Bad Science

I'm twenty percent into Good Calories, Bad Calories. So? I'm a slow reader. I'm obviously very good at math though. First section is all about cholesterol. As you will know, my superhero identity is LowCholesterolman. It's a very important mission that I have, but it doesn't, fortunately, have much to do with cholesterol per se. A mere symbol of my overall and pervasive healthful excellence. Because, as I am being informed -- having felt no need of the information previously -- cholesterol levels seem to have a random correlation to mortality.

As Taubes has it, there was an invalid hypothesis, that high dietary fat is correlated to increased heart disease, and this fat is best indicated by serum cholesterol levels. The science does not support the hypothesis, but politics and ambition and bias all coalesced in the late 70s to bring about the announcement if not the reality of a consensus, and the dogma was set.

My own paradigm identifies not dietary fat, but animal protein as the great killer. Well, that, and dietary fat of the omega six kind -- not at all animal ... vegetable, any of the vegetable oils you use to kill yourself with. I call them the Cees and the Esses. Corn, cotton, canola, soy, safflower, sunflower, um, peanut. Not food. Poisons. Lard is better. By far. This is a digression, however.

The problem, aside from politicizing science, is in simplifying it. First, epidemiology -- by which we identify population-wide causes of disease -- is a technique very well suited to identifying single causes, when the cause is singular. A polluted well that is causing dysentery, or cholera, or whatever it is that polluted wells cause. Epidemiology is perfect for this. But when the cause is not some single agent, but something environmental that must interact with the complexities of genetics and diet and a host of other subtle and confounding factors -- not so much. I'm forgetting the word for it, but there's a problem with medications, that can act in unpredictable ways on an individual basis. One size does not fit all. It's not just dosage -- it's categorical.

So when cholesterol was put forward as the dietary Satan, well, Satan is not so simple. They didn't even know to distinguish between HDL and LDL (the bad one, of which I have none). Triglycerides seem to be a greater culprit, and you'd have to be a super brain genius like me to ever have even heard of such a thing.

The problem isn't just that America trotted gaily down the wrong primrose path. By substituting in vegetable oils for saturated fats, America got fat along the way. Not just fat -- sick. Thanks for that, liars and idiots in the sciences, government and media. Now go to hell for your sins.

Application for today? Well, of course change your diet. But there is a perfect analogue to the cholesterol debacle. It's called Global Warming. A single cause, anthropogenic carbon dioxide, blamed for a non-existent rise in global temperatures -- temps have fallen every year this decade. But y'know what? The debate is over.

Like it was for so long with cholesterol. But it's not. The cholesterol idiocy has caused untold damage to the health of well-meaning people. Now we're set to ruin the world economy over carbon. If we live long enough, it seems, we will see every mistake repeat itself, time and again. It's a good thing the government issued those dietary recommendations about heart-healthy veggie oils, so that we'll die too soon to fry to death on the superheated surface of this dying world.

So that's a good thing. Never mind.


J