John Tierney pose some Azinger article over the weekend entitled… “Diet and Fat: A Case of Mistaken Consensus” [1]
In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop [2], proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking [3], Dr. Koop announced that the American diet [4] was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.
He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”
That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.
It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade.
The article goes on to very accurately protruding how government screwed that one up. And clearly, they understand that the consensus is not only not scientific, it is also not always accurate. Mark this down; place it in red letters on your calendar… the New York Times actually got one right.
But I’ll bet for all the accuracy that is in this article, they don’t understand the connections between the consensus mentioned here, and the one that has supposedly been reached as regards the one about global warming . Can you, I wonder?
One step more; With this article, comes an understanding of why government run health care is counterproductive to a healthy society. How many Healthcare issues are decided on such consensus ? How many such in accurate consensus would be reinforced with the power of government? How many people would die as a result of such?
Perhaps someone should show this article to both Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton. The resulting dance might even be amusing.
Update… while I was composing this one, McQ was posting the same thought. [5]
I ask him in comments: how did the New York Times manage to get this one right? And, how did they manage not to make the extrapolations that you and I did?