Fear those looking out for the public good...
What Paul Krugman Could Learn From How Big Government Created The Obesity Epidemic - Forbes
Teicholz reports in The Big Fat Surprise itself:
The source of our misguided dietary advice was in some ways more disturbing, since it seems to have been driven by experts at some of our most trusted institutions working toward what they believed to be the public good.
The (dietary fat) hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested. Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma. The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health. And the normally self-correcting mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging ones own beliefs, was disabled. While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. And the whole system by which ideas are canonized as fact seems to have failed us.
Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them. One of the twentieth centurys most revered nutrition scientists, the organic chemist David Kritchevsky, discovered his thirty years ago when, on a panel for the National Academy of Sciences, he suggested loosening the restrictions on dietary fat.
We were jumped on! he told me. People would spit on us! Its hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag.
Zealotry. Passions. Dogma. Not science.
What Paul Krugman Could Learn From How Big Government Created The Obesity Epidemic - Forbes
Teicholz reports in The Big Fat Surprise itself:
The source of our misguided dietary advice was in some ways more disturbing, since it seems to have been driven by experts at some of our most trusted institutions working toward what they believed to be the public good.
The (dietary fat) hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested. Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma. The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health. And the normally self-correcting mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging ones own beliefs, was disabled. While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. And the whole system by which ideas are canonized as fact seems to have failed us.
Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them. One of the twentieth centurys most revered nutrition scientists, the organic chemist David Kritchevsky, discovered his thirty years ago when, on a panel for the National Academy of Sciences, he suggested loosening the restrictions on dietary fat.
We were jumped on! he told me. People would spit on us! Its hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag.
Zealotry. Passions. Dogma. Not science.
