Are we on the verge of conquering it?
The comments are sort of interesting. A lot of the naturalistic fallacy is showing up there. I found particularly amusing the one commenter who couldn’t imagine that evolution could make a mistake.
[Via Geek Press]
Is it good, or bad for you?
This article is like much nutritional “science” (including the lipidophobia), but it’s much more entertaining.
…and confusion about eggs and fish at the New York Times.
How they saved lives in Boston.
As the old expression goes, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.
I’m sure that this is just a coincidence:
It’s an interesting coincidence that this increase in obesity started roughly at the same time that the U.S. government started to advocate low-fat, high-carb diets. I remember that period pretty clearly, because I thought it was wonderful. Entenmann’s came out with no-fat pastries — the no-fat cherry coffeecake was one of my favorites — I could eat as much rice as I wanted, pasta was good and more pasta was better, as long as you didn’t use butter because of the evil saturated fat and cholesterol. But margarine, rich in transfats made by hydrogenating corn oil, was much better.
I remember that period clearly, too. It was during that time, after my father’s first heart attack at age 44, that the health gurus told him to go low-fat and eat more grains. Ten years later, he had another one, from which he died a month later. I blame the FDA/nutrition-industrial complex for his death (though it didn’t help that he smoked and had grown up on bagels, knishes and potatoes). And I find it particularly galling when idiots think that it’s anti-science to not buy the health-destroying junk science of the conventional wisdom, when the actual science indicates that it’s killing us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
In reading the Yglesias piece, it’s worth pointing out the flaw in the logic. No one is claiming that humans aren’t capable of rapidly evolving to accommodate dietary changes. That’s a straw man.
The issue is whether or not there is any evolutionary pressure for us to evolve to be healthy with a modern big-agro diet. In short, there is not. If you’re lactose intolerant in a dairy-based society, you’re unlikely to thrive or reproduce. But when it comes to grains, people do just fine on such diets when young, in terms of reaching reproductive age and rearing kids. The bad effects hit us generally later in life, when our genes no longer care (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing, but you know what I mean) whether we live or die, or are healthy or ill. So we go on, generation after generation, continuing to eat crap that’s bad for us, and our bodies not bothering to adapt.
Mike Pompeo calls him on it:
If it’s a train wreck, Pompeo said, Baucus has no one to blame but himself.
“No one in the country bears more responsibility for the complexity of this law than you,” Pompeo wrote in a letter to Baucus on Thursday.
Baucus, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was a key architect of the Affordable Care Act. Most of its major provisions were crafted in his committee, and the Finance draft was consistently treated as the primary bill even as other Senate and House committees worked on their own proposals.
“You drafted it, you twisted arms to get it passed, and, until now, you have lauded it as a model for all the world,” Pompeo wrote to Baucus. “Your attempts to pass the buck to President Obama’s team will not work, nor will they absolve you of responsibility for the harm that you have brought via this law.”
Baucus has a competitive reelection fight coming up next year — just months after the biggest pieces of ObamaCare are set to take effect. Republicans have already made clear that they plan to target Baucus over his role in getting the healthcare law passed, and problems with the implementation could make the GOP’s job easier.
My emphasis.
It certainly should make it easier. These people are truly disgusting.
I was traveling most of last week, and I’m now frantically trying to finish the book. Plus, I had a tooth extracted this morning.
Just in case anyone was wondering why blogging has been light to non-existent.
[Wednesday morning update]
Thanks for the sympathy, but it’s really not that bad. The extraction was almost painless, with lidocaine, and I’ve only experienced a little swelling, and not much pain, on ibuprofen. I feel pretty much back to normal today. Next related project is an implant, in a few months after the bone graft has filled in and healed, but my experience with those is that they’re not a big deal, either. Modern dentistry is one of the many reasons that I wouldn’t want to have been born in an earlier era.
OK, here’s yet another article extolling the terrors of fat:
Also known as Eskimo Ice Cream, akutaq, (pronounced agoodik or agooduk) is a classic native dish that is still popular today. Traditionally, women made a batch of the frosty treat when the men returned with a freshly killed polar bear or seal. Today, modern versions are usually prepared with Crisco, but traditional recipes called for meat and fat from caribou, moose, bears, seals, and fish.
Ingredients: Reindeer fat, seal oil, salmonberries, blackberries
Fat content: It’s hard to estimate without a known serving size of this native treat. But consider this: An average serving of reindeer fat packs a whopping 91 grams of fat. A different version made with fish, berries, and seal oil contains 9 grams of fat.
And you know what? Those on the traditional Inuit diet have very low rates of hearth disease. So what does this do for your thesis? You know what’s wrong with most of the dishes listed? Hint: it’s not fat.
How to make them irresistible.
This is a pet peeve of mine. For anything less than four or five floors, I much prefer stairs to elevators, not just for health reasons, but because it can be faster than waiting for one, but in a lot of places, they make it very hard. I just found the stairway here at the Broadmoor Conference Center, but it’s very clear that they’d prefer the guests not see or use it. At the Grace Inn in Phoenix, where Space Access has been for the past few years, they lock the doors to enter it from the bottom, so you can go down, but not up.
Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin respond to their critics:
The first thing to note is that none of our critics actually defend Obamacare, and therefore none dispute the argument of the piece. Their dispute is entirely with what we propose instead — which our piece of course lays out only briefly and broadly, since we assumed that the argument that replacement is still the right way to think about things first had to be made. Their lack of interest in defending the law is interesting. Do they agree with us that Obamacare cannot work as enacted? Do they agree that piecemeal reforms will not work and Obamacare must be replaced? If they do, do they imagine that the party that forced this unpopular law down the country’s throat will be trusted to fix or replace it once it fails?
If they don’t agree that Obamacare is untenable (as we assume at least some of them don’t), how would they defend it? Do they not think it is headed for an insurance death spiral? Do they not think the financial incentives it sets up will result in far higher federal spending and far fewer insured Americans than its advocates promised? Do they think it will lower premium costs? Is it sustainable over time? Have you seen much of a substantive answer from the left to these commonly voiced concerns?
The critics of our piece offer no such answers, and actually suggest that we’re wasting our time repeating the obvious case against Obamacare. Several of them want to get right to a debate about what should replace it. That’s great. Not all of them, though, want to discuss the solution we pointed to. Kevin Drum acknowledges (twice) that he didn’t actually read our piece; he just read Yglesias and Klein (who just summarized Yglesias) and “sighed.” We know the feeling.
Don’t we all?