Eric Berger reports on the long lead time for new (expendable) SSMEs.
Low-Fat Diets
LCHF seems to be getting more attention:
The mistaken belief that fats cause heart disease stems from weak, outdated research. Back in 1961, the American Heart Association published its first report recommending that people limit consumption of animal fats and dietary cholesterol. The report cited several studies that showed a correlation between high-fat diets and heart problems.
But that hypothesis had never been put to the test in a clinical trial. A controlled trial is the only way to prove a cause-effect relationship, rather than a mere correlation that could occur due to random chance or some other unknown variable.
As Dr. Phillip Handler, the former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated nearly 20 years later, “What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so little evidence?”
Eventually, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) started conducting clinical trials. However, these trials were deeply flawed. Additionally, when evidence contradicted the dominant medical narrative, researchers effectively buried it. One NIH study, which found little-to-no relationship between saturated fats and various health problems, was conducted between 1968 and 1973 but wasn’t published for another 16 years.
Despite the flimsy evidence against saturated fats, mainstream nutritionists still advise people to eat lots of carbohydrates and steer clear of fats. The AHA recommends restricting saturated fat consumption to 6 percent of total calories. Federal guidelines encourage people to eat fat-free or low-fat dairy and plenty of grains.
This advice is dooming hundreds of thousands of people to early death and disability. Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack. The disease costs Americans $200 billion annually in medical care and lost productivity.
For decades, our public health leaders have dispensed deadly dietary advice. That needs to change. Many doctors, myself included, have seen with our own eyes how low-carb diets help patients lose weight, reverse their diabetes and improve their cholesterol.
As time goes on I get more and more convinced that this criminally bad dietary advice killed my father in 1979.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Jordan Peterson and his daughter are on an all-meat diet. And of course, this nonsense comes up, as usual:
…doctors don’t think it’s healthy to have all meat, all the time. To prevent heart disease, the American Heart Association and the World Heart Federation recommend a low amount of saturated fats, the kind found in beef, pork, chicken, and other foods. Research links red meat to colorectal cancer. And an absence of vitamins and fibers, which normally come from fruits and vegetables, is a precursor to conditions like scurvy and constipation.
“I don’t see any health benefits of a diet focused primarily on red meat,” said Kristen Smith, a registered dietitian nutritionist with the Academy of Nutritionists and Dietetics, who said she’s seen the carnivore diet’s popularity grow on social media. “There’s currently no research to support that this type of diet has favorable long-term health outcomes.”
…Cholesterol is one of Weiss’s concerns, since too much of a certain kind of cholesterol heightens risk of heart disease and heart attacks. (Saturated fats, found in red meat, have long been assumed to drive up that risk, although some new evidence suggests that they may be less dangerous than believed. In a controversial editorial last year that departed from the recommendations of major public health groups, three cardiologists argued that saturated fats do not clog arteries and are not on their own a problem.)
Unscientific quackery from the usual suspects. And “…less dangerous than believed….” There is zero scientific evidence that saturated fat or dietary cholesterol are a problem at all.
California
The top four reasons it’s unsustainable.
Age Reversal
Will we see twenty-year-old mice soon? Well, not for at least twenty years or so. But this looks encouraging.
Space Regulation
A new paper by Jim Vedda from the Aerospace Corporation.
[Via Doug Messier]
Build A CNC Router
…for $160. Cool.
The Perseids
They’ll occur during a new moon this month. I’ll probably be in Florida, so I may drive into the swamp to watch. In California, it’s usually pretty chilly at night in the desert.
Blue Origin
Last week in San Francisco, at the ISS R&D conference, I asked Erika Wagner how many more test flights before one with test passengers, and she wouldn’t say. But this article says only a couple more. I wouldn’t think they’d need a lot more testing after that last abort test.
Alexandria O-C
The unserious face of an unserious moment:
Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. If anything, she was worse this time than she had been during her appearance on Firing Line a few days earlier, on which newly revamped show she demonstrated her obliviousness to the fact that the United States economy exploded during the 1990s, to the manner in which unemployment numbers are calculated, and to even the most obvious facets of the Israel–Palestine question about which she has assured her supporters she is so passionate.
“It’s really weird!”
It is, yes. Especially given that, before her two interviews aired, Ocasio-Cortez had taken to exhibiting that jealous penchant for credentialism that so stains the world’s wannabe socialists, and to boasting about her intellectual prowess. At the beginning of July, she tweeted with self-satisfaction — and a noticeably premature use of the word “other” — that she was “Wondering how many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do?” Two days later, she upgraded that claim: “If you think the GOP is terrified of my politics now,” she threatened on Twitter, “just wait until they find out about public libraries.” Just wait, indeed! From a BA from BU to the embodiment of all human knowledge in just 48 hours! At this rate it can’t be long before she gives it all up and becomes an honorary Krassenstein Brother: “We are the way, the truth, and the light. Retweet if you love Love and hate Trump!”
And as Stephen Green notes: “Graduated fourth in her class at Boston University, which costs $72,618 annually to attend.”
She’s a poster child for the high-cost worthlessness of a modern college degree.
[Update a while later]
Are people really this stupid? Well, they’re certainly mal-educated.
[Update a few minutes later]
Millennial socialism: Stupid, evil, or both?
[Update a while later]
The media rushes to protect Alexandria O-C from her own cluelessness.
Milton Friedman
Happy birthday, with some thoughts from Gail Heriot:
His mother—Sarah Ethel Landau Friedman—emigrated from Carpathian Ruthenia (a flea-bitten part of what was then considered the Kingdom of Hungary) when she was 14. She started out working as a seamstress in a sweatshop—an opportunity she was delighted to have. She later went into business with her husband in a dry goods store and an ice cream parlor (both of which she ran). Contrast that with John Maynard Keynes’s upbringing in a prominent British family. His mother, Florence Ada Keynes, who, like Sarah, was a formidable woman, is most often referred to as a “social reformer” or a “politician.”
Yes, what if?