@emerald-
They should have called it climate change from the start, the blew it with global warming, not because it is wrong (this January was the second warmest January on record, despite the cold snap in the midwest), but because you then have idiots like James Inhouffe saying when it is freezing in parts of the country “yuck, yuck, must be global warming” (course, doesn’t mention that Alaska was running 20 degrees warmer then normal, and that SF had temperatures in the 80’s in January and February).
The problem with nutrition is that in many ways it is more akin to social science then hard science, it depends on studies that may or may not indicate causality, and it also relies a lot on doctors who are not scientists (there are scientists who are doctors, the researchers who go into pure research are more trained in science). The medical profession also operates on a model of “recommended protocol”, and few doctors have the time or energy to be checking the literature and thinking for themselves, not to mention that following “recommended protocol” is a way to stave off lawsuits. Part of the problem is that it seems really logical to assume dietary cholesterol had a direct tie to heart disease, you look at fats and they are sticky, and fats clog up drains,so therefore of course it does. The problem is a lot of nutrition information comes about this way, in many ways the theories and ideas put out there are not challenged, it is kind of like throw something out there and see what sticks.
With heart disease, the problem is that they often didn’t go beyond simple correlations. For example, it has been well known that Niacin can improve the HDL/LDL ratio that doctors use (which in of itself is an approximation, the LDL particle count is accurate), so they tell people with heart health history in the family to take it…and recently, they basically found that it treated the symptom (ie bad HDL/LDL level), but in a longitudinal study, it didn’t do anything to prevent heart disease, which indicates that the HDL/LDL ratio in of itself is a symptom of something deeper. In science, they would test a hypothesis like that, figure out why HDL/LDL ratio’s seemed to indicate the risk of heart problems, but in nutrition and health they just assumed that was the golden indicator. Even when they do controlled studies, they don’t listen to the results. There was a famous study, done a long time ago, called the Framingham study, where they monitored diet and blood cholesterol and heart disease, and what the study basically seemed to indicate was what we are hearing today, that dietary cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease or for that matter, with serum blood cholesterol. Then it was discovered that the cholesterol causes plaque because of scarring (and inflammation) to the artery walls, that cholesterol was not in of itself bad. I read something recently where they think the mania for low fat diets might have caused major harm, it seems like there is a link between low fat diets and Alzheimers, that it may be triggered (as one of many causes) by the brain being starved of fats.
Too, you have to remember the politics of it all. The low fat/grain based diet is a big boon to the farm industry, one of the biggest recipients of government generated PR of any industry, the FDA in large part tries to promote the idea of low fat/high grain diets, because it benefits the farm businesses. Likewise, doctors are often driven by the pharmaceutical industry, who benefit them tremendously. There is a website that tracks how much money doctors get from the pharm representatives, in the form of various kind of perks, it is not small. So now that they are saying blood cholesterol is genetic, guess what, they are putting millions more on statin drugs, that make huge profits for the pharm industry…when the statins may be causing damage themselves (among other things, they decrease coq10 levels that the heart needs, yet it is still not standard protocol to have people on statins take coq10).
Where nutrition is similar to science is there are corrective mechanisms there, things are tested, albeit slowly, but there also is a lot of intertia there, due to political and other factors. The difference between climate change and for example, dietary cholesterol, is that as time has gone on there has been more and more evidence that climate change is real (one example, the polar pack ice is dissapating at an accelerated rate), and more and more scientists, including skeptics, are confirming it is real, whereas there literally are no scientists who supported climate change theory who are saying it isn’t true, the skeptics tend to be either long term ones, or ones who never took a position and suddenly say “It isn’t real” (and you find 6 figure payouts in their bank accounts, or more).
It is frustrating, but the other reason is the human body and human physiology isn’t that easy to unlock. They still don’t fully understand the genetics behind how the body works, and they are finding that blanket statements, like “if you do x, this happens, Y, this happens”, may not be so true for a lot of people.
