The Sound Of Settled Science

I have seen how some science is done. Trust me, most of it is total junk. You could probably cut 50% of grants and not lose any valuable data or research.

You would probably only lose the students and professors who take multiple vacations a year.

Sounds like the same flawed self-serving fraudulent political research as in the AGW fraud.

The Nutritionists are figuring out what the Climate Scientists figured out a long time ago.

Lie, cheat, fearmonger and create hysteria if you want to government to shovel money off the truck into your lab.

Seems like the entire University research community, or at least the process, is corrupt/incompetent.

I still got a kick out of this line

"When anti-science rhetoric occurs at a Kansas school-board fight over creationism, we can nod our educated heads in silent amusement,"

I don't understand why creationism/evolution are incompatible but what I do notice is that all the "educated" heads that wholly refute creationism are all the same people perpetrating research fraud.

This is nothing new ... but still deserves repeating.

Researchers work to produce results that support the need for more research and thus more research funding. I could care less so long as it is NOT tax money supporting the research.

Unfortunately ... the government doles out our money without any regard for accountability or performance.

Also, it is just as likely that any new revelations about old research are just as specious as the research being questioned.

Sadly ... the ethical failures of some in the scientific community are going to affect all the honest work that has been or will be.

Ken, the AGW research is not "flawed", these scientists are manipulating exactly the results that serve their master's agenda.

The majority of scientists working for agendized institutions will always nuzzle the hand that feeds them, on the other hand, REAL scientists want to be proven wrong or right so they can most efficiently continue the path to the truth. As a CEO, would you waste your staff's time and resources on a cancer cure that may not be found for generations or would yet another hard-on pill backed by slick marketing be what shareholders want?

Also, as much as people here love to whine about a biased media, I never hear about my 2 biggest pet peeves with their lack of professionalism. Those are the regular reporting of manufactured news(polls)as real news and the wide reporting of "one-off" health studies as news, that is if their content can be deciphered as "entertaining". I also notice that they don't mind the advertising dollars from countless fraudulent and quackery-based "health" products they accept.

As long as our learning institutions in the west squelch free-thinking and competitiveness in favor of creating little robots for our economies, I have great concerns on where the Chinese are going to steal their new technologies in the future.

Formal medical research into nutrition, and the work of food scientists typically within biochemistry departments in universities, is almost
irrelevant. Research in nutrition is being carried out by the general
public - intelligent housewives, athletes, body builders etc. - who are
using themselves as their research subjects. Their findings are then
disseminated partly by word of mouth but mainly by the internet. As my
wife, one of these intrepid folk says, "why don't doctors know about this?"
Well, they slowly do take cognizance of the work - probably in the first
instance through nurses and wives of male physicians.

All of this goes forward slowly. The amount of information out there is
huge, but flawed; incompetents, crazies, and charlatans are present in
goodly numbers. But the intelligent can make their way through the morass,
eventually. I have watched my wife find her way through, initially with
the help of a friend in Pennsylvania. The friend added about five years
to the lifespan of her own husband (he's not dead yet so the amount isn't
certain). Both my wife and her friend's husband had reached the point of
suffering nasty conditions for which conventional medical science offered
no help.

Again, it is the popular finding on chiropractic which has made that
available and almost medically respectable.

Nutrition and health is a complex field, but it has not attracted the best and brightest. It is like the women's volleyball team of science. Gary Taubes reports that when he attended presentations of papers by physicists, the presenter would be bombarded with ruthlessly difficult questions. At a nutrition science session, everyone claps with no difficult questions. Rah, rah, team. Let's go. The only ones who encounter resistance are those challenging the status quo ante dogmas, and even then the attacks are ad hominen and inarticulate. A friend presented results ofrom a prospective diet study showing benefits from low carb high fat diet and nutrition researchers in attendance wiere apoplectic and red-faced with rage at the suggestion low carb could be effective to lose body fat (although my friend is lithe and the most vocal intervenor was visibly much overweight). The objector managed only insults and no critical insights into the experimental design or what could be validly inferred from the results. This is not science as science is done in physics, chemistry, etc.

The genuine science in nutrition and health is being done by clinicians with extensive anecdotal experience with trial and error and metabolic researchers who elucidate the metabolic pathways that provide plausible explanations for the clinical results.

I must say that I was totally shocked when I read that nutritional research relies on self-reports of individuals about what they eat. I had some idea that people would be isolated in labs, fed portions of food measured to the nearest gram and have their BMR directly measured as well as metabolic rates while they were exercising. The tendency to under-report ones food intake in direct relationship to ones BMI is something that any doctor who works with patients with eating disorders knows.

During my training I had occasion to work with an eating disorders specialist whose patients weights ranged from 50-500+ pounds. One of the parts of history taking in such patients is to ask them to recall what they ate yesterday. What I found quite curious was that the 550 pounder would describe a diet which contained perhaps half the calories that I would eat in a day and, almost universally, the final comment from such individuals would be "Doc, how is it that I eat so little and I just can't lose weight?". OTOH, the gaunt 50 lb anorectic would describe daily food intake which would be sufficient to feed a couple of lumberjacks working hard in below zero weather. They would bristle at the suggestion that perhaps they were exaggerating their caloric intake and the common retort would be "I have a very fast metabolism" despite their acrocyanosis and wearing multiple layers of clothes in a warm room (admittedly I hadn't yet fully comprehended the fact that some women would eat this amount of food and then vomit it all up). What I learned from that medical rotation was that all patients lie, especially if it's in the areas of food intake or their romantic lives.

The pdf file that is linked to shows this relationship between physiologically improbable caloric intakes and patients weights. Documenting patients lies is interesting for future reference in the morbidly obese and some of these individuals truly forget the massive amounts of food that they eat or, if they suffer from night-eating syndrome, they can sleep eat the majority of their calories and have no recollection of the nocturnal binge.

It takes a special kind of researcher to be as gullible as these dietary researchers appear to be. While it may seem somewhat harsh, I treat the dietary histories of the morbidly obese the same way that I treat the dog-ate-my-morphine stories of opiate seeking patients: you know they're lying if their lips are moving.