{"id":136,"date":"2008-08-04T09:30:21","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T14:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2008-08-04T09:30:21","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T14:30:21","slug":"diets-and-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/04\/diets-and-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"Diets and Bias"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing the Atkins Diet for more than a year now and the result is consistent with that of the claims and the book. I follow the diet I shed the pounds, while having normal blood sugar levels and cholesterol levels.
\nfrom here:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Gary Taubes, “Good Calories, Bad Calories”\"\"<\/a><\/h2>\n
from Overcoming Bias<\/a><\/span> by Stuart Buck<\/span><\/div>\n
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\nGary Taubes<\/a>, a correspondent for Science<\/em> magazine, contributed to the Atkins Diet craze with his New York Times article several years ago, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?<\/a>.” He then spent the past several years expanding on that article, and the result Good Calories, Bad Calories,<\/a> a book of some 600 pages (nearly 70 of which are the bibliography).
\nTaubes has several overarching themes; he contends, for example, that eating refined carbohydrates is what makes you obese, and that refined carbohydrates contribute to many of what used to be called “diseases of civilization” (such as heart disease, which seems to have been less common in traditional cultures that ate less processed food, including Northern cultures that ate almost exclusively meat).\u00a0 (These arguments are still controversial, although new evidence continues to support them<\/a>.)
\nThe most important theme, however, suffuses the entire book: bias in scientific inquiry<\/em>.
\nMost of the chapters are headed by bias-related quotations, such as this from a 1921 book on philosophy of science: “In reality, those who repudiate a theory that they had once proposed, or a theory that they had accepted enthusiastically and with which they had identified themselves, are very rare.\u00a0 The great majority of them shut their ears so as not to hear the crying facts, and shut their eyes so as not to see the glaring facts, in order to remain faithful to their theories in spite of all and everything.” Or this quotation from a 1950 Fields Medal winner: “The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.”
\nWhy is Taubes so interested in bias?\u00a0 For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer.\u00a0 Judging from Taubes\u2019 exhaustive research — indeed, I’d be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail — the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored).\u00a0 To take several examples (the book is full of many more):<\/p>\n