Saturday 18 December 2010

Nutritional dogma.

Gary Taubes now has a blog. His first two posts have resulted in a lot of opinions being expressed, mine included.

As Henry Larson said in the film "Home for the Holidays (1995)":- "Well, opinions are like assholes, honey. Everybody's got one and everybody thinks everybody else's stinks."

I don't know why, but people adopt nutritional beliefs with a religious fervour. See Low Carb Talibans and read the comments. They choose their TOP EXPERTS (to quote Razwell) and believe everything that they write & say, dismissing any contrary views. What people don't appreciate is that even "experts" get things wrong and have cognitive biases that affect their opinions. See also Elvis lives!

I try to support my opinions using peer-reviewed studies from PubMed. As there are over 20,000,000 studies on that site, the average Joe & Josephine may have difficulty in finding what they're looking for. Here's a tip. Limit the results to studies in English on humans that have abstracts or free full text.

E.G. To find all studies by Leibel RL that meet the above criteria, copy & paste the following line into the search box:-

Leibel RL[Author] AND ("loattrfree full text"[sb] OR hasabstract[text]) AND "humans"[MeSH Terms] AND English[lang]

Other authors worth searching for are Frayn KN, Jéquier E, Flatt JP, Hellerstein MK, Parks EJ, Krauss RM, Dreon DM.

Does anyone have any other author suggestions?

Another useful resource is NCBI Bookshelf.

10 comments:

praguestepchild said...

We are all open to selection bias. I don't think the paleosphere is any more vulnerable to dogmatism than, say, physicists arguing about string theory (Feynman dismissed it as “crazy,” “nonsense,” and “the wrong direction” for physics, and I tend to agree). Definitely not even close to the dogmatic reality-distortion territory most vegans inhabit.

. said...

Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Eaton SB, Muskiet FA, Gurven M, Kaplan H, Godoy RA, Reyes-García V, Chakravarthy MV, Booth FW, Nesse RM, Ravnskov U, de Lorgeril M, Krauss RM, Varady KA, Alexander DD, Holick MF, Cannell JJ, Ioannidis JP

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Thanks! That should keep me busy for a while.

Anonymous said...

Stock MJ

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Thanks. Stock's a good one. Keep 'em coming!

. said...

Some more suggestions (under construction): http://www.canibaisereis.com/2010/12/19/lista-de-autores-relevantes-com-publicacoes-na-pubmed/

Anonymous said...

Older, but useful:

Dr. Benjamin Sandler

Dr. Blake Donaldson

I use Google scholar as well as Pubmed. Here is a search result page for Dr. Sandler:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22benjamin+p.+sandler%22&btnG=Search&as_sdt=80000

Thank you for the search tips at PubMed!

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Hi H. Considering that I use Google for everything else, I've not yet used Scholar.

The only article by Sandler that I've read is How to prevent heart attacks and that doesn't show up on your link. His info' is a little outdated.

Have you seen Dr. Sandler's 50-Year-Old "How To Prevent Heart Attacks" Has Grown Weak with the Passage of Time?

liposculpture guide said...

Today’s nutritional dogma has been beaten into our gray matter: Fat is bad, carbohydrates are good.

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Hi liposculpture guide.

We bloggers are busy beating a different message into our readers' grey matter!

There's a danger that the pendulum could swing too far the other way i.e. Fat is good, carbohydrates are bad. People will think "Ooh, fat is good. Therefore lots of fat is even better!". And so on...

The fact is that no foods are intrinsically good or bad (except for man-made trans-fats).