Most Nutrition Research Is Bunk
Government nutrition advice based on decades of “research” by nutrition epidemiologists has now been shown to be mostly unwarranted scaremongering, writes Stanford University statistician John P.A. Ioannidis, who has been at the forefront of criticizing the misuse and abuse of statistics to justify the publication of shoddy and just plain wrong research in numerous disciplines.
Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”
Afterward, according to science, the dinosaurs took 100,000 years to die off — a “heartbeat” in geological time, we’re told. But 100,000 years is an eternity in a dinosaur’s time. It still doesn’t make sense.
Grab a coffee. (And then marvel at the lack of self-awareness in the concluding paragraphs.)
Usually, we inherit genes from each of our parent in fairly equal measures. However, there are now approximately 20 reported cases of children inheriting almost all of their genes from a single parent.
…about four in ten people who are thought to be unconscious are actually aware
One in five people with severe brain injury from trauma will recover to the point that they can live at home and care for themselves without help
The term [permanent vegetative state] should be dropped and that pain relief should be given to patients affected
These are the startling conclusions of a new US practice guideline for managing prolonged disorders of consciousness (PDOC) issued earlier this week.
h/t Instapundit. Read it all.
The country with the world’s highest meat consumption appears to be Hong Kong, according to the National Geographic. (Although Hong Kong isn’t a self-governing nation, but an administrative district.)
[…]
Hong Kong is also number three in the world in per capita beef consumption, so their meat isn’t just chicken or seafood.
Together with China and Macao, Hong Kong is fourth in the world in per capita pork consumption.
If our health authorities are right, then people in Hong Kong should be dropping like flies from heart disease and cancer.
But they’re not.
Thousands of people take omega-3 supplements regularly and for years. The belief that it protects the heart has spread – and is promoted in the marketing of the supplements – because the results from early trials suggested the capsules had cardiovascular benefits.
Small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, are essential for our health. Omega-3 fats are found in certain foods – most famously in oily fish such as salmon and cod liver oil, which contain the long chain fats called eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Nuts and seeds, and in particular walnuts and rapeseed oil, contain another sort of omega-3, called alphalinolenic acid (ALA).
But a major review by the respected Cochrane collaboration of all the well-conducted trials carried out internationally to test the effect of omega-3, involving more than 112,000 people, says there is no evidence that the supplements do any good.
[…]
The belief that omega-3 supplements could protect against cardiovascular diseases came from a couple of positive results from trials in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Lee. “We’ve all believed it for quite a long while,” she said. “But none of the trials since have shown these results. We somehow haven’t adjusted to that data.”
Just eat whatever the hell you want. (h/t TH)
By probing those layers of sediment, Garzione and her colleagues have found that parts of the Altiplano didn’t gain their great height until 5 million to 10 million years ago. That means the Andes did not rise gradually over the last 45 million years, but lurched skyward in dramatic pulses.
Nearly a hundred stone tools found at the Shangchen site in central China may push back the spread of our ancient cousins—hominins—out of Africa by more than a quarter million years.
The toolmakers lived at Shangchen on and off for 800,000 years between 2.1 and 1.3 million years ago, leaving behind tools that are unprecedented outside of Africa. The site’s oldest tools are roughly 300,000 years older than Dmanisi, a 1.8-million-year-old site in the Republic of Georgia with the oldest known fossils of our extinct cousin Homo erectus. […]
“I’ve always said that once the Chinese researchers start looking for evidence on a similar scale as all the money spent in Africa, things will turn up!” exclaims Gerrit van den Bergh, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wollongong who wasn’t involved with the study.
“It again shows how little we actually know.”
Indeed.
“It is time to accept that not all hominins found in Asia fit in the Asian H. erectus taxon, a species that has been largely employed as a blanket term,” she says. “I think that the question about the first Asian hominin identity is not closed yet.”
Regardless, Shangchen’s toolmakers would have had brains about a third the size of our own. While brain size isn’t everything, experts say that it’s astounding that such early, small-brained humans made it from Africa to China some two million years ago.
Well, maybe they weren’t from Africa.
“The majority of papers that get published, even in serious journals, are pretty sloppy,” said John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who specializes in the study of scientific studies.
This sworn enemy of bad research published a widely cited article in 2005 entitled: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Since then, he says, only limited progress has been made.
Except in climate science. Because trillions of dollars now depend on it being unassailable.
Scientists are just beginning to understand how microscopic organisms that rise out of the ocean can help manage global temperatures.
(All science today is “global temperatures” science, because “global temperatures” are the magic funding words.)
“This article addresses questions in human geography and the geographies of sexuality by drawing upon one year of embedded in situ observations of dogs and their human companions at three public dog parks in Portland, Oregon,” states the paper’s abstract. “The purpose of this research is to uncover emerging themes in human and canine interactive behavioral patterns in urban dog parks to better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality.”
OK, then.
Does thick first year ice on Hudson Bay mean a late date ashore for WH polar bears in 2018?
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry explains her conversion to skeptic as she is set to debate Michael Mann…
The 1992 UN Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the warming was caused by humans. There was tremendous political pressure on the IPCC scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which resulted in a manufactured consensus.
You know what this means, of course.
The presence of astronauts on the moon caused an unexpected warming of its subsurface temperatures for a period of time in the 1970s, a new study has found after delving into “lost” tapes from the Apollo missions.
In 1971 and 1972, NASA deployed sensors on the moon during the Apollo 15 and 17 missions in an effort to measure the moon’s surface and subsurface temperatures — a project dubbed the heat flow experiment.
Data was collected and beamed back down to Earth until 1977, where scientists were baffled by the gradual warming of the moon’s surface being read by the sensors.
It means a “moonbat tax” is on the horizon.
A few years ago the health division of the National Academies commissioned a panel to review all the science to date and concluded that there was no evidence that people would benefit from giving up moderate sodium intake. Some studies suggested that people who consumed very little sodium had a greater risk of dying from stroke or heart disease. At the time, the doctor who led the panel, Brian Strom of Rutgers University, told me the 1,500 milligram goal was derived from a process that was “not entirely rational.”
If you’re craving an essential nutrient, you should probably pay attention.
Now, samples taken from two different drill sites on an ancient lake bed have yielded complex organic molecules that look strikingly similar to the goopy fossilized building blocks of oil and gas on Earth.
The rover also discovered traces of methane…
Despite their reputation, flatulent cows aren’t capable of destroying the world, an environmental politics professor argues in forthcoming research paper. But still, livestock are saddled with an outsized share of the blame for climate change. And if that misunderstanding persists, and pushes policymakers to force a societal shift from meat-eating, it could lead to disaster, says Ryan Katz-Rosene at the University of Ottawa’s school of political studies.
The idea that eating meat is bad for the environment is a drastic oversimplification of an incredibly complex subject, born from a 2006 study that suggested livestock production was as bad as the transportation sector, counting for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, Katz-Rosene said in an interview. There were several problems with the 18 percent figure, he said, but it still managed to brand livestock as one of the villains in the war on climate change.
h/t Bob
The truth is that there’s no evidence that reducing cholesterol prolongs life. Disturbingly, there’s a consistent and confounding increase in deaths from other causes when you reduce cholesterol below 180 mg/dl. Yet every two years, experts from around the world meet and decide that the optimal cholesterol level is invariably lower than it was decided to be at the last meeting – without having any solid evidence to back it up.
@JudithCurry —“A new angle on climate model uncertainty: changing the order in which different climate processes are computed can vary climate feedback parameter by half the full CMIP5 spread in climate feedback. “