A long piece about the science wars. Answer: we still don’t really know, but I’m avoiding them.
Category Archives: Health
The “Affordable” Care Act
The very name of the law was a calculated lie:
Gruber said that Obamacare had no cost controls in it and would not be affordable in an October 2009 policy brief, presented here exclusively by TheDC. At the time, Gruber had already personally counseled Obama in the Oval Office and served on Obama’s presidential transition team. Obama, meanwhile, told the American people that their premiums would go down dramatically.
“The problem is it starts to go hand in hand with the mandate; you can’t mandate insurance that’s not affordable. This is going to be a major issue,” Gruber admitted in an October 2, 2009 lecture, the transcript of which comprised the policy brief.
“So what’s different this time? Why are we closer than we’ve ever been before? Because there are no cost controls in these proposals. Because this bill’s about coverage. Which is good! Why should we hold 48 million uninsured people hostage to the fact that we don’t yet know how to control costs in a politically acceptable way? Let’s get the people covered and then let’s do cost control.”
So, they were consistent.
Lessons From Vermont
No, single payer is not the solution to our health-care problems.
The Nutritional Junk Science
…of our government nannies (and ninnies). My thoughts, over at PJMedia.
Making Stem Cells Pluripotent
They’ve found the on/off switch for it in mice. Hopefully humans won’t be far behind.
Kitchen Secrets
These are great. I knew some of them, but I was surprised, after decades in the kitchen myself, that I’d never heard of, but they make sense. I haven’t looked at them all, just half, but the only objection I have is the assumption that fat is bad, and something to be removed from soup.
The Fatal Conceit
The Times reassuringly described Gruber as “the numbers wizard at MIT,” who has “spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem.” Gruber has “brought a level of science to an issue that would otherwise be just opinion.”
I might note that the Soviets used the term “science” for their own “scientific” planning commission. I drew little comfort from Professor Gruber’s scientific-planning credentials, especially when I learned “he’s the only person you can go to for that kind of thing.” Gruber, aided by his brilliant MIT graduate student assistants, is a one-man Gosplan, the name given to the Soviet Union’s state planning committee. That is not much of a recommendation. Science is better served by competing ideas not by a one-person monopoly.
Both Gruber and the USSR’s Gosplan planners believe their planning is “scientific” and executed by “the best of the best.” Both types of planning commissars suffer from F. A. Hayek’s “fatal conceit”—the belief that we can plan incredibly complex economic systems. As Hayek pointed out in his writings, such “scientific” plans inevitably fall apart under the weight of unintended consequences.
Actually, I’m not sure they’re all unintended.
Another Sat Fat Study
No, you don’t increase your saturated fat by eating saturated fat. It’s the carbs, stupid:
The fatty acid called palmitoleic acid, which is associated with “unhealthy metabolism of carbohydrates that can promote disease,” went down with low-carb diets and gradually increased as carbs were re-introduced, the study said.
An increase in this fatty acid indicates that a growing proportion of carbohydrates is being converted into fat instead of being burned by the body, the researchers said.
“When you consume a very low-carb diet your body preferentially burns saturated fat,” Volek said.
“We had people eat two times more saturated fat than they had been eating before entering the study, yet when we measured saturated fat in their blood, it went down in the majority of people,” he said.
The finding “challenges the conventional wisdom that has demonized saturated fat and extends our knowledge of why dietary saturated fat doesn’t correlate with disease,” Volek added.
You don’t say.
Also, how the mindless theory of calorie counting has harmed public health.
[Update a while later]
Nine lies about fat that have destroyed the world’s health.
Orthorexia
When “healthy” eating becomes unhealthy.
There may be reasons to be a vegan, but health is not among them.
[Update late morning]
Both Anne Hathaway and Bill Clinton have given up on their vegan diets:
Hathaway recently confessed that eating endless meals of tofu and garbanzo beans seemed to be sapping her energy. She told the Insider that when she was filming Interstellar, the action-packed scenes overwhelmed her.
Seeking a solution, Hathaway decided to try feasting on fish and shifting to a low-carb diet. The decision to push away those plant-based platters and experiment with an animal protein-powered plan came in the middle of filming a water scene, which required that she suit up in a heavy garment.
“I fell off so hard…. So you imagine what that’s like — what it’s like running through water and then you wear a 40-pound suit on top of it, so for me it was intense. I was facing my life, I don’t know how many days in a row of, like, garbanzo beans on a plate.”
And with an apology to PETA, Hathaway says that she doesn’t plan to return to her vegan lifestyle. She even dug into a plate of eggs and sausage during a recent Harper’s Bazaar interview. Anne noted that the difference between eating a vegan diet and consuming animal protein was notable overnight.
“I just didn’t feel good or healthy,” Hathaway recalled of her vegan days.
You don’t say.
Junk Science From The FDA
The new calorie-labeling rules are counterproductive, both because people don’t pay much attention to them (appropriately), and because the whole notion of calorie counting as a means of weight control is nutritionally ignorant.