should be able to replicate the results.
Here's an example of researchers being caught doing exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_contact_changes_minds
Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is fat -- the majority of your calories necessarily come from either carbs or fats (protein is pretty constant for most people). So if you cut way down on carbs, gotta go up on the fats, that's just how it works: I eat lots of cheese, full-fat strained ("greek") yogurt, tons of eggs, nuts and peanut butter, tons of olive oil on my salad and vegetables, lots of butter in my scrambled eggs, obviously avocado…
> vegan then you don't get as much variety I simply fail to see how it's possible to eat vegan low-carb. Everything vegan, be it legumes, vegetables, or fruits, have carbs. Legumes are 2/3 carbs, so they're out of the question. Even nuts, despite their high fat/moderate protein content, have an appreciable amount of carbs. Even peanuts, a low-carb legume, have 21 grams of carbs/100g. Which just leaves processed plant…
Maybe not all in its natural form of nuts and veggies, but most veggie and nut oils are vegan and full of healthy fats. Yes, drizzle it on everything. Flavor it. It may get tiring, but its easy, vegan, and filling.