It could be for a myriad of reasons. Other countries subsidize their agriculture too. I have difficulty believing that the United States is the only country on earth that subsidizes corn. You should also account for genetics - like compare american swedes to swedish swedes, since the susceptibility of many of our minority groups to diabetes and obesity is markedly higher.
I don’t know that sweeteners are the problem. As long as we have high density palatable food, which can be anything from coke to fruit juice to dairy creamer, etc.
I don’t mean that it expresses metaphysical truths. I mean that the studies do what they do. A study of 1000 people showing that X causes 1lb of fat gain, on average, means that it is statistically likely that similar patterns will be observed in a large segment of the population. There’s no room for “well I just feel that it might be different”. If you want to show why that study is wrong, you can point to its methodological flaws or something, but nothing you can do will categorically make controlled studies irrelevant to applied science (nutrition).
First, yes, many countries subsidize agriculture. The Eurozone is a bitch when it comes to this, but oddly they don’t subsidize corn. It must be a culinary/taste thing. Second, genetics may factor into it strongly, but I think if that were the case then the logical choice is to stop subsidizing a known sweetener. Third, food stuffs around the world don’t have sugar in the ratios we do. You can take just about any book by an ethnic chef and see the difference (mostly there’s a preference for fats over sugars in most cultures).
As for my point about science not being objective, you’re not grasping the gravity of my statement. I’m saying science doesn’t even have the monopoly on the pragmatic truths of our world. Science is fundamentally limited because of methodological monism. It loses more in the attempt to universalize on a simple means to know the world than it gains.
seems to me that most science isn’t a hard black and white realm of facts. This debate is about nutrition. There are plenty of paleo Austrians on these boards who have found the lifestyle very helpful, but that alone of course proves nothing. I think shooting off the OPs broader points would have made more sense. Evolution and Climate Science are both similar to economics in that you can’t run true experiements. Its pretty hard to run true experiments in nutrition as well. You would need lots of money and would have to basically monitor every aspect of several hundred or even thousands of people for months to properly account for all the variables at play.
While as an anarcho capitalist I agree whole heartedly with agriculture deregulation, I simply cannot see the health benefits coming from changing out HFCS for some other sweetener.
Well I’m not looking to do a lot of research on it, but ideally you would compare two countries with similar agriculture policies with respect to corn or sugar and see if it produced similar results.
Here is a list of the world’s fattest countries. You’ll notice many of the ones in the top are very small, which probably just means selection bias is dominating. I.e. everyone is a white collar worker with the same really bad genetics. But Kuwait is very close to the United States on that list. Having lived there for a year myself as a kid (non-military), I can tell you that they eat lots of fast food just like Americans, even though they do not really have any asymmetric agricultural policy since they imoport all their food.
In fact, looking down the list, I don’t see a very large difference between developed countries. Maybe its a bad dataset. I’m open to alternatives I guess. But my point is that for two countries with similar obesity rates and per capita GDP, they have drastically different agri policy.
Which are just as easy to overeat as sugars.
Well the way I interpreted controlled studies is just that the results are statistically likely in the rest of the population. That’s not really a “hard” universalization. Its also not science per se but the scientific method, which I recognize is non sequitur. It just has statistical plausibility. Whether you think statistics is relevant to pragmatism…
I would not have expected you (nor do I think you should) read through the lot of this thread, but my opinion is that the best diet is the diet you can stick to. I have been clear that there are many different possible ways to succeed in nutrition, but the claims made by paleo authors (read: not necessarily paleo dieters) and low carb types is typically that non-paleo or high carb diets are objectively bad. This much is falsifiable in the general population. Maybe high carb diets are bad for certain individuals, but that doesn’t justify any of the claims being made.
Yes. This is true. There are some scientific phenomena that are difficult to test. There are also some problems in nutritional studies, but these vary on study to study. Some studies just ask people to keep a food log, and others actually physically provide all the meals and/or have people eat them at the facility. Of course you can never prove that people don’t go home and scarf down a bunch of other food, but that’s kind of the point of some experiments anyway.
“Well the way I interpreted controlled studies is just that the results are statistically likely in the rest of the population. That’s not really a “hard” universalization. Its also not science per se but the scientific method, which I recognize is non sequitur. It just has statistical plausibility. Whether you think statistics is relevant to pragmatism…”
Statistics that is frequentist in nature is boolsheet. I’ll just say that for giggles. But seriously, controlled groups aren’t hard fast absolutes, that’s why you’ll see multiple studies deal with similar circumstances or issues and come up with extremely variable results. That means, they’re really not describing anything other than what is true for the circumstances at the time. That’s why people talk of the black swan being more important than the white ones, but even that doesn’t go far enough to describe the inadequacies of modern science.
Modern science has abandoned many things to become what it is, and what’s lost is context. And you only get that from considering the seemingly non-scientific issues of a more philosophical nature. How you approach knowledge is as important as how you acquire it.
This is correct. But it only discredits individual studies, not the actual philosophy of controlled studies. Metastudies are an attempt to deal with this (I listed a couple).
Whether or not black swans are important depends on context. For example, a sample of 1000 people might find that epehedra improves weight loss in all of them, but there might be 1 out of a million people who actually gain weight on it. But the majority of people don’t care about that “black swan” since they are only interested in their individual personhood.
So black swans don’t matter that much in nutrition, especially if we’re trying to give good general advice. I admit that black swans do matter in other contexts, like war. Being 99% sure there’s no war next month is a pretty crappy place to be in.
Nope, meta-analysis is even softer than individual studies. You have to be careful which studies you combine otherwise, you’ll get some funny results.
Actually, they matter in all aspects of knowledge. If it doesn’t work for X person, that means your assumptions about X person are W-R-O-N-G. So, you have to consider alternatives both in method and knowledge.
Why can I find right answers from wrong assumptions? That’s a good start for a question, I think.
True. But they are an attempt to deal with the problem of low sample sizes. And the idea that you can improve study accuracy by increasing sample sizes also holds statistical water.
I do consider alternatives. But only for person X. For everyone else my tools are working fine. And the alternatives I consider for X would also probably be based on the scientific method - trial and error, or educated guesses, etc.
Because the assumptions are wrong. But the assumption that a sample size of 10,000 will be able to represent a large amount of the total population is correct, or at least statistically very very likely.
Well, that’s why it’s better to do it with one study than many. Ever read about the funny meta-analysis of 35k people using their birthsigns vs their perceived personality traits? The researchers claimed it was proof that horoscopes were accurate, but when it was found out that it was an meta-analysis and their definition of personality traits a tad loose, they were laughed at. :3~
But you’re not considering the alternative that your theory is wrong. That’s the problem.
Samples have nothing to do with it. It has to do with that knowledge is not deterministic in its formation. Knowledge follows not from cause-effect, but from another basis altogether. So, drop the assumption that statistics is the gateway to knowledge, it’s not scientific to even use it in this context.
If my theory is that the study is representative of a lot of (not necessarily all) people, then no its not wrong just because of black swans.
Well I said that sample size gives you statistical plausibility. Its assumed (maybe unjustifiably) that statistics has practical application. I don’t know how this ties in with “knowledge”. As far as I can see, I’m not making a knowledge claim beyond what the study has directly investigated in its sample.
Not to change the topic, but what do you guys think of artificial sweetners causing cancer (not fat gain)? I use them a lot. Webmd and some other sites I’ve been on said they’re fine, but social folklore tells me I will get cancer. Will I?
Um… Do you realize you just went against the very scientific method you’re trying to protect? Any case which falsifies the theory means the theory is WRONG according the modern scientific method. This the same method taught in highschool, entry level college courses, and used as the general guideline to most of the sciences. So you can’t have your cake of saying “I’m pro-modern science” and eat from a modified/truncated version of it. So, either you support methodological pluralism, therefore you could make a cause for limited theories, but even then such theories would be purely masturbatory in nature since they don’t describe anything useful (gee lots of people are like X, but a few of them in that category are like Y too…). Meaning, it’s not predictive.
And I won’t bother quoting your statistics rambling any further since it seems you’re not listening. Statistics do not describe reality. They simply describe what we know in terms of their likelihood. Nothing more. It’s not the backbone of science. Otherwise, Public Choice Theory wouldn’t be a science. Nor would computer SCIENCE (we don’t use stats much, but when we do it’s usually dealing with programs, rather than algorithms and proofs). Your obsession statistics shows your own lack of understanding of their limits and your own lack of understanding of their actual uses.
If you can’t acknowledge that much, then we have nothing to discuss. You’re wasting my time and yours.
Which is why the theory isn’t that “this controlled study holds for everyone forever and ever”. It uses statistics to show that these results are likely in the rest of the population. According to your interpretation there can be no empirical science of man whatsoever because “what if black swan”?
Well you’re shifting the goalposts here. Is the issue that science is “falsifiable” or that its not predictive? If you use the scientific method to come up with a probabilistic theory, then yes it is predictive. If you use the scientific method to come up with an objective theory, then yes it is falsifiable by black swans, but that’s not what I’m trying to do.
I know. That’s my point.
Its the backbone of empirical sciences. Unless you think empirical science is an oxymoron and there should be “science” and “empiricism”.
I’m not obsessed with statistics. Its just that they’re particularly relevant on this topic - nutrition. We don’t have the analytical tools to figure out in advance what the results of certain actions will be, so an alternative is just to experiment under ceteris parabis conditions. Our results don’t give us “laws” or “theories”, but they give us probablistic guesses.
No you can have empiricism, but you have to accept that there’s no absolute guarantees to its success. And to deny alternative methods is to invite blind faith to control the discovery of knowledge.
No, I’m not.
It is an oxymoron.
So it’s masturabatory, thanks for confirming that.
If you are interested in alternative viewpoints (which may be incorrect, I don’t know), I know some people who read Dr. Mercola, whose thgouhts/evidence on aspartame are here: