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50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

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Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#291
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a read of books by Nina Teicholz or Gary Taubes. In there is a mountain of data showing the correlation of diets to adopting the national dietary recommendation (which vilified fats). They all make a great case that fat is good for you (proper fat like animal, not vegetables oils which really aren't from vegetables at all). You're right it's more than just sugar, it's carbs in general. Which includes French frie…

>One can still be healthy eating no vegetables and just meat. Haha wow. Citation absolutely needed.

zerocarb

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I wish people would actually engage me on the logic rather than acting like I must be crazy and making things up while they pretend such assumptions aren't some form of prejudice. I'm starved for actual meaty engagement on such subjects. Like explain to me why you think I'm wrong instead of telling me I hallucinated my entire life and if I really do have CF and I really am getting well, it's 18 years of pl…

Reading other replies to your original post is alternately enlightening and incredibly frustrating. So much armchair crap from people who have clearly never encountered anything outside of established science and so refuse to believe that anything outside of established science can exist! As if established science were somehow virgin birthed into existence, and not built upon centuries of painstaking observation and…

It's definitely very frustrating. In the good news column, this discussion is the most meaty engagement I've ever gotten and I'm generally pleased with this unexpected turn of events.

I think the most charitable reading I can give is that when I was much sicker, I tended to do a poor job of trying to present my case and "you never get a second chance to make a first impression." Hopefully the silver lining is that some people will recognize how much my writing has improved over time and will see my past typo-filled and often not very coherent posts as compared to later ones as evidence that my claim that I was very sick at one time and I've gotten healthier holds water and makes sense, even without ever meeting me in person.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm European. Is it not common sense in the rest of the world that sweet things make you fat? Wow.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but the American public has been heavily misinformed on myriad subjects. My European parents were constantly baffled by how unexpectedly bad it was, with my father often wondering aloud how they won the war. Raising a family here isn't ideal, but the economy is strong arguably because of the poorly-informed, convenient-entertainment obsessed, consumer society. It's a great pl…

Do you know other examples of such misinformation?

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people (myself included) just prefer the taste of skim milk. I know it’s not healthier - compared to whole milk, it doesn’t fill you up but it has the same amount of sugar and almost the same amount of calories - but I still enjoy it more.

As bizarre as it sounds it is possible to buy lactose-free whole milk (from cows) that has half the sugar of skim. (It's still more calories per serving.)

My daughter is lactose intolerant and drinks this - it does indeed have less sugar, and the taste is still really similar to normal whole milk.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but the American public has been heavily misinformed on myriad subjects. My European parents were constantly baffled by how unexpectedly bad it was, with my father often wondering aloud how they won the war. Raising a family here isn't ideal, but the economy is strong arguably because of the poorly-informed, convenient-entertainment obsessed, consumer society. It's a great pl…

Do you know other examples of such misinformation?

An obvious one which comes to mind from childhood memories is the campaigns surrounding the effects of tobacco smoke. The industry flooded the media with misinformation for a number of years, and it was incredibly effective at turning smoking into a divisive topic where smokers were fighting for something by embracing ignorance just to spite the non-smokers / be "free". It was a serious battle just to get smoking banned from common interior spaces like restaurants then bars, that wasn't very long ago. It's insane.

I don't think I need to make some kind of exhaustive list here. Climate change is another obvious large-scale disinformation campaign.

EVs vs. gas vehicles is another particularly hot one over the last decade. Countless times I've seen a talking head on a screen claiming EVs are no better, that it's just a longer tail pipe. Completely disregarding the fact that EVs enable options for clean energy production, an impossibility when everyone's physicaly driving the actual oil combustors. Even if we continued using fossil fuels to generate electricity, you can do it a lot more efficiently without being space, safety, and weight constrained like you are under the hood of an automobile. Not even considering solar/wind it's an obvious win.

This stuff is so effective on a large subset of the population because we don't do a good job educating people and have long had a strong culture of celebrated ignorance. We don't optimize for producing skeptical, critical-thinking folks in our public education system. Such people don't make good consumers, it's bad for business.

An unfortunate effect is when you optimize your population for consumerism/business interests, and politicians are marketed for elections through the same means as commercial products, you don't really have a democracy anymore. It's just something going through the motions of being a democracy. The influence is too reliable and its control too concentrated. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is a good example of how bad it's gotten.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#296
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This implies you don't understand what privilege is. It's very literal. There is no blame in having it. It's not an "us vs. them" thing. And that implies you don't allow for those who reject the very political and racist concept of white privilege to reject this presupposition. It's not a matter of "understanding"; he's not failing to understand privilege, he's rejecting it and thus doesn't like her pushing those p…

> he's not failing to understand privilege, he's rejecting it and thus doesn't like her pushing those politics on him. If he understands it then why does he think it's "odd" for her to have a white male husband? > So he doesn't want to hear her whining about how white men are to blame for bad things that happened to her because he probably doesn't like listening to racist drivel. When you're talking about abusive beh…

> If he understands it then why does he think it's "odd" for her to have a white male husband?

It's odd for someone to be racist against whites when they're married to one; whining about white privilege _is racism_. Hating on whites is racism. Judging individuals by the color of their skin, and claiming they have privilege because of it, is racism.

> When you're talking about abusive behavior online, and you describe the individuals that leveled the most abusive behavior at you, that's not "whining" or "racist".

They weren't online, they were in a classroom, his teacher chose an extremely left TED talk by a women whining about white privilege because she'd been abused by bad men. They didn't abuse her because they're white, but because they're abusers. Blaming white privilege for their behavior most certainly is racism.

> I'm happy to call it "majority privilege" if you want. I'm not sure how you think it's not a bad thing for certain races to get treated better than others, though. (Different ones depending on what area you're in.)

It's not a bad thing for the majority to be what society optimizes for; it's not privilege, it's how cultures work.

> What beliefs?

Your belief in "white privilege".

> "The story had to have some kind of genders for the characters"? "It's not a horrible choice to pick the most common genders involved in adult sexual abuse[0]"? "It's possible to design a character with non-political motives"?

Making your students write a story about a man trying to rape a woman is an unnecessary vulgarity in a writing class, it's nothing more than the teacher trying to impose her left'y political views about white privilege onto students. There's a thousand other less political things they could have been asked to write about that were serve the goal of learning to write just as well.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#297
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaded gas was a big one, AGW denial is a big one.

The reason things like leaded fuel, cigarettes, DDT, CFCs (freon), and countless other conspiracies were so egregious is because 'influencers' were able to convince authoritative figures and the media to conspire in misleading the public. People, as in unaffiliated individuals, ought be free to believe whatever they want to. The problem is when authoritative figures are saying things they don't actually believe, gene…

People will probably deride me for saying this, but there's a legitimate criticism to be made of the ability for reasonable people to question global warming alarmism.

In my mind, I dont believe people have changed. People are still religious, our priests are just getting smarter at it by making more sensible crusades (and one that has legitimate environmental and especially world-security implications with respect to Russia standing to gain enormous competitive advantage). The politicians and Leonardo DiCaprio's flying around the world on private jets on one day flights to pick up participation trophies (yes, for global warming) see you as cattle, just as always. If they cared, the state of governance: corporatism and cronyism would be the exception.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#298

For years I've essentially not consumed sugar except for that in vegetables etc. I still suffer from this rubbish though: 1. I often can't find any meat in the supermarket that has not been denatured by having the fat removed. 2. I reject a lot of products which I suspect I'd like because they have added sugar. 3. I have to tamp down on my anger when I hear somebody rabbiting on about the dangers of fat. Humans truly…

“Humans are a stupid species”

I was just now in a little farm watching animals being fed as a group (goats, llamas etc). They all fought each other over the food despite the fact there were enough for all of them, and this event happens multiple times a day. They can’t learn not to spend energy fighting based on past experience.

One week ago I flew 11 hours in a plane on high altitude and arrived safely in my destination.

My point is, let’s give some credit to our species. We’re trying and life is hard.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#299
post #283
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing they mean they’re oftentimes from seeds.

And seeds are not vegetables?

I don’t know, I don’t think most people classify them or nuts as vegetables, but I don’t know whether they are.

Re: 50 Years Ago, the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. Is there nothing to know or learn about nutrition? Yes, it’s hard and there is a lot of bad stuff out there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

I didn't say we should not try to get better at knowing things about nutrition. I said we shouldn't trust most of the "results" in this topic. This is trivially correct unless you believe eggs both cause and cure heart attacks.

> This is trivially correct unless you believe eggs both cause and cure heart attacks.

Sure, but like often the case, it could be more complicated than that; different people can react differently to foods.

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