Stephanie Seneff argues tirelessly that substantive changes in lifestyle over the past 40 years, in particular, reduced sun exposure and avoiding dietary fat, have led to an almost unshakable belief that avoiding fat and sun are healthy. And even with a lot of sun exposure, if saturated fats and Vitamin D (which we get form…
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Sulfur and fire geography
A little speculation of my own (with a little help from my friends) SULFUR. Stephanie Seneff, waxes eloquent on the virtues of sulfur, and Michael Medler, a physical geography at Western Washington University who works with fire, literally and figuratively. Besides his fire ecology work, he also is the father of there girls (19 and…
Slow-down diet
The variety of Wansink’s work is quite impressive – in part, because each research question he asks generates many more. Also – he tries quite hard not to take sides. Everyone thinks Wansink is in his or her pocket, like Sandor Katz (of Wild Fermentation fame says). They think he’s low fat or vegetarian or…
Food heroes and heroines
As promised, I’m profiling three scientists who not only have somewhat contentious scholarship, but also would seemingly contradict each other – one low-fat proponent and another, a high-fat diet proponent, both offering insights into food choice and diet. One is wildly interdisciplinary (Wansink), the other, narrowly trained but with high personal motivation (Seneff). So from…
Food scientists need to have a little more experience with media….
If I Google my top three favorite food scientists and writers (Lustig, Wansink, Seneff), they aren’t exactly positioned in top health and alternative health websites, my team is not getting very much coverage (relatively speaking).[1]Results: Name # hits Robert Lustig (Bitter Truth/UCSF) 7,300,000; 27,000 in Google scholar Brian Wansink (Cornell) 268,000;…
Diets and “Good Science”
With the low fat mantra, consumers have been substituting sugar more and more, and weight and abdominal body fat have been increasing. Not surprisingly, so has purchase of “low-fat,” lite foods – discussed mightily in Sugar, Salt Fat (Michael Moss). So, there seems to have been some cherry-picking in Key’s work – and the rise…
Ancel Benjamin Keys and the lipid hypothesis
The idea of cherry picking data in food science and studies is often associated with Ancel Keys, who died in 2004 at the age of 100. Keys completed studies at UC Berkeley, originally studying chemistry, but then receiving a BA in economics and political science, and a MS in zoology. He was a management trainee…
Cherry-picking in science, examples!
One of the best examples of cherry-picking has been in the story of the huge expansion of the Sahara Desert, based on a series of articles in 1991 in their highly-reputable journal Science, wherein it was found that the metaphors and images used to describe the phenomenon of drought and famine were inaccurate (a marching…
Cherry picking
Whose science? Eating eggs is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day… http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2919284/posts (C 20) So, somehow eating eggs, and presumably the controversial cholesterol in them, does as much harm to bodily fluids and organs as smoking a pack of cigarettes? Seriously? This isn’t science, it’s hyperbole. Western science typically spins its story in…
Diet is never going to be like any other area of science…
“Diet is never going to be like any other area of science. Whatever we’ve read, whatever the competing theories, whatever the weight of op[inion, every individual is effectively conducting their own pseudo-scientific experiment in eating.” —BBC News Magazine (Vanessa Barford, 4/17/13) Atkins and the never-ending battle over carbs Science, and here I am talking…