Former Salt Expert Weighs In

"These are your kidneys on salt," explains the venerable Dr. Sharma.

This from Dr. Arya M. Sharma's Obesity Notes blog:

While I have no illusions that this [Institutes of Medicine] report [on salt] will in any way put the century old debate to rest (indeed the report calls for further research), I think that there is a much bigger message in this report that should let us tread cautiously when it comes to dietary recommendations in general. 

Let us remember that associations (on which so many of our assumptions about healthy diets depend) simply do not prove causality, even when backed by seemingly plausible biological hypotheses derived largely from rodent toxicology. We should also remember that fancy statistical predictions on the vast number of lives lost or saved by altering the population intake of this or the other nutrient, are generally based on sometimes rather heroic assumptions that may well explain whey [sic] they are rarely (if ever) borne out by actual interventions. 

Thus, whether we are talking about salt, fat, carbs, sugar, fibre, gluten, calcium, Vit D, dairy or red-meat, a degree of humility in advocating for policies and other measures to reduce or increase this or the other is generally in order. 

Seldom in the field of nutrition are things as cut and dried as some will have us believe – if only food were as simple as tobacco.

It's for these reasons, and probably more, that I think the government should reduce its involvement in creating and enforcing nutrition policies. The science is just too tenuous, and lawmakers a little too susceptible to the political machinations of nutrition activists and businesses.

I mean, barring famines, our ancestors did pretty well for themselves nutritionally, all without the aid of governments, ad agencies, doctors, personal trainers, and so forth.

Not Far from Home

An artist rendering of the Meridian Idaho temple

Not far from where I grew up another beautiful Mormon temple will soon be completed. Once the groundbreaking takes place, it'll probably only be another 18 months before the temple opens to the public for an open house, after which it will be dedicated for use by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In temples we are taught about God and his plan for his children and the central role of Jesus Christ in that plan. We enter into covenants to live good, clean lives, and to serve the Lord with all our hearts.

Temples too are where Mormons aspire to be married for time and all eternity, hence Mormonism's heavy emphasis on the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family. Family relationships are meant to endure, and Mormons believe in the literal fulfillment of this sentiment through the ordinances of the temple, where the the power of God to bind on earth and in heaven is manifest.

My Favorite Soap: As the Pendulum Swings

It kills me, it kills me not . . .

Ah, nutrition research. So rife with controversy.

The big new study on salt, as reported in the New York Times, is important, a step in the right direction, though in itself will not end the debate.

Nutrition research investigating the effects of food components on a population's health outcomes is notoriously difficult to conduct. Thus every study, especially the epidemiological ones--as pointed out in the article--should be taken with, well, a grain of salt.

A Tale of Two Meats

A cold-blooded killer

In the news we read that Samoa has lifted its ban on the imports of turkey tail, which was implemented in 2007 under the guise of improving public health.

Turkey tail is high in fat, and so its ban should have measurably improved the health outcomes of Samoans, right? Was anyone prescient enough to begin a longitudinal study to examine this question? Here we had, in essence, a government-sponsored clinical study handed to us on a plaited coconut-leaf platter, and what have we seen?

What's interesting to me is that fat alone is unlikely the culprit of the Samoans' high obesity rates. Samoans always had a fatty diet from the abundance of coconut milk they consume. (And coconut fat is primarily saturated fat, no less.)

So why single out turkey tail (and, apparently, mutton flaps) for regulation, and not, say, soda, which in Samoa comes in 750 mL bottles, or other sources of refined carbohydrate? 

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of using the strong arm of the government to ban any foods, fatty or sugary. Government intervention has hardly solved our nutrition problems in the United States, I doubt that model is going to work elsewhere.)

If we look at the transition in Samoans' diet from traditional to modern, it's the combination of high fat with high refined carbohydrate intake--and not the fat per se--that is likely the culprit.

Turkey tail and mutton flaps are merely nutritional scapegoats, easy targets for nutritional activists, and not the actual cause--as is claimed--of Samoans' (and other Pacific Islanders') health woes.

Likely a celebration of the return of turkey tail and mutton flap to Samoa

(Photo credits: Jules Food and NiuZila)

 

New Atheist Delusions

I once perused Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and I've long wanted to post about my impressions that he is, at best, a very shallow thinker when it comes to religion, and that those who buy into his arguments aren't thinking any deeper than he is.

Gregory L. Smith provides us with two recent posts (here and here) that sum up much of what I would have said, that is, had I the time and resources and intellect to do it. They're both worth reading.

Today the pendulum swings, perhaps, in the direction of the New Atheists and their disciples, tomorrow it swings away from them.

But God's existence or nonexistence has never depended on our opinions into the matter. It is not His existence that is on trial, it is ourselves.

Too Much Beauty Can Be An Ugly Thing

The New York Times reports the sad story of a Dutch psychology researcher whose career imploded when it was discovered that he had fabricated data used in some 55 publications and at least 10 students' PhD dissertations.

Apart from serving to illustrate the perils of the publish or perish culture of academia, the nature of Stapel's fraud seems a strange twist on a fallacy described by--yep, here I go again--historian David Hackett Fischer.

"The aesthetic fallacy," Fischer writes, "selects beautiful facts, or facts that can be built into a beautiful story, rather than facts that are functional to the empirical problem at hand."

Times reporter Yudhijit Bhattacharjee notes that in his interview with the now disgraced scientist,

Stapel brought out individually wrapped chocolate bars for us to share. As we ate them, I watched him neatly fold up his wrappers into perfectly rectangular shapes. Later, I got used to his reminding me not to leave doors ajar when we walked in or out of a room. When I pointed this out, he admitted to a lifelong obsession with order and symmetry.

Bhattacharjee continues,

He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said.

The difference, though, between what Stapel did and the aesthetic fallacy as Fischer describes it, is that Stapel, "frustrated by the messiness of experimental data," chose to not merely cherry pick beautiful facts but instead deliberately fabricated beautiful facts to support his hypotheses.

As Fischer notes, "Any attempt to conduct [an empirical] search according to aesthetic standards of significance (most commonly in an attempt to tell a beautiful story) is either to abandon empiricism or to contradict it."

In the case of Stapel and his fabricated data, it would appear that he managed to do both.

The Economy Can Use All the Spending It Can Get

I don't profess to know much more about economics--or economists, for that matter--than what I've read in this book and this book. So I'm not able to say much about it, or them.

But this video featuring the ideas of dead economists set to Christmas tunes is hilarious and this one on personal economics is an all-time favorite.

Also worth watching are the epic rap battles of John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, round one and round two.