Free The Animal

Here represents a core fundamental of scientific method. Suppose you lived in Europe any time during the last few hundred years and were fortunate enough to observe the lovely swan in action. Suppose further that you noticed that every single one was white. How about you observed a million of them over time? Could you say, definitively, that “all swans are white?” No. You. Can’t. You could hypothesize, which, if you’re a scientific researcher, would naturally involve attempting to find swans that aren’t white. Grasp that: you look for swans that are not white, because, it doesn’t matter if you find 10 billion white swans, you still can’t say definitively that all are white universally, or even globally, unless every nook and cranny of the Earth has been checked for non-white swans. OK, but so what? Could we work with and find use in hypotheses that may not be substantiated universally, but are true in a limited context? Sure. It’s done all the time, and it’s fine, so long as it’s done right. But this isn’t how politicized, government, and big-industry “science” is done, now — especially in areas like diet, medicine, environment (yea, all you “health-nut” greens: the bad…

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Via reader Chris S. comes this absolutely astounding news: “Eating an egg a day can raise the risk of developing diabetes.” And, of course, such “startling” news is being uncritically reported all over the place. You can access the abstract here. In a word: absurd. I don’t know what’s worse, actually doing this sort of meaningless and useless “research” in the first place, or mindlessly shilling for it via sensational “news” reporting. In my opinion, the whole lot of ‘em ought to be pelted with rotten fruits, vegetables, and of course, eggs. Now, here’s why. This is an observational study, not a controlled intervention study. And not randomized, either. In essence, what they did was to take data from two other studies, data that was gathered by means of an annual questionnaire. As it turned out when they analyzed the data, those who developed type 2 diabetes were largely the same people who tended to eat a fair amount of eggs. Correlation or association, however, in no way implies causation. It could also turn out that the people who got diabetes take hotter showers, on average. The only thing you can really say is that type 2 is surely linked…

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In a mental exercise I posted yesterday, I asked readers to speculate as to the order of most likely cause of heart disease and death from myocardial infarction. The facts are that death by MI was unheard of in 1910 (about 100 years ago), had risen to 3,000 deaths per year by 1930, and to 500,000 by 1960. Then I provided eight food group categories, A – H, and indicated how much each had changed over the last 100 years, but without telling you which group was which. So here we go: A; sugar and sweeteners: 100% increase B; eggs, fruit (excl. citrus), vegetables, whole grain: Moderate decrease C; lowfat milk: 100% increase D; whole (full fat) milk: 50% decrease E; butter, lard, tallow: 70% decrease (30 lbs. per person per year to under 10) F; vegetable oils (incl. hydrogenated): 437% increase (11 lbs. pppy to 59) G; poultry: 280% increase (18 lbs. pppy to 70) H; beef; 46% increase (54 lbs. pppy to 79) So, if one were to simply line it up by the numbers, the order would be like this: Massive increase in vegetable oil consumption. Huge increase in poultry consumption. Large increase in sugar and sweeteners….

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I was going to try to design a poll, but let’s just get on with it. Do your own personal poll; discipline yourself to create an actual list of probable causality, in oder of most likely to least likely. If you think the causation is likely multiple factors, then place two or more categories next to each other, like 1, 2, 3. In other words: in order of priority, of likely cause. The most certain vector for approximating the level of heart disease is a data point relatively easy to obtain: death from myocardial infarction (“heart attack”). It’s well established that heart attacks are typically caused in first-order by heart disease (generally used to describe a number of related conditions). Naturally, everyone is thusly focussed on second-order causes: what causes heart disease? Let’s take in some statistical data. Myocardial infarction was almost non-existent in 1910 (heart attacks were unheard of). By 1930, deaths from MI had escalated to 3,000 per year. That would constitute a thousands of percentage increase, approaching infinite, the lower the actual number of deaths in 1910. It began to taper off in terms of percentage increase, so that by 1960, there were 500,000 deaths from MI…

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One of the things I’ll discuss often is getting off the “mealtime” bandwagon. Why would you want to eat when you’re not hungry? Some days, I’ll eat five or eight “meals” a day. Others, one or two. Some days, none at all. Today at 11am, I suddenly realized I was hungry. So I ate. Imagine that. A simple five strips of bacon (uncured, organic, from Whole Foods) and three Jumbo eggs. The cooking oil melting in the pan is one of my favorites: ghee. If you get tired of your butter smoking and browning (when you don’t want browned butter), use ghee. It’s on about par with lard, but both take a backseat to the greatest cooking oil of all: coconut oil. But before I get into one of the long digressions for which I’m infamous, let me get to the point. It’s about the ghee. Here’s the article from the BBC: “Hidden heart harm of fatty foods” Ahmed Al Haj is only 48 and looks healthy on the outside, yet this Bangladeshi waiter has ended up on the operating table for a triple heart bypass. As a Muslim, Ahmed does not smoke or drink, but his diet has been…

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