A Repost - My Favorite Junk Science Post

Full explanation: I subscribe to the substack "Unsettled Science" by author Nina Teicholz, and today got an email that a new post was up called, "Canceling the Science on Saturated Fats."  The point of the post was a reference to an article in the Washington Post by columnist Tamar Haspel who wrote, “Don’t Believe the Backlash: Saturated Fat Actually is Bad for You.”  Nina is particularly familiar with this because of her research that lead up to her 2014 book, "The Big Fat Surprise" which dove into how this argument just doesn't hold up the closer we look at it. 

But that's not where I'm going here.  The email got me thinking about junk science in general, which I have written tons about.  Which led to me going through old posts and reminding myself of what I consider one of, or perhaps my single most favorite junk science article.  Hey, it's a slow news day and the middle of a four day weekend for lots of folks. So here's the favorite post from August of 2019 - with a word or two changed here and there to help it read better.

The Secret of the People Living Past 100 

Full disclosure: I make fun of junk science for a bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons is I'm one of the people who has been harmed by junk science.  In a nutshell, I follow the same sort of ketogenic lifestyle that Karl Denninger talks about, except I rarely talk about it, but it's not worth the column space to get into my story since that's not the point.  

Doubtless, though, if you pay attention to the "he-who" junk science health studies that we're bombarded with in the media, you've heard of the Mediterranean Diet.  You've heard the mythical stories of how people from that area live longer, have less heart disease and, well, the whole story.  Have you ever asked if there really is such a thing as one Mediterranean diet?  After all, the countries on the Mediterranean stretch from the ones you've probably read about - rural French, Italian and Greek - to Spain, Albania, Turkey, Slovenia, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria and more, a stretch of coastlines that must go over 8,000 miles.  Are their diets really identical or even all that similar?  How much do they have in common?  Are they really that much healthier and live that much longer?

One of the terms that gets buzz is Blue Zones.  There's a handful of these zones which produce the most per-capita supercentenarians—the oldest of the old, the longest lived of the longest lived—in the world.  A few are in the Mediterranean like Sardinia and Ikaria, but Okinawa also gets a lot of press.  They get celebrated for their diet and lifestyle, and used as examples for what we should all be doing. 

An interesting paper that is out in preview took a look at what the longest lived populations have in common.  I get the inline quotes here not from the study, but from a weekly email I get from a guy named Mark Sisson.  Mark is 64 these days but was formerly a very high level competitive athlete.  He devoted his second career to repairing the damage he did to his body trying to compete and is now best known as the owner of business that makes so-called paleo diet products. 

Red wine consumption didn't predict supercentenarianism.

Legume consumption didn't predict it.

The presence of hills didn't predict it.

It turns out that a strong predictor of super-longevity is the absence of detailed birth records.

That's right - the best predictor of super-longevity is living someplace where there's no records of when people were born!

Wait - it gets better.

In the United States, whenever a state introduced birth certificates, supercentenarianism miraculously dropped by 69-82%. A full 82% of all supercentenarians on record in the U.S. were "born" before birth certificates were used. Only 18% have birth certificates; only 18% of American supercentenarians can actually be verified. Oops.

In Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria, the strongest predictor for regions with high reported supercentenarianism was high crime, low income, and low life expectancy relative to the national average. Ninety-nine percent of male Italian centenarians smoke. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese centenarians are actually dead or missing. These aren't what you'd expect. Oops again.

Gee, the strongest predictor of longevity is living in high crime, low income and low life expectancy areas compared to the rest of the nation?  That seems completely backwards from everything we know about poverty being a substantial health risk.  And that's not even touching the report that 99% of Italian centenarians are smokers.  Something very strange is going on here. 

The conclusion of the paper is that the primary causes of reported supercentenarianism in these countries are pension fraud and reporting error.

Sorry, but this literally made me laugh out loud.  They're not measuring longevity, they're measuring fraud.  This is the quality of science we get out the medical junk science world.  This is what diet advice is being based on.    

(Verified Italian supercentenarian Maria Giuseppa Robucci (20 March 1903-18 June 2019)) 

 

Obama's EPA - High Priests of Junk Science

As previously claimed, the EPA today released a rewrite of the Clean Water Act of 1986 to give it control of every body of water visible to the naked eye, down to and including large puddles.  In doing so, they enlarged the law from an "anorexic fashion model-sized" 88 pages to an engorged tick of 2200 pages.   They did this under the guise of "just clarifying the laws". 

In doing so, they relied on some amazingly junky science.

The Clean Water Act initially limited the federal government to regulating the “navigable waters of the United States” like the Ohio, Mississippi or Colorado Rivers, or the Great Lakes.  In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize control over tributaries and adjacent wetlands. They've now expanded the law to introduce the concept of a “significant nexus to a navigable waterway”.  Insty explains: 

The agency defines waters as “significant” if they are “located in whole or in part within 100 feet of the ordinary high water mark,” or, alternatively, within the 100-year floodplain and 1,500 feet of the high water mark of waters already under the government’s jurisdiction. That’s already a lot of water, but there’s more.

The EPA acknowledges that the “science available today does not establish that waters beyond those defined as ‘adjacent’” to these significant” waters should be regulated. But forget science. The agency says its “experience and expertise” show there are “many” other waters that could have a significant downstream effect. Thus the EPA establishes an additional standard for significance that covers just about anything that’s wet.

I remember reporting on their efforts to do this years ago, and found a piece in 2013. The EPA issued a paper, which was not peer reviewed at the time, saying all waters in the world are connected.  This gives them the authority to say a puddle on your property can drain into a creek and eventually end up in the "navigable waters of the United States".

In September, the EPA issued a draft scientific study purporting to find that virtually all wetlands and streams are “physically, chemically, and biologically connected” to downstream waters over which the EPA already claims authority. Moreover, says the EPA study, even many “ephemeral streams” and “prairie potholes, vernal pools and playa lakes” that are dry most of the year can be found to have some connectivity to downstream waters.

This is the most ridiculous kind of pop eco-science, pure junk science that can be invented.  How does one measure that?  How can you be certain that water in a creek or pond hundreds of miles from one of these navigable waterways ends up in them?  How do they know it just doesn't evaporate and leave whatever they're afraid of as residue on the land?  How could they measure that movement?  How long would it take to measure that well enough to know?  Underground rivers generally move quite slowly (I know there are exceptions, but they're rare).  Ground water moves even slower. Would it take centuries to measure it?  Millennia? 

Add this to their junk science about CO2, shutting down the coal power plants for the modeled-but-never-measured global warmening, their absurd claims about freon and ozone holes, ozone pollution, regulating outboard motors and lawnmowers to be as clean as cars, or their equally absurd claims about DDT and I see an agency that clamps onto whatever junk science fad is running around and issues regulations before anything is truly known.  "We need to regulate now!  We can't wait until we have proof!!", as all the warmists used to say in the 1980s.  It's the motto of tyrants everywhere.

(mercilessly borrowed from Sodahead.com)

How Do You Tell Junk Science from Good?

In the last week, I've linked to a few stories that touch on how science reporting - mostly bad, occasionally good - touches us.  The over-hyping of every solar flare, the poor information on radiation levels from the Fukushima disaster, and the cardiac surgeon (3) who believes we've been told all the wrong things about what to eat and what to avoid.  It raises a very important question:

How can we average people tell when we're being exposed to good science and how do we know junk science?

It used to be pretty easy; in the case of a medical study, the more people who were in the study and the longer the study ran, the better; for the harder sciences, if the study was reported in Science or Nature, or another of the big journals, it was probably as sure as anything.  If there's one thing the Hadley Climate Research Unit's emails (ClimateGate) should teach us, it's that considering the journal's reputation is useless today.  There are scientists involved in climate modeling who really are in search of the truth; it just seems that at the highest levels, it's about as corrupt as Chicago politics.  Among the highlights of those emails was how the top guys at Hadley actually controlled journals, getting editors fired if they dared publish anything that questioned the "orthodox view".  So much for judging by the journal it's published in. With the major journals controlled by the "priesthood", any advances will only show up in the smaller, less prestigious journals, inviting the sneers of the priesthood.   

Nor does it mean anything if the ideas appear well supported by other scientists.  The American Physics Society, certainly one of the great academic societies in the world, has declared "the evidence is incontrovertible" about man-made global warming.  Nobel prize-winning physicist (1973) Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group's promotion of man-made (anthropogenic) global warming fears. 

"In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period."

When the APS simply published a long letter from Lord Monckton, a well known skeptic about AGW, they went so far as to publish a disclaimer that this was not the APS viewpoint - something they have never done about really "out there" quantum physics.   (It's at the top of article in that link) As Dr. Giaever says; it's acceptable to talk about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which implies that for every decision we make, a parallel universe pops into existence, but it's not acceptable to question computer models about future climates that claim accuracy to even one decimal place? 

A good rule of distinguishing good science from bad might be if they use terms like "evidence is incontrovertible", or "the science is settled", or they have a "consensus committee", it's junk science.  Look at it this way: nobody holds a consensus committee or issues statements like "incontrovertible science" about gravity, where the science, while not settled, is accepted.  Nobody calls a consensus committee unless there is no consensus.  

Neither is it necessarily true that you can judge the quality of research by the connections of the scientist to some "evil" funding agency.  While this is sometimes true (famously, the tobacco companies' responses to anti-smoking studies) it has become a bogeyman used to link anyone who opposes you with an evil funding source - typically a big business .  Linking opponents of AGW with the "big oil", for example.  Everyone works for someone, and scientists who work in government-funded labs are not glowing saints free from comprises either; they often work for agencies with an agenda (the EPA for example).  In the case of the dire warnings about solar flares, do you think NASA might have a dog in the fight?  In an era when government budgets need to be slashed, do they have an interest in trying to get research money to fund more space science missions?  "Cut someone else!  We're more important!"

There's a saying that goes, "the most important words in science aren't 'Eureka, I've found it!', they're 'that's funny....' ".  Science progresses when someone notices the funny results that don't fit the current ideas and begins pulling on the loose thread.  At the beginning of the 20th century, for example, many physicists thought that everything was known about physics and their field was done.  There would be no more physicists in a few years.  All that remained was to dot a few "i"s and cross a few "t"s.  The loose thread someone pulled on led to relativity, quantum theory and an entire century of rich science that no one suspected was there. 

Dr. Dwight Lundell, the heart surgeon I mentioned the other day, appears to be a good example of the kind of guy who says, "that's funny...".  He has observed that the recommendations from the FDA and the other experts who advise us on what to eat have had unintended consequences worse than what they were trying to address - without fixing the problem.  He has written a book to tell you his findings.  Should we ignore his experience with thousands of patients and just assume he's only in it for the money?   The mere fact he's making some extra money on a book says nothing about whether he's right or wrong, and everyone has a right to make an honest living. 

Dr. Lundell is not alone.  Dr William Davis runs a "Track your Plaque" website/program for people diagnosed with actual cardiovascular disease, and his recommendations parallel Dr. Lundell's.  The whole lipid/cholesterol hypothesis is badly broken (at least, IMO), and there are probably thousands of people studying it who will tell you that (excellent summary pdf).  Dr. Duane Graveline, former NASA astronaut and M.D., has a good introductory website.  Statins may have some benefit, but those benefits likely have nothing to do with cholesterol lowering, but are from the changes to epithelial cells that they cause.  They seem to me to be extremely over prescribed. 

The whole low-fat mantra has led to a very fat industry that produces tons of heavily processed and modified foods that make them bundles of money.  In your typical grocery store, anything around the walls tends to be "whole food" (i.e., milk, cheese, butter, meats, fish, poultry, fresh fruits and veggies) that makes these companies nothing, while the other 80% of the store is filled with these processed products (i.e. breakfast cereals, cake mixes, pastas, sodas, breads, all kinds of prepared foods).  Perhaps the McGovern aides who started the whole "low fat diet as national policy" thing simply wanted to force everyone to eat like they do in Big Sur, but in the end, they got SnackWells, Honey Nut Cheerios and other highly processed junk that got a good reputation because it said "low fat" on the label.  Even the mandatory FDA labels that count a handful of nutrients, sodium, and macronutrient composition are deceptive about whether a food is a good choice to eat. 

I wouldn't trade our free market, even as badly distorted as it is, for any other system, but one of the problems with it is that industries and trade groups get together and manipulate government bodies to get their research funded (in the case of climate modeling) or to make their products to appear favorable (in the case of diet/food).  My answer to this is government is too damned big if these tactics make money, but I know that's wishing for days we'll probably never see again.

It's tempting to say that any time the news headline starts with "scientists say", ignore it.  The problem is we need to stay on top of all of this, not only for our good health, but because the behemoth Fed hydra, constantly, addictively driven by thirst for control, uses these ideas to control us.  And it doesn't have to be good science for them to use it as justification for controlling your life.  It's also tempting to say only trust things you read in small journals by honest (if not iconoclastic) researchers, but these things rarely make the news and feed back to the first point: if the news starts with "scientists say", ignore it.  And I think I stand by what I said the other day:  In general, if a government committee recommends something, do the opposite.

The Secret of the People Living Past 100

Full disclosure: I make fun of junk science for a bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons is I'm one of the people harmed by junk science.  In a nutshell, I follow the same sort of ketogenic lifestyle that Karl Denninger talks about, except I don't talk about it, but it's not worth the column space to get into my story since that's not the point. 

Doubtless, though, if you pay attention to the "he-who" junk science health studies that we're bombarded with in the media, you've heard of the Mediterranean Diet.  You've heard the mythical stories of how people from that area live longer, have less heart disease and, well, the whole story.  Have you ever asked if there really is such a thing as one Mediterranean diet?  After all, the countries on the Mediterranean stretch from the ones you've probably read about - rural French, Italian and Greek - to Spain, Albania, Turkey, Slovenia, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria and more, a stretch of coastlines that must go over 8,000 miles.  Are their diets really identical or even all that similar?  How much do they have in common?  Are they really that much healthier and live that much longer?

One of the terms that gets buzz is Blue Zones.  There's a handful of these zones which produce the most per-capita supercentenarians—the oldest of the old, the longest lived of the longest lived—in the world.  A few are in the Mediterranean like Sardinia and Ikaria, but Okinawa also gets a lot of press.  They get celebrated for their diet and lifestyle, and used as examples for what we should all be doing. 

An interesting paper that is out in preview took a look at what the longest lived populations have in common.  I get the inline quotes here not from the study, but from a weekly email I get from a guy named Mark Sisson.  Mark is 64 these days but was formerly a very high level competitive athlete.  He devoted his second career to repairing the damage he did to his body trying to compete and is now best known as the owner of business that makes so-called paleo diet products. 

Red wine consumption didn't predict supercentenarianism.

Legume consumption didn't predict it.

The presence of hills didn't predict it.

It turns out that a strong predictor of super-longevity is the absence of detailed birth records.

That's right - the best predictor of super-longevity is living someplace where there's no records of when people were born!

Wait - it gets better.

In the United States, whenever a state introduced birth certificates, supercentenarianism miraculously dropped by 69-82%. A full 82% of all supercentenarians on record in the U.S. were "born" before birth certificates were used. Only 18% have birth certificates; only 18% of American supercentenarians can actually be verified. Oops.

In Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria, the strongest predictor for regions with high reported supercentenarianism was high crime, low income, and low life expectancy relative to the national average. Ninety-nine percent of male Italian centenarians smoke. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese centenarians are actually dead or missing. These aren't what you'd expect. Oops again.

Gee, the strongest predictor of longevity is living in high crime, low income and low life expectancy areas compared to the rest of the nation?  That seems completely backwards from everything we know about poverty being a substantial health risk.  And that's not even touching 99% of Italian centenarians smoking.  Something very strange is going on here. 

The conclusion of the paper is that the primary causes of reported supercentenarianism in these countries are pension fraud and reporting error.

Sorry, but this literally made me laugh out loud.  They're not measuring longevity, they're measuring fraud.  This is the quality of science we get out the medical junk science world.  This is what diet advice is being based on.  

(Verified Italian supercentenarian Maria Giuseppa Robucci (20 March 1903-18 June 2019))

How to Become a Famous Scientist - Just Use This One Simple Trick

I write about junk science fairly often.  There seem to be two main reasons for that.  First, it's one of my favorite topics, but behind that is the fact that there would be far less to write about if it weren't for the fact that we appear to be in the Golden Age of Junk Science.  There is far more junk science than at any point in my lifetime - or maybe I just notice it more, but don't think about that.  

Examples?  A recent example that leapt off the page at me and gathered a lot of attention is Harvard researchers have announced that eating red meat just twice a week causes diabetes.  But SiG, I hear you thinking, that's not what that headline says.  It says "may."  Yes, but junk science always uses those "hedge your bets words" like could, might, may, should and so on.  That way they never can be held accountable for misleading the world.  "We never said it would cause diabetes, we said it may.  We didn't say what the percentage chance was because we need more funding to find that out.  (Ooo! They win twice in that disclaimer!) 

Like virtually all of the food correlations you read about, they depend on Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQs) which are notoriously unreliable.  Legendarily unreliable in fact.  FFQs have survey questions like, "list what you had for lunch in March of '22" (usually multiple choice) 

But that's not all. An honest assessor of papers like this, Dr. Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D. in Public Nutrition, did a must-read analysis of the study, but we don't always get that.  A few money quotes:

• This makes no sense. Diabetes is essentially the inability to handle glucose. Meat contains no glucose. Carbohydrates contain glucose. My immediate thought was – don’t blame the burger for what the bun, fries and fizzy drink did. 
• The definition of red meat included sandwiches and lasagna.  Lasagna is red meat?  It's only red from the tomato sauce covering it.  You just can't see that because of noodles covering it.
• As if FFQs aren't bad enough, the serving sizes have changed since the original Food Frequency Questionnaires
• Total red meat was claimed to have a higher risk than both processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. Total red meat is the sum of the other two. It can’t be worse than both.
• The relative risk numbers grabbed the headlines; the absolute risk differences were a fraction of one per cent.

Since we don't get a column like Zoë's for every study, the takeaway message about studies like this is that "correlation doesn't mean causation."  All they can possibly find is correlation.  Second to that is to know that the lobbying group with largest impact on society has got to be the vegan lobby.  It’s good to realize that it's just the latest paper from the Harvard correlation study factory.  All their papers promote plants and condemn animal foods.  And all of it, every one I've ever seen, is junk.

The easiest place to find correlations is in climate research.  Have you seen a story about climate change doing something or other and thought, "climate change; is there nothing it can't do?"  Think correlations, not causation.  For example, Watts Up With That published a story this week that says climate change is causing more allergies.  

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) ran a segment during its local morning edition titled, “Climate change is contributing to an extended allergy season.”

The author's point is that it could be true, might even be a cause and effect relationship, but it's a negative consequence to something that's good for the world in general.  Some people will need to get more treatments, but that's not everyone (I'm one - I've had allergies since my teenage years).  By and large, allergies are treatable. 

Since correlation sells, I want to drop a simple idea that I haven't seen anywhere else.  Let's believe for the moment that global temperatures are increasing, and ignore the big questions that raises.  That means that anything else that can be found to be increasing in the time period in which temperatures are rising will be found to be directly correlated to climate change.  Conversely, anything that was found to be decreasing in time is inversely correlated to climate change.  Perhaps you could say climate change was endangering species.  Never mind.  That's been done.

In the first piece, instead of saying eating red meat causes diabetes, you can just as accurately say climate change causes diabetes.  The two things have increased in the world in the same time period.  Climate change causes microplastics in the Pacific ocean.  Without doing the research, I bet if you went back to the 1950s, let alone the late 1800s temperature reference period, you wouldn't find the word microplastics or even the concept.  Today, it's hard to go a week without seeing a microplastics story. 

Think of it!  No more need to waste time compiling fake data; if they're both increasing, one caused the other.  Food Frequency Questionnaires? Fuggedaboutit. Just ask the AI to fill it out or make it up completely.  You know people have been getting bigger and more obese in America.  It's going up, it may not go up exactly at the same slope as temperature (pictured below and far from constant) but it correlates with global temperatures so just say that climate change is causing people to get bigger and more obese.  Or red meat consumption. Your choice. If you find data that says vegetable consumption has gone up - ever notice "fruits and vegetables" has become one word, fruitsanvegetables? - you can conclude climate change caused it. You could conclude fruitsanvegetables consumption caused Americans to get bigger and fatter, but that'll get you cancelled.

University of Alabama Huntsville measure of the lower atmosphere temperature from 1979 to last month.  From Watts Up With That

Meet The King of Junk Food Science

Ever get overwhelmed by the "he-who" studies about food that make the news all the time?  People who eat red meat X times a week are more likely to get Y; that sort of thing?  Meet the reigning king of junk science: Buzz Feed presents the story of Brian Wansink, the head of Cornell’s prestigious food psychology research unit, the Food and Brand Lab. If any one person could be responsible for so many of us saying, "Wait!... Didn't they say that was good (or bad) for us last week?", it's Brian Wansink.

As the head of Cornell’s prestigious food psychology research unit, the Food and Brand Lab, Wansink was a social science star. His dozens of studies about why and how we eat received mainstream attention everywhere from O, the Oprah Magazine to the Today show to the New York Times. At the heart of his work was an accessible, inspiring message: Weight loss is possible for anyone willing to make a few small changes to their environment, without need for strict diets or intense exercise.

To show an example, Buzz Feed leads with a story about a young scientist from Turkey, Özge Siğirci, and the task Wansink gave her.  Earlier, Wansink's lab had performed an experiment at an all-you-can-eat buffet in an Italian restaurant.  Some customers paid $8 for the buffet, others paid half price. After their meal, they all filled out a questionnaire about who they were and how they felt about what they’d eaten.

Somewhere in those survey results, the professor was convinced, there had to be a meaningful relationship between the discount and the diners. But he wasn’t satisfied by Siğirci’s initial review of the data.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done an interesting study where the data ‘came out’ the first time I looked at it,” he told her over email.

The problem is, that's not how the statistical techniques of science work.  You don't sift through tons of data trying to find a hypothesis to publish, you have a hypothesis and then set up an experiment to try to prove or disprove it.  More specifically, you try to disprove the Null Hypothesis; which says that your experiment made no difference and any differences you found are a random event.  Disproving the null hypothesis means your experiment worked.  Wansink is going about things completely backwards: he's looking at results and trying to generate a hypothesis that matches them.  

For example, he gave Siğirci  suggestions for how to massage the data, and would later publicly praise her on his blog for being “the grad student who never said ‘no.’”

First, he wrote, she should break up the diners into all kinds of groups: “males, females, lunch goers, dinner goers, people sitting alone, people eating with groups of 2, people eating in groups of 2+, people who order alcohol, people who order soft drinks, people who sit close to buffet, people who sit far away, and so on...”

Then she should dig for statistical relationships between those groups and the rest of the data: “# pieces of pizza, # trips, fill level of plate, did they get dessert, did they order a drink, and so on...”

Eventually, four papers were published about the pizza study.  All four have been corrected or retracted.  It might be catching up with him.

Wansink couldn’t have known that his blog post would ignite a firestorm of criticism that now threatens the future of his three-decade career. Over the last 14 months, critics the world over have pored through more than 50 of his old studies and compiled “the Wansink Dossier,” a list of errors and inconsistencies that suggests he aggressively manipulated data. Cornell, after initially clearing him of misconduct, has opened an investigation. And he’s had five papers retracted and 14 corrected, the latest just this month.

Now, interviews with a former lab member and a trove of previously undisclosed emails show that, year after year, Wansink and his collaborators at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab have turned shoddy data into headline-friendly eating lessons that they could feed to the masses.

In correspondence between 2008 and 2016, the renowned Cornell scientist and his team discussed and even joked about exhaustively mining datasets for impressive-looking results. They strategized how to publish subpar studies, sometimes targeting journals with low standards. And they often framed their findings in the hopes of stirring up media coverage to, as Wansink once put it, “go virally big time.”

As Susan Wei, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota interviewed for the article says, it's hard to tell if Wansink is stupid or corrupt.  Well, she was more polite than I am and didn't put it exactly that way:

Wei added. “He’s so brazen about it, I can’t tell if he’s just bad at statistical thinking, or he knows that what he’s doing is scientifically unsound but he goes ahead anyway.”

Longtime readers know that junk science is one of those things that really gets me mad; it's also something I've written about several times (example).  In a way, Wansink is just another example of the replication crisis hitting science, mentioned in that link.

A lot of people in the country really pay attention to these junk studies and try to adjust their life to improve their health and their family's.  There appears to be no attention in Wansink's lab to how good the science is, just that it gets lots of publicity and goes viral. 

It's a long article, but quite an interesting read if you're interested in the "replication crisis" in science, and some of the problems.  It looks closely at some studies Wansink's group is famous for and their problems, and it has interviews with some former students. 

Brian Wansink - AP Photo by Mike Groll - from Buzz Feed

We're Awash in Junk Science - and Junk

Earlier in the week, Borepatch posted another update on the junk science coming out of not just the climate modelers/IPCC, but science in general.  The link was to the Economist, "How Science Goes Wrong".  The potential impacts on society are devastating, as the impact from biochemistry illustrates:

A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. ... In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.

But the killer comment comes from the comments to Borepatch's post by AndyN, who links to a similar story on Reason.com asking "Can Most Cancer Research Be Trusted?"

My favorite quote: "I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning."

I've told the story that Mrs. Graybeard had a bone marrow transplant for breast cancer in 1997, and that paper that was based on turned out to have been falsified.  Furthermore, with the passing of our friend I talked about in that post, she is the only survivor out of a group of 8 who were all given a 75% chance of survival based on cancer staging studies.  Was survival pure dumb luck, or was it factors that had absolutely nothing to do with the therapy?  If the research can't be trusted, we're not much more advanced than bleeding people or applying leaches.  Anybody remember when Steve Martin did "Theodoric of Yorik" the barber on SNL in the '70s?  The really ironic part of this is that academic researchers are usually held up as more ethical than the drug companies who are "only in it for the money" - and certainly the way they've turned cholesterol lowering drugs from a useless curiosity into a multi-billion dollar industry (cf here or here) shows they're not completely innocent of bad research themselves.  But in this case, the drug companies, by trying to duplicate the studies, are performing arguably the most important part of science: independent verification.  From Reason:

These results strongly suggest that the current biomedical research and publication system is wasting scads of money and talent. What can be done to improve the situation? Perhaps, as some Nature online commenters have bitterly suggested, researchers should submit their work directly to Bayer and Amgen for peer review?

The experiences of my wife and her group underline that bad medical research isn't a victimless academic vice.  Real people were subjected to really awful treatments (doctors call it "the most grueling ordeal in medicine") that provably did nothing for their survival chances.  And it's not just medical science that's filled with bad research and outright (intentional or not) fraud. A popular psychological journal paper on "priming" has largely been disproven (9 separate studies failed to replicate the results), while the idea already has "made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace".  (If need be, search this blog for mentions of Cass Sunstein)  Particle physics, held out as the "hardest of the hard sciences" has been victimized by not "blinding" the study properly:

But maximising a single figure of merit, such as statistical significance, is never enough: witness the “pentaquark” saga. Quarks are normally seen only two or three at a time, but in the mid-2000s various labs found evidence of bizarre five-quark composites. The analyses met the five-sigma test. But the data were not “blinded” properly; the analysts knew a lot about where the numbers were coming from. When an experiment is not blinded, the chances that the experimenters will see what they “should” see rise. This is why people analysing clinical-trials data should be blinded to whether data come from the “study group” or the control group. When looked for with proper blinding, the previously ubiquitous pentaquarks disappeared.

and:

Other data-heavy disciplines face similar challenges. Models which can be “tuned” in many different ways give researchers more scope to perceive a pattern where none exists. According to some estimates, three-quarters of published scientific papers in the field of machine learning are bunk because of this “overfitting”, says Sandy Pentland, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In August of 2005, John P. A. Ioannidis published one of the most downloaded papers ever, "Why Most Published Research Findings are False".  In it, he presents a long list of factors that are associated with results being false.  One that lept out at me was this:

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

Which explains Climate Science in one sentence.

Naturally, it wouldn't be this blog if I didn't take a shot at how this is much more of a problem when there's a huge government like we have now. 

We spent a while yesterday looking at the "Man on the Street" interviews that Mark Dice has on YouTube, and it doesn't take long to convince you that these people shouldn't be left alone with scissors, let alone in a voting booth or making important decisions.  That thought leads to the idea that we should be led by only "Philosopher Kings", Technocrats who will be experts in the fields and choose the right course of action for us based on Science.  That's an exceedingly dangerous course in politics, because it's generally a feature of command governments, and that's generally accompanied by millions dead.  What this research into how well science is working is saying is that the consensus is almost always wrong, and the scientists really aren't any more qualified to make important decisions than the people who think Lee Harvey Oswald killed Jesus in the 1300s with a stolen gun. 

and that is the problem....

Another Steaming Pile of Junk Science

In my personal "war on junk science" I can't really influence anyone who's doing the science, I can only hope to point the junk being passed on out there.  Maybe if enough of us hassle the agencies paying for this crap, things might get better.  Hah!  I make myself laugh sometimes.  We won't affect those agencies. 

In essence, this is a followup to a post from just over one year ago, The War on Meat and is based on a long post called "Why are We Basing Food Policy on Black Box Data?" from Nina Teicholz at her substack, the Unsettled Science newsletter.  Going from memory here, Nina was newspaper journalist in her early career.  At some point, her newspaper assigned her to be the food correspondent, sort of a "secret restaurant critic".  At some point, she couldn't help but notice how much better food prepared at some restaurants was and somehow learned it was because of the natural, real butter and cream they used in sauces.  Like most people, she grew up fat phobic and was afraid of it.  This led to her researching and writing a book called The Big Fat Surprise which is just full of stories of the kind of crap that goes on in food science (I've often thought if I treated test data on how some electronic system performed like Ancel Keyes treated the cholesterol vs. heart disease risk data in his famous "Seven Countries Study," I'd be in jail.)  That led her to become one of the founders and first president of The Nutrition Coalition, a grass-roots organization of people trying to clean up the US Dietary Guidelines.  

It shouldn't be a surprise, just as everywhere else and every little thing the Fed.Gov touches, industries and lobbying organizations pushing their particular agendas, spreading money around directly or indirectly.  

It's a bit on the long side, but definitely worth a read.  As I usually do, I'll post some highlights here to tease going there to read the whole thing.  The main topic is in serious errors in a study called the Global Burden of Disease study, which like so much other junk science, tries to link the harm done to people by their diets.  A note from epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis goes particularly well here; so well it could have been written about this study, but wasn't. 

In recent updated meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies, almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk.  Substantial deficiencies of key nutrients (e.g., vitamins), extreme over consumption of food, and obesity from excessive calories may indeed increase mortality risk.  However, can small intake differences of specific nutrients, foods, or diet patterns with similar calories causally, markedly, and almost ubiquitously affect survival?

As we said then, how could everything have “statistically significant associations with mortality risk”?  How could everything either lengthen or shorten our lives and nothing be benign?  That's what the GBD study is looking like.  Back to Nina Teicholz:

It turns out that a highly influential 2019 claim—that no amount of unprocessed red meat is safe for health—was completely inaccurate, according to a statement in March by the authors of the Global Burdens of Disease study (GBD), an on-going project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Two years earlier, in 2017, these same authors had judged red meat to be the least likely cause of death among 15 risk factors analyzed. Then, in 2019, red-meat’s risk jumped 36-fold. A forthcoming publication will correct these errors, and the risk will drop significantly, said the lead author Christopher Murray, in an interview. Despite the inaccuracies, however, he says he does not intend to correct or retract the paper.
...
GBD has also been a collaborator with the World Health Organization since 2018, and its numbers are increasingly being used by the United Nations, including work to reduce meat consumption as part of the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals.” The most prominent of these groups, EAT-Lancet, for which Murray was a “Commissioner,” aims for everyone on the planet to eat zero to 2.4% of calories as red meat.

Altering the world’s diet along these lines is intended to stop global warming, yet anyone can agree that global policy affecting human health ought to have a foundation in reliable data. With the still-rising epidemics of obesity and diabetes, we can’t afford false steps. In this light, GBD’s wildly fluctuating food-risk estimates look perilous.

It's not just their estimates on red meat that are problematic. 

In fact, other food risks calculated by GBD also changed dramatically from 2017 to 2019. The risk of salt dropped by 40%, while risks attributed to diets low in fruit, nuts and seeds, vegetables, seafood omega-3 fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids declined by more than 50%.

One of the sources Teicholz links to is an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, known widely as JAMA telling the story of the attacks on a different medical journal's editor by a group calling itself the True Health Initiative (THI).  This other journal, Annals of Internal Medicine was only tangentially involved, getting some letters critical of the GBD studies.  The editor noted the hostility and tone of the THI emails (apparently she got 2000 copies of the same email) was the worst she's ever gotten.  

This gets into the way the anti-meat sources resemble all the leftist/cancel culture stories we hear.  There have been doctors who have had their lives ruined for not following the accepted stories.  When the stories are wrong and need to be corrected, groups like THI fight like mad.  Everyone knows the line that goes: "if a conservative doesn't want to eat meat, they don't eat it; if a liberal doesn't want to eat meat meat, they demand that nobody eat it and the world stop producing it."

Go read. 

The New Dark Ages

There has been wider conversation than usual on blogs I read about something I’ve mentioned several times over the years; that we’re not just headed for a global collapse involving much of (all of) the West, we seem to be headed to a second Dark Ages.  The talk has been centered on whether or not we’re already in the New Dark Ages (which I’m going to shorten to NDA because I expect to use that a lot).  The talk seems to have started with a post from Borepatch in turn referencing a post about results from the James Webb Space Telescope contradicting the “standard model” of cosmology, the Big Bang Theory (TBBT).  Aesop at Raconteur Report replies that he thinks we’re in the slide into the Dark Ages and that slide started in the mid-1800s.

Let me begin by saying that the dates of something like the (original) Dark Ages, or any period in history are arrived at by committee.  They’re no more absolute or valid by decree than something like the Big Bang Theory; they’re a consensus.  We will never know when the NDA starts (or started) but years from now, historians will assign a date.  

Both Borepatch and Aesop are right about the decline in science in the world and that it has been going on for along time, and I've written about it many times (for example).  Does that itself indicate the NDA has begun?   I don’t think so, in itself.  Yes, there has been a steady decline in new, important science compared to the early 20th century, but there are other explanations involved.  

A good starting point is to ask what science is.  I’m an extremely hard-core advocate of the idea that if an experiment can’t be done to test predictions, it’s simply not science.  By itself, that says extremely well-regarded things can’t be considered science; things like TBBT, the modern Theory of Evolution, the modern “Climate Change” hustle and many, many more.  These are supported by observations and computer models, but anyone who hasn’t realized those models can be made to say anything the author wants hasn’t worked around computer models for any length of time.  

Here, I fall back on a quote from a guy whom I’ve considered a role model since I first came across him around 40 years ago, Richard Feynman: “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.”  Like Feynman, I'm almost a militant experimentalist.  If it can't be demonstrated in a controlled experiment, it's not science, it's faith.  

As an example of the difference, as a design engineer in microwave communications, I spent literally days at a time simulating how a circuit, antenna or other thing would work before we built the first one.  These models are based on Maxwell’s equations, science that has been experimentally verified for over a hundred years.  The software was from independent, competing, software companies that would spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year improving their algorithms to accurately predict what these circuits and things would do.  They did this by designing experiments and testing how accurate the predictions were.  Remember, these are competing companies, and they used their accuracy as a selling point.  How much is spent on the climate change models and verifying how accurate they are by experiment?  Does anyone ever talk about verifying the models?  I’ve read they don’t spend anything on that, but don’t know for sure.  Their Global Climate Models are parameterized and the parameters are tweaked to agree with some measured data, which isn’t necessarily accurate.  They change the model to give them the answer they want but don’t necessarily know that the changes improved the model for all situations or just the ones they checked.  They’re not founded on established science.

That doesn’t mean that only physics is real science.  The vast majority of biology, chemistry, geology and the subjects taught in (what used to be called) “Colleges of Arts and Sciences” are science, but there as aspects that aren’t really science.  Math is real science because mathematical proof establishes that everything about it can be checked and is consistent.  Every kid knows (or should know) that any subtraction problem can be checked by addition, division by multiplication, and the ability to prove correctness carries as far as you care to go.  

Virtually all of modern medicine is improved by constant experimentation, although corruption has institutionalized things that haven’t been proven by experiment.  If an engineer did what some of these epidemiologists did with their correlational “he-who” studies we’d be doing hard time in Federal prison.  It can be hard to recognize when something sneaks into those academic programs that can’t be verified by experiment.  

Until some organization can replicate the conditions of a developing/evolving world, including tracking results for billions of years, I can’t consider it anything other than an observation.  Start with the best models of the just formed world and watch one for a billion years or two.  See if anything spontaneously generates.  Without experimental backup, I see no semantic difference between saying evolution selected for some characteristic and saying there was intelligent design.  Either way, you haven’t experimentally verified anything.  Except the first one allows people to feel better about themselves. 

The things that rely on real world science and application - engineering - are relatively healthy, still doing great and remarkable things, but a side effect of that is as the specialization of the knowledge required goes up, the number of people who can do it goes down.  Take microprocessors - a tremendous invention that has improved the world in uncountable ways.  Last data I have says there are only four companies on Earth that can work at the smallest current geometries.  Is another, smaller-transistor sized generation in the future?  Quantum processors?  Processor speed hasn't really improved in a decade or more.  CPUs were running at 3 GHz 10 years ago.  If Moore's Law was still running, they'd be running at 12 or 15 GHz by now.  The fact that they aren’t implies operating at that speed is fundamentally too hard.  What if to get transistors to 15 GHz requires massively expensive new semiconductor plants?  Further, what if the science that says that isn’t widely accepted as good science, and to do the experiment would cost far more than any company would be willing to gamble?  

Think of analog signal processing.  Yes, it still goes on and it's the same way.  There's a small handful of places that can do it.

While the semiconductor foundries are still big and still have many engineers working there, the number of designers that can design the entire chip is shockingly small.  The number in the world would fit comfortably in conference center.  

Can it keep going?  

The age of big construction projects and civil engineering projects is apparently over, mostly because of NIMBY reactions blocking it, and those are unfortunately too often linked to “junk science.”  Could a modern Golden Gate bridge be built?  A modern Hoover dam?  

The slow down in big new physics discoveries is tied to the expense and difficulty of getting to the energy levels they need.  The JWST discoveries depend on things that have never been done before - the size of the telescope, not just being in space but at the L2 point so that it can get down to the temperatures required to see those wavelengths.  I've read of creating particle accelerators so big they need to be put in space.  Will any country or society do that?  The increase in costs that hinder the advance of physics limit the giant construction projects.  

The other problem areas that come to mind seem to be education-related and I think with the news showing what a hot mess education is, I don’t need to say much.  I think of the bridge that collapsed at FIU a few years ago, apparently because of incompetent hires at some point in the process.  Add in the Boeing 737 issues and you wonder if everything gets higher risk and more likely to kill you.

The reason I’m reluctant to say the NDA has begun is because my threshold isn’t just that we’re not advancing properly or fast enough, it’s that the new people take the old inventions so much for granted that it’s not just that they don’t understand how to replicate them, they lose the idea that such things ever existed.  I think there’s a real possibility that relied-upon integrated circuits that are old can fall into that trap.

Years ago, someone had the story about a Roman villa that was unearthed somewhere in central Europe.  (Yeah, I'm fuzzy on the details).  Like the modern discovery of Roman mosaics, it was gorgeous, and one of the discoveries was the villa had a form of central heating.  The people who discovered it were puzzled to find burned marks on the floors in some rooms.  They came to the conclusion they were from fires set to warm the place.

The people who lived there a few hundred years after it was built not only couldn't run the central heat, they had no concept of what central heat was or what it could do, so they lit fires on the floor.  They knew nothing from their past.

We're not at that point exactly, yet, but I think you can see it in the future.   

Image from the movie "I Am Legend."  Not at all about New Dark Ages, but I think a Zombie Apocalypse would bring one.

The War on Meat

While it turns out that the widely reported story that the latest Biden "infrastructure" bill had provisions to limit beef consumption to a few ounces a month was a fake news story tracked to the UK Daily Mail, that's a minor distraction.  There really is an all out war on eating meat, especially beef, which is grounded in nothing but pseudoscience and propagated rumor.  It has been going on for years and if you're like most people, you've probably have heard some of the arguments so long you tend to think they're true. 

We've covered some of this sort of stuff here.  Junk science is a pet peeve of mine and you'll hardly find an area of science more filled with junk than diet recommendations.  I'll link to this piece because it carries a great table of spurious correlations of the kind that show up in what I've called "he-who" studies:  "he who eats (or does) X is more likely to get Y;" that sort of thing.  There's a great deal of desire on the part of many people to know what they should eat.  Simply saying, "eat what your grandparents ate, not industrial foods" which is honestly as a good a recommendation as anything, doesn't get accepted well.  The alternative, real, randomized controlled experiments that would last for decades, is prohibitively expensive, hard to do, and nobody wants to wait.  As we noted while going through my wife's cancer 24 years ago, it takes five years to get five year survival data; extrapolate that to it takes a lifetime to get life extension data. 

The rest of the world does appear to want to institute a carbon tax on meat because of grossly exaggerated figures on the amount of impact animal farming has on methane production.  First off, the methane from cows is 1.8% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US.  Second off, methane doesn't come from cattle farts, it comes from cattle burps.  I realize that might be a minor distinction, but the EPA, those high priests of junk science, jumped on the "regulate cattle farts" bandwagon under Obama.  The UN claims cattle create 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than comes from transportation - but they're lumping in all livestock, not just cattle, to include poultry, lamb and all sources of meat.  They're also including the effects of animal feed production, feed harvesting, feeding the animals, the farm vehicles that tend to these animals and everything up to the emissions from the slaughterhouse.  A third of that 18% is blamed on deforestation specifically in Brazil.

Both of those summaries are dishonest.  First, it's not fair to blame methane production in chicken farming on cattle farming, and it's unfair to include everything that the goes into food production to just the tailpipe emissions of vehicles rather than the equivalent entire life cycle associated with transportation.  Second, the part about deforestation is dishonest for two reasons; the easiest being that there's no equivalent deforestation in the US, or in other parts of the world.  In the US the story is reforestation.  We have more trees today than a hundred years ago.  The other reason is that not all grassland could be forest and not all forest can convert to grasslands.  There is some relation between the two, but it's not simple subtraction.  Simply, much of the planet can't be dense forest and can only be grassland. 

Chances are, you've heard until you're subconsciously convinced that low fat foods are healthier.  That data was always suspect, but that cynical observation applies that says old science theories don't go away because the weight of evidence pushes them aside; they go away because old scientists who support them die off.  Since about 2000 there have been many good quality meta-analyses of all the studies that have been done before and concluded the evidence is just too weak to matter.  The diet-heart hypothesis that lifetimes of eating fatty foods and having elevated cholesterol levels led to heart attacks has had conflicting data, like that in older adults higher LDL is associated with longer life, long enough for studies to have essentially concluded the diet-heart hypothesis is dead. 

What about vegetarianism?  It's another belief that has far more faith behind it than evidence.  Seven years ago, I ran a review on a book I'd read by health writer Denise Minger, called "Death by Food Pyramid."  Denise was a 17 year old who had thought she should become a raw food vegan but was unaware of the constant effort required to not destroy her health.  Vitamin B12, for example, just doesn't come in plant matter, at least not to any level that eliminates the need for supplementation.  In Denise's case, she simply needed 17 teeth fixed.  At 17, she went to the dentist and after way too many disconcerting "hmm" sounds, heavy sighs, and pokes with pointy metal objects, found she needed to have 17 teeth worked on - coming from never having had dental problems before she became a vegetarian.  In the space of one year. 

In all of these struggles over diet, we have the same conflicts of interest of special interests that we've had with the Covid fiasco.  Everyone pushes to get their favorite industries pushed by the USDA Dietary Guidelines.  The vegetarian movement is largely pushed by the Seventh Day Adventist church, and some influential doctors they've won over to their side, like Dean Ornish, a diet book author and M.D., and Walter Willet, the very influential head of Harvard's School of Public Health.  The lowfat crowd is pushed by the grain and cereal industry.  The push to get people to eat less meat and saturated fat is pushed by the vegetable seed oil industry, which may well be the absolutely worst things in our processed foods. 

Someone who has spent the last several years fighting to get the USDA Dietary Guidelines fixed is Nina Teicholz, who went from being a low-fat, vegetarian food writer to an omnivore heading the Nutrition Coalition, an organization trying to get the dietary guidelines to more honestly assess science that has been pouring in within the last 20 years.  This an hour long, but very worthwhile talk on many of these topics. 

At the risk of overstating the obvious, If a Government Committee Recommends Something, Do The Opposite, as I said here.  If they tell you to limit red meat, maybe you should eat more of it.

Catching Up - A Disjointed Post

No one will be more surprised than I am that I haven't posted anything since Thursday night.  I think that, excepting a few periods of travel, it's the longest I've gone without posting since I started this blog.  Not that I think there are hordes of readers waiting with bated breath for me to return, just that I feel like I'm supposed to return!

Aside from some family matters that I don't think are proper to discuss, at least for now, the time since my last post was largely spent working on the new shop.  We had blinds to mount on three windows and the double doors.  We had to wait for the construction guys to finish working inside, caulking and painting, and then I went to hang blinds.  I don't know about you folks, but hanging blinds never goes as smoothly and effortlessly as it should.   We bought blinds online specifying the kind that mount outside the window box, since I knew the walls had a 1x4 running a few inches on both sides across the top and bottom so there would be wood to screw the mounts into.  Due to unexpected nails, no two blinds have the same placement and spacing of the mounts!  Each set of blinds ended up being mounted a few times.

But the worst were these.  We have hurricane rated doors, with windows made of impact glass that survives the 2x4 shot at 150 mph (also effective against smash and grab), but they didn't have blinds inside for privacy.  The blinds are made by the company that makes the doors, so they should be the easy choice, right?  Ha ha!  Despite the video that makes installation appear to be a 30 second job (I swear it was all CGI), this was the worst job we had to do.  The two blinds took about six hours to mount and wrecked me, both physically, aggravating the mostly-healed tendinitis I got last Saturday, and causing me no end of frustration.

The construction is down to just a couple of finish jobs and may be done this week.  I'm mostly moved into the space, but need to spend some time building some shelves.  My working vacation for the last two weeks is ending today, so moving the reloading stuff will have to wait until next weekend when I can spend a little more time getting the area laid out. 

Possibly the longest thing I've written in the last few days was a comment over at Bayou Renaissance Man, to a piece on How to Quack-Proof Yourself. The topic of junk science is something I've written many pieces on and care deeply about.  This particular alleyway in the topic is very important, and the linked author, Dr. Amy Tuteur, approaches the argument with authority.  She gets a lot of it right, IMO of course, but drifts too far down the "physicians are scientists and we know what's good for you" road for my comfort.  In a year that we've been told the advice on consumption of saturated fat in the diet is meaningless (pay portal - more readable summary here) when it comes to preventing heart disease, and that there really is nothing mysteriously good for you about red wine (resveratrol), her comments on a few of these topics don't sit well with me.  Let's face it, the official pronouncements on what we should eat change regularly.

Here's the part that tweaked me.  Quoting the source:

A pervasive theme in quackery is the notion of the brilliant heretic. Believers argue that science is transformed by brilliant heretics whose fabulous theories are initially rejected, but ultimately accepted as the new orthodoxy. The conceit rests on the notion that revolutionary scientific ideas are dreamed up by mavericks, but nothing could be further from the truth. Revolutionary scientific ideas are not dreamed up; they are the inevitable result of massive data collection.

Like plate tectonics?  Like the big bang theory vs. the steady state models?  Both of these well-established scientific theories were brought up by "brilliant heretics" and didn't get accepted despite the "massive data collection" she talks about.  Back in 2011, Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for a topic he was drummed out of his research group over, quasi crystals.  Yet another  brilliant heretic who was ignored and punished widely despite his "massive data collection".  She's going against perhaps the most quoted book in science, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.    Kuhn observes that science is relatively static; new ideas are accepted in infrequent revolutions when old ways of envisioning and approaching problems fall to new ones.  This happens largely because the old scientists who hold those views die off.  

Like Neil deGrasse Tyson, she makes the mistake of saying since science is self-correcting and is right in the long run, it's always right. In general, science is always wrong; if it was always right, it wouldn't need to be self-correcting.  Something would be proven, then put on the shelf while new things were conquered.  If this is true at all, it's only true in math.  Science is correct only in a few, simple areas that are well known and that no longer need research. 

In reality you get things like the recent paper where a well-funded lab tried to replicate published, peer-reviewed cancer research and found only about a quarter of 67 papers could be verified. My favorite quote:

"I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning." 

Which reminds me that one of the most downloaded academic papers in history is John Ioannidis' Why Most Published Research is Wrong.

Gary Taubes, one of my favorite science writers, and a guy who has won many awards at it, says, "And here’s the challenge to both the scientist working in the field and the lay observer following along: how do we tell the difference between the one in a million times, say, that an outsider comes along and gets it right, and the other 999,999 quack-driven attempts? The numbers alone tell us that the best idea is always to bet against the outsider, that we’re always best served by ignoring him or her and getting back to science as usual (what Kuhn called “normal science”). The odds are enormously in our favor if we do so. But, still, when a paradigm is shifted, it’s going to be an outsider who does it,..."

And that's the rub.  If a self-proclaimed brilliant heretic, or someone proclaimed as such by other people says they have proof their advancement in science or medicine chances are they're not right.  But keep your ears open for lots of heretics saying the same thing.  The data that dietary saturated fat has essentially nothing to do with heart disease has been talked about regularly by many, many researchers for as long as the lowfat mantra was being preached, but there's a long time lag between the point where lots of heretics start saying something and the time the older researchers die off. 

(I wanted a picture of an old scientist, and Bing gave me actor Christopher Lloyd as Doc from "Back to the Future".  Somehow, that works for me.)

The Crisis in Nutritional Science

I've mentioned John P.A. Ioannidis on my pages many times before (the first, I think).  He's the author of what’s widely quoted as one of the most downloaded papers in history, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False 2”, in which he presents data that as much as 70% of published science is wrong.

Last year, he extended his purview to probably the richest source of bad science, nutritional epidemiology, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Bottom line, this field has got to be fixed because it is just so far from good science that it’s dangerous. Not only is it endangering peoples’ health, it’s ruining confidence in science as a way of finding out how the world works. You can read and download the paper (2 page pdf) here.  The unusual part of getting to this article is that I bounced there from Watts Up With That, a post by frequent guest author Kip Hansen, "Epidemiology, Diet Soda, and Climate Science".  You should RTWT. 

As I always do, some quotes to get you to read it.

In recent updated meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies, almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk.  Substantial deficiencies of key nutrients (e.g., vitamins), extreme over consumption of food, and obesity from excessive calories may indeed increase mortality risk.  However, can small intake differences of specific nutrients, foods, or diet patterns with similar calories causally, markedly, and almost ubiquitously affect survival?

Ioannidis' clear thinking comes across very clearly here.  He's saying that when they looked at epidemiological nutrition studies, almost every food item looked at had “statistically significant associations with mortality risk” or in other words, everything we eat is killing us faster and sooner, or making us live longer, and he asks if that's even possible.  Everything?  Nothing is neutral or has no effect?

Perhaps my favorite paragraph from the whole article (emphasis added):

Assuming the meta-analyzed evidence from cohort studies represents life span–long causal associations, for a baseline life expectancy of 80 years, eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (i.e., 1 year per hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single mandarin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life.  Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking.  Could these results possibly be true?

Before you order your yearly 23 pounds of hazelnuts, hold on a minute.  It stretches credulity to think all of those could be true.  One year of extra life for every hazelnut eaten daily?  Or 6 years less life for one egg eaten daily? What happens if you have one hazelnut and and one egg daily?  Do the effects cancel?  Does only one year cancel, so you only die 5 years sooner?  These answer are the result of the way these meta-analyses work; they find spurious correlations.  You might recall an article I did on the King of Junk Food Science (where the adjective "junk" modifies science, not food) and a link to a FiveThirtyEight column where they post funny spurious correlations they found.  In these nutritional studies, they frequently study "all-cause mortality", but the top causes of mortality include accidents (#3) and medical mistakes (usually left out of the rankings, but numerically could be more than accidents, taking #3).  How could they be improving mortality dramatically without affecting those to some degree? 

Individuals consume thousands of chemicals in millions of possible daily combinations. For instance, there are more than 250 000 different foods and even more potentially edible items, with 300 000 edible plants alone. Seemingly similar foods vary in exact chemical signatures (e.g., more than 500 different polyphenols). Much of the literature silently assumes disease risk is modulated by the most abundant substances; for example, carbohydrates or fats. However, relatively uncommon chemicals within food, circumstantial contaminants, serendipitous toxicants, or components that appear only under specific conditions or food preparation methods (e.g., red meat cooking)may be influential. Risk-conferring nutritional combinations may vary by an individual’s genetic background, metabolic profile, age, or environmental exposures. Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables is challenging, if not impossible.

Dr. Ioannidis concludes nutritional epidemiology is intrinsically unreliable.  It produces results that cannot be considered causal.  I hope/trust that's enough to get you interested in reading the article because I can't do it much justice without well exceeding the limits of TL:DR.  I recommend the version on WUWT rather than the original JAMA paper, if you're only going to read one.  Author Kip Hansen shows the mess that is nutritional epidemiology and then compares the field to climate science, another field with an incredible number of variables that may or may not interact with each other.

Similarly, for climate science, the object of study, the Earth’s climate system is not only exceptionally complex, but also chaotic.  First, we have to understand that, as we see in nutrition science, climate is comprised of hundreds of interacting components, each changing on time scales ranging from seconds to centuries, each being integral influencing and causal factors for the others — all correlated in ways we often (almost always) do not fully understand.  And, as in nutrition science, almost all climate variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is found to be correlated to some weather/climate  outcome, many other variables will also yield significant associations in the huge present-time and historical data sets relating to Earth’s weather and climate.

Thus we find the situation, unacknowledged by most of the climate science field, that [paraphrasing Ioannidis] “Disentangling the potential influence on medium to long range climate outcomes of a single climatic factor, such as atmospheric GHG concentrations,  from these myriad other variables is challenging, if not impossible” based simply on the complexity of the climate itself.

John Ioannidis - Stanford University photo