I’m going to make up a series of fictional health claims which I will put in quotes below to begin a discussion on pseudoscience.
“Smoking is actually good for you. Doctors used to recommend it, until the government realized that demonizing tobacco would allow them to charge exorbitant taxes on cigarettes. It is a well-known scientific fact that smoking frequently lowers a person’s BMI, and you will notice that obesity has soared over the past 50 years, corresponding with the decrease in smoking among the broader public. Despite lower incidence of smoking, lung cancer has soared, proving that tobacco does not cause it. Native Americans used to smoke tobacco for thousands of years prior to contact with Europeans, and it was part of a healthy, natural diet, and was even an effective, all-natural painkiller. Moreover, there are more than a few centenarians who have smoked most of their lives, proving it can be part of a healthy life.”
I pulled most (but not all) of this out of my ass, but in casual conversation, how would you disprove me? Or would you even be able to? Would you even want to?
See, the problem with pseudoscience is that it’s just scientific enough to be plausible, even though its conclusions are complete bullshit. I myself wouldn’t have enough knowledge on the tobacco “debate” to disprove myself in this situation, but what we see among the diet wars are things just like this, all the time. “Plants are trying to kill you, they have defense mechanisms!”
To be fair, I couldn’t tell you any landmark studies that definitively concluded that smoking was bad for you, but it’s been told to me my entire life, so I kind of just believe it. Saying it that way makes it sound really bad that I think smoking is wrong, right? Except that studies DO exist, and the evidence for smoking being bad for you was so incredibly strong that it actually shifted public opinion monumentally against tobacco, despite how well-entrenched it was in society. It was a painful transition. It took decades to enact. It’s entirely possible that lung cancer has gone up in total, but almost certainly not per-capita. This distinction is hugely important, but confusing these two perspectives is a sneaky tactic used by the insincere (or, the very ignorant).
Most people know or believe that smoking is bad for you, largely because public health took the science and formulated it into public policy. What’s funny, too, is that I am actually slightly familiar with two large studies that proved smoking is bad for you: the Seven Countries Study, and the North Karelia Project. You want to know what’s really, really funny about those studies? They also proved that high LDL is a risk factor for heart disease.
See, that’s what nobody has been able to explain to me. I believe it was the popular Keto influencer Gary Taubes who first threw Ancel Keys – the author of the Seven Countries Study – under the bus, saying all sorts of terrible things about Keys that I don’t think are warranted. But this got picked up by all of the Paleo/Keto influencers after Taubes, such that it’s a very popular talking point for pro-Keto, pro-Carnivore ideology today. “Keys was a terrible human being, who did terrible science, who cherry-picked everything, etc., etc.!” This has become a cornerstone of cholesterol denialism, but for some very, very odd reason, nobody has taken aim at his other conclusions, such as that little bit about smoking being a risk factor for heart disease (among other things).
(Why would people take issue with claims about LDL, but not claims about smoking? Honestly, I think it’s a political thing. I suspect that, sociologically, smoking is not perceived to be a political issue, whereas diet is. Whether this is warranted or not, plant-based diets are often associated with the Left, due to the undertones of climate activism often found in Veganism and Vegetarianism, which I think is why there is such a huge tendency for Conservatives, especially in the church, to gravitate toward specifically anti-plant diets, whatever can plausibly be presented, with Carnivore at the appealing extreme. “See! The other guys are WRONG!”)
Moreover, even if Keys was as terrible as these (generally quite ideologically-motivated) influencers say, how does that do ANYTHING to disprove all of the research that came after him, by completely independent scientists, doing what they do and testing the shit out of various hypotheses?
(For the record, Ancel Keys lived to age 100)
The North Karelia Project is even more interesting in my opinion. Finland realized that people – especially men – in certain parts of their country were dying super young of heart disease, so they enacted a pilot project to reduce smoking and reduce the consumption of saturated fat, and it worked, added something like 10 years to the average lifespan for men in that region, or something like that. Crazy stuff.
And to be completely fair, science from the 1960s didn’t know what we know today. For example, we know that the type of saturated fat matters a lot. The saturated fat from dairy (to say absolutely nothing about any other health claims around dairy) doesn’t seem to raise LDL, but that’s because “saturated fat” is a catch-all term that doesn’t quite do justice to the variety of fats it characterizes. Science frequently becomes more granular and self-corrects over time, as it works at getting closer to the truth.
It simply blows my mind that there is such a huge push to completely ignore 60 years of science, over thousands of papers, tens of thousands of scientists, across the fucking world, all so some YouTube personality can stand in front of you wearing a white lab coat and say, “LDL doesn’t matter, ungodly amounts of saturated fat are good for you!” There’s nothing wrong with questioning the science, but it means you have to actually read the science. Spend any time on PubMed and you’ll find that LDL very much is a risk factor for heart disease.
And here’s the thing: even if you want to take issue with that last statement, it’s one thing to say, “LDL is not the most critical risk factor for heart disease”. You’d probably be right! Genetics makes a huge difference, and smoking status makes a huge difference, too. You could very plausibly argue those two factors are more important. You could say, “Some other mechanism is responsible for why LDL affects the arteries, and this mechanism varies widely between people”, and that’s plausible, too. You’re going to have to form a really good argument, but there’s still a lot of research being done, and we don’t have all the answers yet. But to say, “LDL is perfectly fine, eat shit-loads of bacon, steak, and eggs, almost exclusively, because Joe-Blow went Carnivore and he’s still alive” is fucking stupid. At that point you HAVE to argue that 60+ years of research across the world is completely fabricated, because there’s no possible way you could claim this otherwise, and you’d better be really familiar with that research because your life could depend on it. You could do far worse, so I don’t want to say it’s the worst possible option, but the fact that you can also do far better doesn’t give me any admiration for it.
It’s simply mind-blowing to me.
I think when people say, “Question everything”, there’s a certain appeal to appearing a skeptic. In the real world, I think people simply choose to question the things they disagree with. It’s entirely possible that this is the same for me, too, but it’s something I would really need to contemplate. Of the million things in our lives, there is only so much we can effectively question, and I think what you choose to question can possibly say more about you than what you don’t. What a tough subject….
(I know a guy who claims to be Carnivore, but I once sighted him eating broccoli. It’s nothing against him personally, but I wonder: how much of whatever health benefits he might have experienced are due to eating Carnivore, and how much are due to him being smart enough to not eat Carnivore? Do you get what I’m saying? The problem with anecdotes is that there’s no precise way to verify them, and sometimes the individuals themselves can’t verify them, either, such as somebody who claims to be Keto but eats a weekly average of 23.287% of their diet in carbohydrates, rather than the generally-accepted <10% required to constantly be in ketosis. These labels are really just mini-ideologies, used generically, and rarely perfectly represent reality. Even Paul Saladino has matured enough to publicly address that fruits are good to include in your diet) [side note: because I’m a child, I love that a major Carnivore influencer literally has “salad” in his name. Insert Palpatine “ironic” meme here]
I was eating lunch with a bunch of friends a month or two ago and the subject of health and diet came up (uggghhh). What I hadn’t expected was that out of 10 people, minus myself, absolutely everybody was pro-Paleo, pro-Keto, and/or pro-Carnivore to some extent. It’s never my desire to be the “ackchyually” guy when people just want a casual conversation, but I’m trying to be more bold and speak up when I strongly disagree with someone, especially if they are a little too sure of themselves. I don’t necessarily intend to change people’s minds, but I always hope to add perspective. The general theme was nothing I hadn’t seen before: “my doctor wanted to put me on a statin, and I said no thanks, I don’t believe in that crap”, “I tried Vegetarianism for a month and felt terrible” (I mean…for one, it depends on what you consider “Vegatarianism”…), “I tried Keto and had tons of energy”, “sugar causes heart disease”, “I heard you should eat foods as close to their original form as possible”, “not too long ago, we only used to eat fruit seasonally, therefore we shouldn’t eat fruit year-round”, etc. And it’s not my desire to be a jerk to my friends, I simply could not process how much pseudoscience could be packed into one conversation, but it echoed perfectly what tends to be a very Conservative thing: distrust in science (simultaneous with a general lack of knowledge about the science), distrust in doctors, pro-animal products, anti-plant products, etc.
I only really spoke out against the claim that foods are only healthy when they are eaten in their natural form. I was quick to say, “Yeah, but that could be used to argue that you shouldn’t cook meat”, which I’m very thankful was accepted as a valid point. What I didn’t get a chance to address was the statement about eating fruit seasonally. If you’re an evolutionist like me, you probably loosely believe something along the lines of the out-of-Africa hypothesis, and if you’re a young earth Creationist, you probably believe humans were created in the Middle East. In both places, loosely speaking, fruit grows year-round, so you’d basically have to argue that white folks like us had some kind of adaptation specific to Northern climes, but what mechanism could you propose for this? You’d have to argue that longer periods of darkness (or cold, or something…) trigger some kind of metabolic in-ability to process fruit in the winter, but that already sounds unlikely, notwithstanding techniques from the past few hundred years, such as drying fruits, storing them in jams, or even just wrapping apples in newspaper and placing them in the root cellar (a fun story I heard from my grandma last year). More likely, humans just got creative with how they acquired their Vitamin C, etc. Remember, just because we live in “modern” times doesn’t mean we are somehow separate from the human lineage. You could argue that refrigeration is just an extension of our incredible adaptability. To be fair, though, I think we instinctively distrust industrial society, and so tend to think of pre-industrial society as being “healthier”, although this is almost certainly not true.
What bothers me the most is the sheer sensationalism that surrounds these diet wars. This is the true heresy to me.
- There’s nothing exciting about saying, “Eat your fruits and vegetables”, but there is something exciting about saying, “Eat meat for every meal and be super healthy!”
- There’s nothing exciting about saying, “Diet and exercise help you lose weight”, but there is something exciting about saying, “Eat as much as you want, and get skinny!”
- There’s nothing exciting about saying, “Here’s what this research from 1973 proves…”, but there is something exciting about saying, “Tommy went Carnivore and lost 150 pounds, his life is perfect and women are lined up at his door!”
- There’s nothing exciting about saying, “For those who won’t or can’t make lifestyle changes, statins are a highly effective way to reduce LDL cholesterol and reduce the risk of dying from already-developed cardiovascular disease, or sometimes to prevent it from developing in the first place”, but there is something exciting about saying, “Your doctor LIED to you! The medical establishment doesn’t want you to know the TRUTH! Statins are just a cash cow, and LDL standards were lowered so statins could be over-prescribed!”
Boy holy god, the Conservatives love that last one. I won’t say that medications aren’t over-prescribed, but saying they are over-prescribed is not the same as saying they are ineffective. In fact, statins further solidified the research on LDL, because when safe ways were found to lower LDL, CVD mortality dropped dramatically in those who took them. (Consider reading the book “The American Cardiovascular Pandemic: A 100-Year History” for the full perspective. the author was a practicing researcher through some of the largest changes. The guy is a recently-retired Boomer and has no idea what sorts of social media debates exist on his area of expertise; dude is a fact machine)
How about this? How about we all just try to be reasonable? I lean more toward plant products than animal products. I don’t think the dichotomy is especially useful, but overall that’s how it is. But…I don’t go around saying that meat is poison or anything ridiculous like that. A little bit of butter is almost certainly not going to kill you, and I enjoy a good steak every now and then. But…I also trust in 60 years of research that shows that excessive saturated fat and dietary cholesterol consumption – predominantly from animal sources – is not good for you in the long run, so, maybe take it easy on those foods. Maybe you did some kind of Keto-ish diet that really helped you eat whole foods and get healthy – great! I don’t think the differences between these various diets need to blown out of proportion. I think this is very different from what social media communicates to us, this idea that any given substance is horribly toxic, because x ideology says so, it’s-gonna-kill-you-overnight, etc., such as all the hatred that has been thrown at seed oils, for example. Sensationalism simply doesn’t sell to me, even if it otherwise tells me what I want to hear, which is something I wish more of my friends would internalize. If you honestly think that every other dietary path but yours leads to dietary hell, I honestly don’t know what to tell you, I think most people just want to be right, although I don’t completely know what that leads to in the context of diet. Believing some food is “terrible” for you is an odd psychological trick to make you feel superior for rejecting it, although it’s not clear to me that diet alone kills you immediately, or whatever. Are you a safe driver? Are you mentally healthy? Do you have good, healthy relationships? Do you get enough sleep? I just don’t know what practical value is to be gained by labeling every other diet but your own as “terrible”, or “heresy”.