Lately I keep running into the idea that the proper way to do science is to continually strive to disprove a hypothesis, rather than support it*. According to these writers, this is what scientists are supposed to aspire to, but I've never actually heard a scientist say this. The latest example was recently published in the Wall Street Journal (1). This evokes an image of the Super Scientist, one who is so skeptical that he never believes his own ideas and is constantly trying to tear them down. I'm no philosopher of science, but this idea never sat well with me, and it's contrary to how science is practiced. Descending from the writings of Karl Popper, apparently the idea has been strongly criticized by a number of other philosophers of science.
I'd go further and say that the idea is commonly abused by non-scientist contrarians who need an excuse to wholesale reject a body of scientific evidence that is inconvenient for them (along with Thomas Kuhn's writing on paradigms). It's also abused by writers who want to make a dramatic story by creating a sense of outrage or superiority in the reader (i.e., "these people are supposed to be scientists, but they can't even get the scientific method right!").
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Your Health System
health system, also sometimes referred to as health care system or healthcare system is the organization of people, institutions, and resources to deliver health care services to meet the health needs of target populations.
New Review Paper by Yours Truly: High-Fat Dairy, Obesity, Metabolic Health and Cardiovascular Disease
My colleagues Drs. Mario Kratz, Ton Baars, and I just published a paper in the European Journal of Nutrition titled "The Relationship Between High-Fat Dairy Consumption and Obesity, Cardiovascular, and Metabolic Disease". Mario is a nutrition researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center here in Seattle, and friend of mine. He's doing some very interesting research on nutrition and health (with an interest in ancestral diets), and I'm confident that we'll be getting some major insights from his research group in the near future. Mario specializes in tightly controlled human feeding trials. Ton is an agricultural scientist at the University of Kassel in Germany, who specializes in the effect of animal husbandry practices (e.g., grass vs. grain feeding) on the nutritional composition of dairy. None of us have any connection to the dairy industry or any other conflicts of interest.
The paper is organized into three sections:
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The paper is organized into three sections:
- A comprehensive review of the observational studies that have examined the relationship between high-fat dairy and/or dairy fat consumption and obesity, metabolic health, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
- A discussion of the possible mechanisms that could underlie the observational findings.
- Differences between pasture-fed and conventional dairy, and the potential health implications of these differences.
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What Causes Type 2 Diabetes, and How Can it be Prevented?
In the comments of the last post, we've been discussing the relationship between body fatness and diabetes risk. I think this is really worth understanding, because type 2 diabetes is one of the few lifestyle disorders where 1) the basic causes are fairly well understood, and 2) we have effective diet/lifestyle prevention strategies that have been clearly supported by multiple controlled trials.
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Interview with Aitor Calero of Directo al Paladar
Aitor Calero writes for the popular Spanish cooking and nutrition blog, Directo al Paladar ("straight to the palate"). We did a written interview a while back, and he agreed to let me post the English version on my blog. The Spanish version is here and here.
Without further ado, here it is:
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Without further ado, here it is:
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