I actually think this is not just a sort of wild accusation... it's a really important point.
Why should I take the new rules seriously when the old rules were so, so very wrong?
I do not have an unmeetable standard... a clear, direct apology explicitly stating that the previous standard was the result of bad process, combined with clear statements of what is being done to improve the process and ensure this doesn't happen again would be fine.
In the meantime, though, I will not permit these people to just sort of tip-toe away from what they have (collectively) done to us, nor am I particularly impressed by efforts to change the consensus at a speed that to my eyes appears carefully calculated to ensure that nobody ever actually has to apologize, or even admit that they were wrong. In other words, at a speed that clearly indicates they're perfectly fine with millions more dying of preventable diseases rather than admit clearly that they were wrong.
Unsurprisingly, I'm not inclined to account that as "virtue", nor to pay very much attention to what they have to say now. If you care about your health, ignore the government standards and do the research to build your own consensus based on the latest science coming out, which is in ever-greater dissonance with the decades-old "official" consensus. Don't wait for our political leadership to calculate how they can move without ever having to admit fault!
(Yeah, I'm pissed about this. If the nutritional consensus forced on us for decades really is wrong and really is, as I rather suspect, the primary cause of the obesity epidemic, this is, fully literally, Nazi-scale evil unleashed on the world. Millions of lives cut short, millions upon millions more with their quality-of-life trashed. I can personally name names for both those categories; the latter category includes damned near my entire immediate family, and they're working pretty hard on getting moved into the first one, and I simply can't convince them of the real problems with the entire authority system for their entire lives telling them something else. It would put the US government right up there on the 20th century death toll list... and that is a hard list to get on to because the competition is quite stiff! Every day they dither around trying to figure out how not to have to admit fault is that much worse.)
To whom is an apology owed, by whom, and for what? The best science at the time indicated that saturated fats were killing people(which was true), and so public advocacy groups lead campaigns to lower the consumption of saturated fats. It turns out the replacement is also killing people, but it wasn't widely known for a few decades. The reality is that nutrition isn't a priority for most Americans, and our regulations and levels of research funding reflect that. The fact is that it was preferable for most people to continue to eat fatty foods made with substances of unknown safety than to stop eating fatty foods. There was no conspiracy.
The book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" has been read by virtually nobody. You can tell this, because it is widely believed the book is about a low-carb diet, or how bad carbs are. It's a misunderstanding that's understandable between the cover and the name, and heck, even the publisher-provided blurbs on Amazon, but what the book is actually about, by bulk of words, is the story of how the standard nutritional consensus got to be such garbage in the first place. It is primarily a history book, rather than a science work.
There is a very good case to be made that the science never supported what we were told, and that it was sourced in naked political power plays. When, of course, the consensus was still the Standard Consensus, that was not an argument that the body politic could hear, but as it becomes increasingly clear that the Standard Consensus was in fact wrong [1], it becomes an increasingly important book.
Nutrition is hard, and we'll be studying it for decades more. But it is not so hard that it was simply expect that we should be this fundamentally wrong, and more importantly, this wrong for this long. This took effort, and if we refuse to study what happened, we'll learn nothing from it. If indeed it the standard consensus is wrong, the signal telling us it was wrong was STAGGERINGLY ENORMOUS. We call it the "obesity epidemic". The only comparably sized epidemiological signal that comes to mind is the one that said "Lead is bad to put in the air." Those who ignored it are the ones who owe us apologies.
If you're even beginning to suspect that the standard consensus is wrong, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy and reading it. The science is a bit outdated now... the history, as is the nature of history, is not.
[1]: I phrase it that way because I'm still hedged a bit on my bets, though "The standard consensus was very wrong" is getting pretty high on my Bayes-O-Meter, even as I'm not really bought in to any of its replacements yet.
I suppose it's worth pointing out that in previous HN discussions on these sorts of topics I've always been a bit more circumspect; my Bayes-O-Meter was merely in the "highly suspicious" range. But with the announcement from the government that they are actively reversing something previously issues forth as "truth", I've finally tipped over in outright ideologue on the topic. For the record, this is actually a considered decision, not brute emotionality or fad-following. It is also, for what it's worth, the exact reaction that I'm accusing these people of trying to avoid. They are trying to avoid exactly the anger I'm expressing here from becoming widespread, but if I'm correct, the anger would be fully justified, and the only honorable thing for them to do is to go ahead and incur the anger instead of holding us back. As you can see, I'm still hedging a bit with conditional phrases, but at this point I'm having an increasingly difficult time imagining that we're suddenly going to get a spate of (honest) studies re-confirming the standard consensus.
And to be clear... I'm not asking for them to be right. That would be an unfairly large request. I'm asking for them to stop being so aggressively wrong.
I used to work in molecular epidemiology for a few years and while that never included nutrition, I did become close friends with some of the best minds on the topic. The scientific establishment was not wrong about the danger of high fat diets. This has been demonstrated over and over. What the establishment got wrong was that they didn't predict the extent to which people would replace fats with sugars in their diets. Another point I think it's really important to make is that a lot of the argument about low fat or low carb is academic and I think harmful. We've known for years that a low calorie, low fat diet that's high in fiber and consists of lots of fruits and vegetables is healthy and can contribute to losing excess weight. We've recently learned that some people find it easier to lose weight with a low-carb diet, but that doesn't mean that the establishment view is wrong. I think this debate over which is better is harmful because some people get the idea that science doesn't know what's healthy and what's not, so they say to themselves "why bother listening to anything they say?". This becomes especially problematic when people conflate the statements "high carb diets are unhealthy" with "any diet not high in carbohydrates is healthy", or similarly "high fat diets are unhealthy" with "any diet not high in fat is healthy".
Which groups? I'd be interested in someone substantiating these accusations.
EDIT: I appreciate the responses, but does anyone have a credible source? Amid criticism that what people have read has turned out untrue, let's be careful not to perpetuate the problem with more rumors.
They demonized saturated fat and pushed a switch to partially hydrogenated vegetable oils which had trans-fat. Now we say trans fat is so unhealthy that it should be banned. So a significant number of people got exposed to trans-fat due to their policy demands.
* I don't put much faith in Wikipedia, but the linked article says CSPI has been consistent for 20 years: From the mid-1990s onward, however, CSPI identified trans fats as the greater public health danger. ... In response, three trade groups - the National Restaurant Association, the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers and the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils - "said the evidence [on trans fat] was contradictory and inconclusive, and accused [CSPI] of jumping to a premature conclusion"
I'm particularly impressed with the force of this announcement - scientists haven't reached a consensus that trans fats are safe. That's it? That justifies a ban? Sounds like they're hedging their words now, so when they're inevitably wrong again they can blame 'the scientists'.
"“I don’t know how many lives will be saved, but probably in the thousands per year when all the companies are in compliance,” Technically that could be 2000 which in turn would be out of 380,000 which in turn is at the order of magnitude of statistical blip.
That said I'm all for going back to good old fashioned, exists in nature and is yummy saturated fat. Bring back the beef tallow french fries McDonalds! in ten years the FDA will say it's good for us!
Vegans couldn't eat McDonald's french fries anyway. When they switched their fryer oil, they added natural beef flavoring to compensate. I know some vegetarians that were pissed about this when they found out, but McDonald's quite rightly pointed out that they have never, ever attempted to certify any of their menu items as vegetarian or vegan, not even the salads. They leave that up to third parties, and state that they do not strictly enforce efforts to prevent cross contamination from kitchen equipment also used for meat products.
It is likely that the only markets in which McDonald's would make more than a token effort to serve vegetarians would be India and select parts of California.
Aside from that, I wonder why a vegan would be considering fast food anyway. If you take more than a cursory glance at how such restaurants get their vegetable ingredients, you would see quite a lot of animal cruelty in the form of the institutional working environment for agricultural laborers. The 2001 Yum! Brands boycott, precipitated by tomato pickers in Florida, comes to mind.
I pity the vegans because they voluntarily choose a form of asceticism, and are not likely to get any compensatory benefit for doing so. They choose to make their own lives more difficult, just like people who play games with unofficial voluntary conduct challenges. I'm not going to fault them for doing it, but I'm also not going to change my personal opinion that they are at some level just spoiling their own fun just for a few extra millimeters of e-peen.
E-peen isn't always about showing off to others. Sometimes you just want to figuratively admire it for a while in the mirror.
I think they're honestly trying to be better people. And in trying, they become happier with themselves.
But I also think that what they do does not actually make them objectively better, because I have different moral standards than they have.
As a result, the self-satisfaction vegans achieve by adhering to their standard of conduct sounds very much like someone telling me about how they caught all the Pokemon. They may be very proud of their accomplishment, but any interest I show is feigned, purely to spare the other person's feelings.
A fraction of vegans like to proselytize or otherwise promote their voluntary conduct challenge, and I can't stand those guys.
i pity the hindus even though i can empathize with them. it just feels _wrong_ on some irrational, emotional level, to think of killing a cow, even though i feel nothing when i think of eating chicken.
I've killed a variety of different species, but outside a self-defense situation (and I would hesitate even then) I could never shoot a bear, for much the same reason. I just can't look at bears and not think they're simply furry people.
Please don't say things like that. I know chickens that care very much about their own lives and the chickens they live with. They do not want to be killed.
I'm not going to argue with you, but please stop talking about something you clearly know nothing about.
For anyone else that reads this thread, chickens are smart animals with complex social lives. See this excerpt from "Are Chickens Smarter Than Toddlers?":
In 1996, I discovered Dr. Lesley Rogers’s book The Development of Brain and Behaviour in the Chicken (1995) in the Beltsville, Maryland Agricultural Library outside Washington, DC. I sat on the floor of the stacks, reading it in tears, because Rogers was affirming that birds are intelligent beings, and that prejudice, not science, says otherwise. She said, “it is now clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals” (p. 17). She said, “With increased knowledge of the behaviour and cognitive abilities of the chicken has come the realization that the chicken is not an inferior species to be treated merely as a food source” (p. 213).
She explained that a chick “hatches with a well-developed brain, immediately able to make decisions and to form memories” (p. 118). Of battery cages for hens and all forms of industrial conditions for chickens, she said: “In no way can these living conditions meet the demands of a complex nervous system designed to form a multitude of memories and to make complex decisions” (p. 218). Citing recent demonstrations of complex cognition in birds including chickens and others once denigrated by mainstream scientists as “unquestionably low in the scale of avian evolution,” Rogers called for more research in the field of comparative cognition, given how recent studies had “thrown the fallacies of previous assumptions about the inferiority of avian cognition into sharp relief” (p. 218).
I was ecstatic. A bona fide avian scientist was saying what I already knew to be true about birds, and about chickens in particular, in forthright language that could be quoted without ellipses. She spoke of “the cognitive demands of the hitherto underestimated chicken brain” (p. 213).
The chicken’s brain is equipped to enable it to meet the complex demands of the natural world in which this brain took shape. There is a fit between the total mental system of the chicken and the tropical forest habitat in which chickens evolved. Chickens have thrived for tens of thousands of years within the complex ecology of their forest world – a world that is reflected in their genetic makeup. The neurophysiology of the chicken embodies a system of interactions between the genetic, hormonal and environmental factors that figure in the developing embryo and express themselves in the adult bird.
A cockroach can do those things too. In no way do they even approach the simplest mammals in smarts. The assertion that they are on a par is based on broad generalities - they have memory and respond to their environment. Like your Roomba; I guess that's on a par with mammals?
I lived with chickens for 18 years. I put my experience up against your fake book learning.
Look up [GRAS] to resolve it confusion about science-policy vocabulary. In non-computer science (especially biology) we deal with levels of confidence, not binary absolutes.
It isn't difficult to examine the science reported to date, combine it with first principles, and have a pretty good idea if a scientific idea is correct or not. By the time regulators have overcome inertia and industry pressure and created a new regulation, the science has been there for a long time.
As for the previously held view (now considered incorrect) that saturated fats are harmful, a similar review of the scientific results at any time over the past 40 years would have shown that the view was based on the flimsiest of actual data, like one correlation combined with a second correlation.
That said, if you are relying on the government and other authorities as the final word on health advice, history suggests a bad outcome.
Why should I take the new rules seriously when the old rules were so, so very wrong?
I do not have an unmeetable standard... a clear, direct apology explicitly stating that the previous standard was the result of bad process, combined with clear statements of what is being done to improve the process and ensure this doesn't happen again would be fine.
In the meantime, though, I will not permit these people to just sort of tip-toe away from what they have (collectively) done to us, nor am I particularly impressed by efforts to change the consensus at a speed that to my eyes appears carefully calculated to ensure that nobody ever actually has to apologize, or even admit that they were wrong. In other words, at a speed that clearly indicates they're perfectly fine with millions more dying of preventable diseases rather than admit clearly that they were wrong.
Unsurprisingly, I'm not inclined to account that as "virtue", nor to pay very much attention to what they have to say now. If you care about your health, ignore the government standards and do the research to build your own consensus based on the latest science coming out, which is in ever-greater dissonance with the decades-old "official" consensus. Don't wait for our political leadership to calculate how they can move without ever having to admit fault!
(Yeah, I'm pissed about this. If the nutritional consensus forced on us for decades really is wrong and really is, as I rather suspect, the primary cause of the obesity epidemic, this is, fully literally, Nazi-scale evil unleashed on the world. Millions of lives cut short, millions upon millions more with their quality-of-life trashed. I can personally name names for both those categories; the latter category includes damned near my entire immediate family, and they're working pretty hard on getting moved into the first one, and I simply can't convince them of the real problems with the entire authority system for their entire lives telling them something else. It would put the US government right up there on the 20th century death toll list... and that is a hard list to get on to because the competition is quite stiff! Every day they dither around trying to figure out how not to have to admit fault is that much worse.)