Original Cin

Fate gave to man the courage of endurance.

– Ludwig van Beethoven

via Thoughts and Quotes: Fate gave to man the… – Forbes.com.

I finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes a few days ago. I think I’ve made a lot of progress on my goal to lose weight just by doing so (it’s the light blue square in my goal grid), although only time will tell. It’s a marvelous book with political, scientific, and health freedom issues that go far beyond those that Taubes immediately brings up, and I am stunned.

Calories convincingly makes the case that a misunderstanding of statistics regarding heart disease at the turn of century, as well as a flawed understanding of what humans ate tens of thousands of years ago, essentially caused an ill-founded crusade against dietary fat. Combined with the fact that fat is roughly twice as calorie-dense as protein and carbohydrates, this led to many health officials recommending low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. This puts a recent NutritionData blog entry into perspective (the entire post is worth reading, slowly, and carefully,  although it makes a lot more sense with details from Taubes):

The prevailing wisdom that meat and saturated fat are unhealthy is based on the same sort of inconclusive, circumstantial evidence as the studies I’ve noted here.  But if we really want to get to the truth, we’re going to need to consider ALL the (flawed) evidence, not just that which supports our point of view. – Monica Reinagel, More evidence that saturated fat has been falsely accused?

The bulk of the evidence on diet is inconclusive and circumstantial because, Taubes points out, the research is just not conducted in a competent manner:

…institutionalized vigilance… is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.” – Calories, 451

Indeed; calories is full of examples of questionable assumptions, poor choices of animal models (rabbits!?), and a general lack of clear thought. This book is just as much a book about the history of science (?) as it is about nutrition, and it puts contemporary events such as the rise of evidence-based medicine in perspective. (When I ran across it in the text, I found the Cochrane Collaboration website already in my bookmarks).

Fast forwarding past the history lesson that justifiably takes hundreds of pages in Good Calories, Bad Calories, the best information we have on metabolism at this point suggests that insulin promotes the storage of energy as fat, and that the intake of carbohydrates causes a big increase in blood insulin levels. Neither point should be terribly surprising to anyone that’s ever been around diabetic family members on insulin. Taubes describes this as fat cells pulling in calories, making fewer available for everything else, and increasing appetite — this model “assumes that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables” (358).

Calories is simply too much to talk about all at once, and I’ll continue writing about this for a few days at least.

Besides being a support of SENS, I’d also like to see work done toward whole body transplants; an idea that usually makes my friends a bit jittery. “Won’t you have to kill someone in order to have your brain transplanted into them?” Well, I hope not; it would be much better if everyone on earth could benefit from such technology. My knowledge isn’t yet good enough to speculate on the details, but there have been plenty of alternatives kicked around, particularly the engineering of cloned brainless bodies. The benefits of such technology are so overwhelming that it boggles me that people aren’t working on it like crazy.

Another issue that might come up is one of identity. After all, people won’t be able to recognize you! But a society that supports the idea of a whole-body transplant shouldn’t have any trouble with this; you just need a doctor or some other authority to send “before” and “after” pictures to the government and your friends and family.

I saw this video on Thinking on the Margin. It reminds me of my “the world is strange” idea.

Back in college, I knew a person named Kyle (I think) who was absolutely crazy about history. Lies My Teacher Told Me was his favorite book. He thought that history was something everyone should know forward and backwards. I think he knew the exact year that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. When I asked him why history was so important, his answer came shockingly close to the aphorism that “people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”.*

There is a problem with this reason to study history – it is a falsifiable statement. If we accept that a knowledge of past events allows one to draw parallels with present situations and make better decisions as a result, then we should observe that historians are better decision-makers and make better predictions about the future than the rest of us. A quick search of Google Scholar reveals that someone has, in fact, done exactly that, although no full articles appear to be available online. I intend to look further into this, and see what people have actually found.

*I suspect that this saying is to history as Keynes’s quote about people being “…the slaves of some defunct economist” is to economics. It sounds really neat, but it’s actually pretty dumb.

Those who curse Fate
May scorn, persecute, and hate
We who announce its coming and speed its wheels.

But ultimately,
they are powerless against Fate itself.