Fatheads

So now the largest study of its kind ever conducted has shown that a low-fat diet in women does not reduce the risk of "heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer or colon cancer," according to the Washington Post. The findings are assumed to apply equally to men.

You have to love this. For years, the health "experts" have been inveighing against the myriad dangers of a high-fat diet, engaging in a vociferous propanganda campaign against any food that tastes good, scaring people into foregoing butter, cheese, bacon, and other culinary delights in favor of yucky stuff like tofu and Brussels sprouts - all in the name of Science.

Now it turns out that Science was promoting just another myth, one apparently no more reliable than the hoariest old wives' tale.

With a straight face, the Post reports that some "researchers fear that the findings will leave the public skeptical about all health advice."

Gee, ya think?

The colorfully named Jacques Rossouw of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute tries to put a positive spin on the unwanted results of the Institute's own study. He is quoted as saying,

We set out to test a promising but unproven hypothesis that has proven to be less promising than we anticipated.... This is the nature of science: to have incremental gains and setbacks. We have a duty as scientists to put the best information out there at any given time, even if it can become confusing at times.

The satirical blog Scrappleface puts it another way:

A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said scientists were not surprised by the findings of the study, that refuted a decade of nutritional wisdom.

“Science works by first making definitive recommendations, and then doing several years of research to discover if we were right,” said an unnamed NIH spokesman. “During the research phase, our job is to vigorously promote our assumptions until the facts disprove them.”

Scrappleface's unnamed source* adds, “Americans should trust us, because our faith in our assumptions is rock solid.”

Look. Jacques Rossouw is correct in implying that Science is not and cannot be absolutist in its conclusions. All generalizations and inferences from empirical data are probablistic. Any hypothesis can be overturned by new evidence, as has occurred in this case.

What galls some of us is that the spokesmen for Science seem to remember this principle only when they are cornered into admitting that their hypothesis was wrong. The rest of the time, they natter with blithe assurance that "Science says this, and Science says that," never intimating that these conclusions are necessarily tentative and provisional.

Scientists themselves may be more cautious, but the people who claim to speak for Science on our airwaves and in our newspapers rarely qualify their statements for public consumption. A high-fat diet is bad, because Science says so - this has been their unrelenting message for more than a decade, ritualistically repeated with smug, unblinking certainty, pounded daily into the heads of the American public (whose waistlines, it may be noted, have only expanded during that time, despite the rash of low-fat and non-fat foods on the market).

Science is the god of our time - "a jealous god," to quote the title of a newly released book on the subject. What is properly understood as a method of investigation - one which, like any method, has both strengths and weaknesses - has been transmogrified into an all-purpose, all-inclusive, infallible guide to everything.

But every now and then, a news story like this one comes along to remind us that while the Emperor may not be stark naked, he's not nearly as well-dressed as he pretends. 

Now pass me the whipped cream, will you?  ;-)

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*In case there is any confusion, Scrappleface's unnamed "source" is made up, and its "news" entry is satire - although in this instance, it's pretty tough to distinguish between satire and reality.

Comments

[Ginny]

I just finished reading a pile of news reports on this, and I can't help but gloat, feeling vindicated in what I've always said: It's not what you eat, it's how much. Any prescribed eating plan (forbidden foods and required foods) - which is what "a diet" is - is destined to failure, because humans will not be controlled in that way for a lifetime. So the alleged benefits never materialize.

Many medical people are now trying to spin the study results by saying that it proves nothing because it's the KIND of fat you cut that counts. (Saturated should be cut, not the other kinds.) But as I understand it, the low-fat dieters cut fat across the board - all kinds, including and probably especially saturated. (Descriptions I saw spoke of lean meat, chicken and fish - i.e., low saturated fat - and piles of vegetable and grains.) So they cut saturated fat (along with the other kinds), and it had no effect on disease. I must be missing something here. Why can't they just concede the obvious and be done with it?

[Michael Prescott]

>Why can't they just concede the obvious and be done with it?

Because their "faith in [their] assumptions is rock solid," as Scrappleface quipped!

[Ginny]

Plus it's just plain human nature to hate admitting you were wrong. :-)

[Paul]

In the article I read on the study, the people involved clearly stated that the subjects in the test group did not maintain the diet restrictions outlined by the testers. The results are quite suspect,and should never have been reported.