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Heresiarch

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  1. The above gave me an epiphany, which is why I've quoted it. I'm a layman; a trained engineer, but not a biologist or chemist or doctor or even a university professor. If I see someone claiming that saturated fats aren't the evil the mass media makes it out to be, and can name some studies and papers and dig around within those studies to pick apart their methods, that's good enough to convince me (once I've checked out their line of reasoning). However, it doesn't give me the tools to convince anyone else -- other than to say "go read the same stuff that I read." Once I've read enough material, I have a fairly well-formed opinion, but I'm not qualified to write a journal article on the subject. I think 99% of the people on this forum think that saturated fat is bad for you, based upon the fact that mass media and school teachers think so. I wouldn't call that knowledge. When I posted previously in this thread, those people were my audience. You've stepped up the standard here a notch. You're asking us to do something akin to writing a journal article. I'm willing to step up to that, but this is something I do in my spare time. So, I'll just list a serious of contentions, and go from there. I don't want to just dump some random points, though; I want to state well-formed claims. I'll post again "real soon now," and probably in the biosciences forum.
  2. Heresiarch

    Traffic Laws

    If roads were privatized, I think what we'd get would be a lot more railways and subways. Cars are grossly, horribly inefficient. Public roads, and the cars that drive on them, have given us bedroom communities and suburban shopping centers. The last hundred years would have been very different if public roads weren't paved everywhere and "a car in every driveway" considered the heart of the American dream. I'd much rather take a train ride across the nation than drive it (as much as I like to drive). It'd be cheaper, to boot.
  3. The burden is on those that make claims. The Lipid Hypothesis is a claim. Where is the evidence for it? We don't have to disprove it. As I mentioned above, I think this thread about processing food is misguided. I think you two are talking past each other. Progressiveman, I suggest you make it clear that you're not talking about "human manipulation" as a primary causal agent. Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories does a great job of pulling together the reasons why the Lipid Hypothesis is the current mainstream belief. Maybe getting to a bookstore is difficult for you, I don't know. I suggest stopping by a bookstore or library and reading the first chapter or two. He's done much more research than I have. I can't really recommend too many websites because, you know, they're websites. People put them up in their spare time. The best two are westonaprice.org and thincs.org. The latter is a spare-time kinda thing, but the posters are all professional scientists, researchers, or practitioners. The Weston A Price foundation is a non-profit and moderately funded, and many of the articles are of professional quality. I've seen a lot of Objectivists say "go read Rand, she's expressed this much more eloquently and covered it in much more depth than I can." I'm saying the same here. I suggest reading Taubes first.
  4. Indeed, some among the community that question the Lipid Hypothesis go that far. They think processing -- as in, man manipulating food in some way -- is what destroys the nutritive value of food. I agree with your reductio ad absurdum -- the intervention of mankind isn't what makes certain foods bad. However, when the more cogent of the dissenters talk about "processed foods," they mean just what progressiveman1 mentioned: refined sugar, hydrogenated oils, white flour. These food products (and similar items like high-fructose corn syrup and texturized vegetable protein) are the evils to the skeptics. They could keep repeating the long list of food items every time they wanted to talk about them, or they could use a neologism or a compound word. They stick to "processed foods," and what they mean is just this short list of foods -- not all products that have ever been manipulated by a human. The complaint isn't about processing; it's about the effect that these specific foods have on men. Mainstream opinion is fairly well settled; the skeptics, however, are a diverse bunch. Most skeptics (as well as most non-skeptics) are irrational people. The people that rally around Weston A Price focus on the nutritive value of the foods they eat; the cholesterol skeptics have a wide range of different hypotheses, ranging from homocysteine to excess carbohydrate intake; and there are a handful of independent personalities, like Mercola, that have a grab-bag of complaints. So where's the science? The Anti-Coronary Club Trial was started in the late 1950s. By November 1966, 26 of the "Club members" had died, eight from heart attacks, compared to 6 deaths (none from heart attacks) in the control group. Seymour Dayton reported in 1969 on a study of 850 veterans. The study group saw their cholesterol droop 13% lower than the controls, and 30 fewer members died from heart disease. Hurrah, right? Significantly more of the study group died from cancer. When autopsied, there was no difference in the amount of atherosclerosis between the two groups. Statin trials have shown similar results: lowering your serum cholesterol indeed lowers your risk of death from heart disease -- you'll just die from cancer, or stroke, or something else, instead. The statin proponents don't like talking about mortality. The four-and-a-half year Minnesota Coronary Study included more than 9000 men and women; half served a low-cholesterol, low-saturated fat, and high-polyunsaturated fat diet, while the other half received a "typical American diet." The cholesterol-lowering diet was associated with an increased rate of heart disease. 269 on the diet died, compared to 206 eating the normal fare. A 1957 study on 5400 male employees at Western Electric looked at (among other things) the 15% of the men that ate the most fatty food and the 15% that ate the least. After four years, 14 new cases of heart disease showed up in the high-fat group and 16 in the low-fat group. After two decades, the study was revisited: "the amount of saturated fatty acids in the diet was not significantly associated with the risk of death from [CHD]". The Framingham Heart Study was launched in 1950 and followed 5100 residents, re-examining them every two years. The risk for heart disease among the men with high cholesterol was five times the risk of men with cholesterol levels under 200 - but this correlation disappeared with age, was substantially lower for women, and was completely absent for women over 50. The study director said, "the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people's serum cholesterol...." I've seen the Framingham study cited as proof that high serum cholesterol causes heart disease, but that isn't what that study demonstrated at all. It demonstrated correlation, not causation, and most importantly only among a subset of the population. There's Mann's research into the Masai, who consumed solely animal products yet had low cholesterol and no heart disease until they moved into neighboring Nairobi and started eating traditional Western diets. Studies of native populations in Alaska and the Yukon showed similar results. Here are a handful of other studies showing no link between dietary fat and heart disease: Navajo Indians: Page et al 1956 Irish immigrants in Boston: Trulson et al 1964. Swiss alpine farmers: Gsell and Mayer 1962. Benedictine and Trappist Monks: Groen et al 1962. Samburu: Shaper 1962. The Helsinki Mental Hospital Study ran from 1959 to 1971, and their cholesterol-lowering diet seemed to reduce heart-disease deaths by half. This study is frequently cited by those supporting the Lipid Hypothesis. What about all of these other studies? You can't pick and choose your evidence.
  5. The shy person isn't actively fearful of interactions with other people. Rather, he avoids interactions with other people. This might be due to an irrational fear. The thing is, once you overcome that fear, you are not magically granted the powers of clever and appropriate social interaction. Some people pick it up right away; others move from a global, irrational sense of low self-esteem to a specific low estimation of their own social awareness, which can be just as crippling. Shyness and introversion are similar, but I think they view the same phenomenon from different angles. The introvert prefers to work and/or play alone; the shy person is difficult to draw out into conversation. An introvert might be shy, or he might be great at a party. The shy person might also be introverted, or maybe instead he loves hanging out with his friends (but shuts down when faced with meeting a stranger).
  6. For the short answer on how to eat right: it's not going to be a little money. Quality food isn't grown in a vat, or produced by animals given the latest high-tech recombinant hormone. Stay away from processed foods (processed cheese, pasteurized milk, TV dinners, white flour), soy, and sugars (including fructose!). Eat nutrient-dense food, such as red meat, organ meat, dairy products, and cooked green vegetables. Learn the basics of endocrinology. Think in terms of micronutrients, not just macronutrients. -- "Everyone knows" that public roads and public schools and taxation are good and right and just. "Everyone knows" that saturated fat is bad for you, that tofu is a great health food, statins are a wonder drug, and that all the vitamins needed for a lifetime of good health can be bought from Sam's Club. I don't agree with Rand because I worship her authority; I rebuilt my philosophy from the ground up. Using observation and logic, I could follow the development of philosophy from metaphysical axioms to epistemology to ethics to politics. I think the same process should be used in all areas of knowledge. How do we know that cholesterol causes heart disease? Because doctors stay in school for a long time, and because it's impossible for anyone who stays in school that long to be wrong about it? Because, as people that value reason and science highly, anyone who calls themselves a scientist is free from bias and irrationality? Is it because the FDA says it's true, and as a government organization, they are smart and rational people and surely couldn't be wrong here? Obviously the answer is "no" to all of these questions. So I don't want to just give you my answer; what makes me any better of an authority to follow than your doctor or the FDA or General Mills? "How does Joe Random find out what good nutrition is?" This is a question I've faced often, as I've tried to proselytize both Objectivism and nutrition. I've studied biology and chemistry and microbiology; I wouldn't expect everyone else to. I could tell you how *I* came to think cholesterol and saturated fat are good things -- that started with being bored and interested in UFOs. Not in the I-believe-in-aliens way, but in the sci-fi-crossed-with-skepticism-and-debate way. Some UFO skeptics and writers (James P Hogan in particular) also opened doors for me into other areas: does HIV really cause AIDS? Is Mad Cow Disease caused by bovine cannibalism, or a mix of organophosphate pesticides and heavy metals? Is ascorbic acid equivalent to Vitamin C, or is there a host of chemicals that contribute to the nutritional value found in whole foods? Is elevated serum cholesterol a causal agent in heart disease or merely a correlated phenomenon? The thing about alternative-theory communities is they attract nutballs. If I told my coworkers, outright, that I think income taxes are wrong, they lump me into the same boat as the Libertarians that run around shouting "taxation is theft!" Well, sure, ok, but that doesn't endear you to anyone, especially the rational people that are on the fence and would (otherwise) be open to conversation. Most people aren't Objectivists; on both sides of all these alternate-theory debates are non-Objectivists. When the whole-fooder says "the studies that attempted to show the value in statins wind up demonstrating a higher mortality among those taking the drug," they follow with "so you should stay away from them, and eat the whole foods that God intended you to." The situation is exacerbated by the common response to alternate theories. When Velikovsky's craziness garnered significant public interest, Sagan's response was "he's a nutjob." Which didn't do much to show people how Velikovsky was wrong. Many of you are probably familiar with the response to global warming critics; Gore calls them deniers, not just ending debate but shutting it down so hard that any question of the official line is considered insanity. Finding answers requires a lot of philosophical detection. I have not found any major Objectivist coverage of the nutrition debate, so you'll have to read through it all yourself. (If you've read dozens of books in order to grasp philosophy, why not do the same for long-term health?) I often see Objectivists say "the important thing to do is to not let silly notions go unchallenged; let the lay public know that there is reasoned opposition to the mainstream idea." I'm trying to do the same here. If you want to learn more, I suggest starting with the Weston A Price Foundation, thincs.org, and the book Nutrient Timing (available from your local GNC for like $3!).
  7. And aren't you just being a labelitarian?
  8. Crossing the street exposes you to the risk of getting run over by a truck. You could minimize that risk by staying inside your house all day. Who would ever want to leave their house? Obviously, leaving your house (or joining the army) isn't a decision based upon an assessment of risk alone. Many people see great value in joining the military, whether it's a respect for soldiers who are willing to die to protect their families and freedoms, or the career prospects of a life in the armed forces, or the money from a GI Bill that will pay for higher education, or even just the economic option to someone with few other economic prospects. Joining the army isn't purely risk; it also comes with reward. I think, for everyone, for different levels of security, there's some price/risk point where they're willing to join the army. Think of it like a militia, as if you were living in the wild west: would you take up your gun to defend your family, neighbors, and freedom? How big of a threat would an enemy nation have to be before you decided to fight rather than live in subjugation?
  9. This could apply to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and numerous other "great" philosophers. There's a concept in Philosophy known as Obscurantism; the idea is that someone is being opaque (intentionally or not), and because no-one can understand them, therefore they must have something more profound than our simple intelligences can perceive. "Too intelligent to properly convey their ideas" is a defense of obscurantism. The charge was brought against Hegel during his lifetime, and his reply was that he was developing a new type of logic; of course his stuff didn't make sense, you had to be willing to stretch your mind around this new logic first. I think it has a lot in common with ad-hoc hypotheses, and your defense against it is similar.
  10. I think you're using too much jargon. For example, in the following bit: The important thing to communicate here is primacy of existence -- but I wouldn't use that phrase when talking to someone who hadn't studied Oism. Technical terms and complex, jargon-filled phrases make me think of Kant. You don't want to overwhelm your correspondent; I think it's best to focus on one subject at a time. I've found that giving them snippets of ethics and politics and epistemology is more confusing than helpful. It gives the impression that they have to know this giant, complex philosophy (like, say, studying all of Kant's writing) just to comment on this one little part. But Objectivism isn't like that. It describes reality. It describes what you see in front of your face. The names we give to concepts (the jargon) helps us communicate with each other, and places concepts aside other ideas in the history of philosophy. But to a new student, the goal should be to help them make the same observations; to come to the same conclusion. I don't use the phrase "measurement-omission" because I read it in a book. I understand the process; I read the book, and introspected, and was able to match my observations and reasoning with what I read. I realized that the concept that I had arrived at matched. You want to walk your target through the same process; get them to start asking themselves whether they really believe that reality is out there -- or if, instead, they would rather believe that they're a brain in a jar, or that every single one of us is in a different universe, or whatever.
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