Claiming Vanilla is Not a Flavor

I got this AI explanation:

The claim that "vanilla is not a flavor" among some racists or those with racially biased views often stems from a derogatory use of the word "vanilla" to denote something or someone as plain, boring, or lacking in diversity or complexity. This usage is rooted in cultural and racial stereotypes where:

Vanilla as "Plain": Vanilla, in this context, is used metaphorically to refer to white or Caucasian people, suggesting they are culturally or inherently uninteresting compared to other racial or ethnic groups, which might be described with more "exotic" or "rich" flavors (like chocolate, which has sometimes been used to refer to people of color). This is a gross oversimplification and misrepresentation both of vanilla as a flavor and of human diversity.

Denial of Complexity: By saying vanilla isn't a flavor, there's an attempt to deny the complexity of vanilla itself. Vanilla is one of the most complex flavors in culinary use, with hundreds of flavor compounds, but this complexity is often ignored to fit the narrative that "vanilla" (and by extension, what it's used to represent) is simple or uninteresting.

Cultural Superiority: This statement can also reflect an underlying belief in the cultural superiority of one group over another, where the "vanilla" culture is seen as less valuable or less worthy of respect. This is part of broader racist ideologies where one's own culture or race is elevated at the expense of others.

Racial Identity and Flavor: The use of food metaphors in racial discourse often serves to belittle or mock other racial identities by associating them with flavors considered inferior or less desirable. This is not unique to vanilla but reflects how food can be weaponized in racial rhetoric.

It's important to recognize that these assertions are rooted in prejudice and misunderstanding:

Vanilla as a Flavor: Vanilla is indeed a flavor, derived from the vanilla bean, and it's one of the most widely used flavors in the world, not for its simplicity but for its ability to enhance other flavors.

Cultural Misappropriation: The use of "vanilla" in this manner is a form of cultural misappropriation, reducing vast and varied cultural heritages to simplistic, often negative stereotypes.

Racist Tropes: This kind of rhetoric is indicative of deeper racist tropes that seek to diminish or demean those who are different, often by using innocuous terms like food flavors in a derogatory way.

In summary, the claim that "vanilla is not a flavor" when used in racist discourse is a misguided and harmful attempt at denigration, ignoring both the literal and metaphorical richness of vanilla and the cultural diversity it represents.

Experts Expect Mass Starvation

Have you been reading stories about population decline? It is all a hoax. The population is increasing so fast that we face mass starvation, unless something is done.

The USA will hit 350 million this year.

A world food organization reports:

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates have made an unprecedented plea for financial and political backing to develop “moonshot” technologies with the greatest chance of averting a hunger catastrophe in the next 25 years.

In an open letter signed by 153 winners of the Nobel Prize and World Food Prize, the signatories warned that the world was “not even close” to meeting future food needs, with an estimated 700 million people going hungry today and an additional 1.5 billion people to feed by 2050.

TV Show promotes Vegan Diets

A current Netflix series turned this medical study into a reality tv show:

Question What are the cardiometabolic effects of a healthy plant-based (vegan) vs a healthy omnivorous diet among identical twins during an 8-week intervention?

Findings In this randomized clinical trial of 22 healthy, adult, identical twin pairs, those consuming a healthy vegan diet showed significantly improved low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentration, fasting insulin level, and weight loss compared with twins consuming a healthy omnivorous diet.

Meaning The findings from this trial suggest that a healthy plant-based diet offers a significant protective cardiometabolic advantage compared with a healthy omnivorous diet.

It says that the twins were chosen randomly, but the ones chosen for vegan diets had lower blood pressure, lower LDL cholesterol, and lower triglycerides. After the 8-week study, these measurements were lower still. The study brags that the vegan diets lowered these numbers. Okay, but why did they start with lower numbers?

The vegan diet also lowered HDL cholesterol, but higher HDL is considered good for the heart.

The test subjects were healthy, with figures in the normal ranges. There is reason to believe that someone with high LDL will be healthier if he lowers his LDL, but no so clear about someone with LDL in the normal range.

Plant-based diets have gained recent popularity not only for their lower environmental impact compared with an omnivorous dietary pattern but also for their health benefits.1,2 ...

Clinicians may consider recommending plant-based diets to reduce cardiometabolic risk factors, as well as aligning with environmental benefits.

So your clinician might be making a dietary recommendation based on speculative effects on climate change.

The Mental Health Gap

It used to be that the Republican Party had the more educated and wealthy members. On average, Republicans had about one more year of schooling than Democrats. Over the last 25 years this has reversed.

Now the super-rich are Democrats, and so are the college professors and govt workrs. The Democrats have also become the hate-whitey party. Working class whites have shifted to Republican. On the coasts the elites are Democrats, while elsewhere many of the elites are Republicans.

There is another gap that is rarely mentioned. One out of six Americans is on psychiatric drugs, and the big majority of them are women.

Want to guess their political leanings?

Breitbart reports on a Pew study:

When sex and age were factors, 56.3 percent of white women between the ages of 18 and 29 and who labeled themselves as “liberal,” said they had been given a mental health diagnosis, compared to 27.3 percent of conservatives in the same categories and 28.4 percent of moderates

Donald Trump would still be President, if the election were limited to sane voters.

Here is some typical liberal commentary:

America’s story is threaded with racial bias. Does anyone seriously question that we would move forward more effectively if we all move together? Does Texas really think it can suppress its non-white majority in coming elections? ...

South Africa confronted apartheid. Germany acknowledged the Holocaust. We Americans have a tragic history of racism that began with slavery and has never ended. We cannot be afraid to look at our own past.

I recently came across a photo from the 1940s of a young boy of 8 or 9 drinking from a “colored” water fountain in North Carolina. That is the definition of systemic racism, and proof that racial bias and the American legal system have been intertwined during our ongoing fight for equality in the United States.

Really? While Germany was gassing the Jews 80 years ago, America was providing separate drinking fountains for young boys. It is all just systemic racism, right? Today, we have school programs to teach those boys to hate Whites, and then segregated graduation ceremonies.

Here is another, from the London Guardian:

Food injustice has deep roots: let’s start with America’s apple pie

From amnesia about apple pie to burger battlefields, author and academic Raj Patel says today’s food justice fights have long, bloody histories

So some Indian guy hates America, as symbolized by apple pie. Maybe I will write an essay on why I hate Indian food, and on how everyone in India is to blame for it.

These essays are increasingly common, and appeal only to liberals suffering mental illnesses.

Avoiding McDonalds Restaurants

McDonalds does a lot of things really well, but some policies seem designed to alienate customers. You cannot get a clerk to tell you the difference between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder. It is difficult to get a burger without mustard and ketchup. And the ice cream machines are usually broken.

The company makes lots of money, so I can only assume that it has some business interest in doing things this way. My guess is that they are trying to train their customers to like mustard and ketchup, so people stop making special orders.

The ice cream baffled me, and here is a video trying to explain it: The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken. I don't know if this is right or not, but I go elsewhere for ice cream.

China bans overeating

The Western news media like to blame Red China for human rights abuses, such as putting Moslems in anti-Islam re-education camps, or using slave labor to manufacture Apple products. But these seem like sensible moves that any dictatorship would do.

China does spy on its own citizens, but I have never heard of it doing anything worse than the NY Times joining in the racial bullying and doxing of an innocent 15-year-old girl.

But now China has crossed a line, and moved to deny universal human rights.

The London Guardian reports:

Xi Jinping’s war on waste is set to be enshrined in law, with the submission of draft legislation to China’s highest legal committee recommending large fines for businesses that enable or promote wasting food. ...

The popular phenomenon of mukbang videos – performative eating videos which originated in Korea and often feature excessive binge eating – were also banned.

Under the draft law submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Tuesday, food service operators face penalties if they induce or mislead consumers to “order excessive meals and cause obvious waste”.

These stories make me proud to be American.

The mayor of New York did try to ban very large soda drinks, but he was decisively defeated by the wider public. We will never give up our guns, Bibles, or right to eat excessive meals.

Runaway population growth in Africa

The NY Times reports:

As Egypt’s Population Hits 100 Million, Celebration Is Muted

With little habitable land, deepening poverty and dwindling supplies of water, the future looks bleak. And there is no sign of a slowdown.

CAIRO — Somewhere in Egypt, around lunchtime Tuesday, the country reached a major milestone: its 100 millionth citizen was born. ...

Egypt’s cabinet said last week that it was on “high alert” to fight population growth, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has described as a threat to national security on par with terrorism. If unchecked, the population could reach 128 million by 2030, officials say.

Mr. el-Sisi tried to push back the tide with a public health campaign called “Two Is Enough” to persuade parents to have fewer children. Like many such efforts, it failed.

Why worry? Quillette assures us that there is plenty of food for everyone:

The Battle to Feed All of Humanity Is Over. Humanity Has Won ...

For millennia, people lived on the edge of starvation. Today, starvation has disappeared outside of war-zones. Let’s look at some data. ...

Even in sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, food supply per person per day rose from 1,852 in 1961 to 2,449 in 2017 – a 32 percent increase. According to one report, “There is a silent epidemic sweeping through Africa and it’s worse than HIV. Out of the 20 fastest rising countries with obesity, nearly half of them are in Africa. The health burden on the continent is rising.”

This is the future. Billions of Africans getting fat on Western food technology. Get used to it.

Expert advice on eating beef has been wrong

Experts have been giving us bad dietary advice for decades, and here is the latest example:

Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills. But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence. If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits.

I haven't checked, but I bet that the people who told us to eat less beef and pork were primarily leftists.

Transgender children under the age of 16 should be able to undergo surgery without their parents’ permission, according to Australia’s top psychologists.

The Australian Psychological ­Society, which represents 24,000 professionals, says the disapproval of both parents should not inhibit a child under 16 from consenting to procedures. ...

Parents who disapprove of their children’s medical treatment pose a ‘significant barrier’ for the child, it said.

To overcome this, the body has suggested hospitals should have the right to petition courts as well as ‘advocacy’ to change the minds of parents.

Further, legal advice should be accessible so the young people can authorise their treatment, it said.

This is really sick.

I always thought Sigmund Freud was a phony, but this article relates his dubious theories with his Jewishness. Freud was considered a non-religious Jew, but his Jewishness was extremely important to him, and to the success of his goofy work. Freud would be just another quack, if he were not promoted by Jews.

The NY Times mostly prints fake news about Pres. Trump, but today's issue has an article about gay men fighting over custody of an old dog:

After a Divorce, Who Gets the Dog?

I recommend a petnup.

Steve and Jim considered themselves married in North Carolina for 4 years. The dog is 14 years old. Steve complains that only three states (Illinois, Alaska and, effective this year, California) have divorce laws where judges consider the best interests of the dog. The world has gone mad.

The coming food shortage

The NY Post reports:

The world could be facing a food shortage in just 10 years, according to an agricultural data technology company.

Gro Intelligence founder and chief executive Sara Menker says previous calculations about food supply have focused on mass and weight, not nutritional value — and this is where things become problematic.

Previously the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has predicted that the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion by 2050 and the world needs to produce 70 percent more food to feed all these extra people.

But at a TEDGlobal event Arusha, Tanzania, Menker said if you look at the nutritional value of current food production instead, global food security is more tenuous than originally thought.

According to Quartz, Menker believes the year 2023 will be the crossover point when we will no longer be able to produce enough food to feed a growing population.

She has estimated that by 2027, there could be a 214 trillion-calorie deficit, which is the equivalent of 379 million Big Macs.

Demand will be driven by population and economic growth in China, India and African countries.

If this is correct, then soon we will all be expected to make sacrifices in order to subsidize runaway population growth in China, India, and Africa.

It makes more sense to isolate those countries. Stop sending them food and technology, and stop allowing them to export their population problems. They will eventually learn to solve their own problems.

Animal fats are good for you

Nutrition advice is usually based on weak evidence or no evidence. In some cases, the evidence points to the opposite of the expert advice. Here is such an example, and the embarrassing study with the best science behind it was not even published for 40 years.

SciAm reports:

Ramsden, of the National Institutes of Health, unearthed raw data from a 40-year-old study, which challenges the dogma that eating vegetable fats instead of animal fats is good for the heart. The study, the largest gold-standard experiment testing that idea, found the opposite, Ramsden and his colleagues reported on Tuesday in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

Although the study is more than just another entry in the long-running nutrition wars—it is more rigorous than the vast majority of research on the topic—Ramsden makes no claims that it settles the question. Instead, he said, his discovery and analysis of long-lost data underline how the failure to publish the results of clinical trials can undermine truth.

Absent a time machine, it’s impossible to know how publication of the study, conducted in Minnesota from 1968 to 1973, might have influenced dietary advice. But in an accompanying editorial, Lennert Veerman of Australia’s University of Queensland concluded that “the benefits of choosing polyunsaturated fat over saturated fat seem a little less certain than we thought.”

National Grilled Cheese Day

According to this, grilled cheese lovers enjoy life better is all sorts of ways.

Leftist distrust of science experts

I occasionally hear people claim that Republicans are anti-science, but the Democrats seem much more anti-science to me. Here is an editorial cartoon from Monday's Santa Cruz Sentinel, the daily paper for a leftist Democrat California beach town.

Thalidomide was never FDA approved (until it was later approved for leprosy). No one was injured a Three Mile Island. I don't think that anyone ever said that the space shuttle was perfectly safe, altho the risk did turn out to be higher than estimated. (Note also the spelling error of Challenger.) Dow Corning was bankrupted over breast implant lawsuits in 1995, but that is just proof that our legal system is broken. There is a consensus now that the lawsuits were bogus, and millions of women get implants today without major problems. Asbestos is not really that dangerous unless you are a smoker who inhales the fibers.

Leftists also hate GMO foods, pesticides, DDT, antibiotics, and preservatives.

Journalist Chris Mooney has made a career out of blaming Republicans for not trusting scientific experts, and has a Wash. Post column on The science of why you really should listen to science and experts. SciAm's John Horgan refutes it:

I recently knocked science journalist Chris Mooney for asserting that “You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts.” Non-experts have the right and even the duty, I retorted, to question scientific experts, who often get things wrong. ...

He cites a study that found that judges and other lawyers show less ideological bias—or “identity-protective cognition”–in their application of the law than law students and lay people. ... To my mind, the study merely shows that lawyers and judges know the law better than law students and non-lawyers.

Mooney’s citation of Tetlock is bizarre, because Expert Political Judgment—far from a defense of experts—is a devastating critique of them....

“people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. ... People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.”

The biggest fail of science

The Dilbert cartoonist writes:

What’s is science’s biggest fail of all time?

I nominate everything about diet and fitness.

Maybe science has the diet and fitness stuff mostly right by now. I hope so. But I thought the same thing twenty years ago and I was wrong.

I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin.

I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science.

I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now.

I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies.

I used to think I needed to drink a crazy-large amount of water each day, because smart people said so, but that wasn’t science either.

I could go on for an hour.

I agree with this. No other area of science has failed so badly. For decades, reputable authorities have been telling us what is supposedly scientifically correct about diet and fitness, and they have been wrong with most of what they say.

It is hard to explain how so much money could get such poor results. I think that the problem is that most of the bad advice has come from physicians. They are not the best source for 3 reasons.

1. Diet and fitness are out of their expertise. They take medical school classes in diagnosing disease and cutting up cadavers, but not in diet and fitness.

2. Physicians do not have a scientific mindset. Science is all about doing experiments, and physicians do not believe in experimenting on their patients.

3. Physicians are not independent thinkers. The medical world is extremely hierarchial, and physicians very much believe in following official policy and in having everyone follow orders as well.

Dilbert relates this to a more general public distrust in science on other issues like climate change.

Healthier to pig out

From the business news:

McDonald's has hit hard times. Its earnings report in 2014 was the lowest in over a decade.

But the company announced a big change that may help spur sales: It's rolling out custom burgers across the country.

Custom burgers? That is the most annoying thing about McDonald's. Every other burger chain has no problem selling you a burger the way you like it. Only McDonald's makes it difficult.

Meanwhile health research offers these tips.
Being Colder May Be Good For Your Health.

It is better to concentrate your food in big meals:

A new study by researchers at the Salk Institute cautions against an extended period of snacking, suggesting instead that confining caloric consumption to an 8- to 12-hour period-as people did just a century ago-might stave off high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity.

The results, published December 2, 2014 in the journal Cell Metabolism, add to mounting evidence suggesting that it's not just what we eat but when we eat it that matters to our health. Although the intervention has not yet been tested in humans, it has already gained visibility as a potential weight loss method-and, in mice, it may reveal what causes obesity and related conditions in the first place.

So turn off your heat, head out to some burger chain giving you a decent choice, and pig out. You will be healthier and happier.

Dietary gospel on fat is wrong

NewScientist reports:

After decades of health warnings, the idea that steak, cheese and lard are bad for your heart is melting away. The truth is more complex – and delicious

THERE'S a famous scene in Woody Allen's film Sleeper in which two scientists in the year 2173 are discussing the dietary advice of the late 20th century.

"You mean there was no deep fat, no steak or cream pies or hot fudge?" asks one, incredulous. "Those were thought to be unhealthy," replies the other. "Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

We're not quite in Woody Allen territory yet, but steak and cream pies are starting to look a lot less unhealthy than they once did. After 35 years as dietary gospel, the idea that saturated fat is bad for your heart appears to be melting away like a lump of butter in ...

It explains:

Yet the voices of doubt have been growing for some time. In 2010, scientists pooled the results of 21 studies that had followed 348,000 people for many years. This meta-analysis found "no significant evidence" in support of the idea that saturated fat raises the risk of heart disease (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 91, p 535).

The doubters were given a further boost by another meta-analysis published in March (Annals of Internal Medicine, vol 160, p 398). It revisited the results of 72 studies involving 640,000 people in 18 countries.

To the surprise of many, it did not find backing for the existing dietary advice. "Current evidence does not clearly support guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats," it concluded. "Nutritional guidelines... may require reappraisal."

In essence, the study found that people at the extreme ends of the spectrum – that is, those who ate the most or least saturated fat – had the same chance of developing heart disease. High consumption of unsaturated fat seemed to offer no protection. ...

Yet the voices of doubt have been growing for some time. In 2010, scientists pooled the results of 21 studies that had followed 348,000 people for many years. This meta-analysis found "no significant evidence" in support of the idea that saturated fat raises the risk of heart disease (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 91, p 535).

The doubters were given a further boost by another meta-analysis published in March (Annals of Internal Medicine, vol 160, p 398). It revisited the results of 72 studies involving 640,000 people in 18 countries.

To the surprise of many, it did not find backing for the existing dietary advice. "Current evidence does not clearly support guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats," it concluded. "Nutritional guidelines... may require reappraisal."

In essence, the study found that people at the extreme ends of the spectrum – that is, those who ate the most or least saturated fat – had the same chance of developing heart disease. High consumption of unsaturated fat seemed to offer no protection.

Slate argues:

It’s been more than 40 years since Allen’s movie premiered, but his satire of public health research sadly still resonates. A widely circulated New York Times blog post reported this week on a study purporting to show that people who run at least five minutes a day live around three years longer than those who don’t. This finding was determined to be true after “adjusting for” various characteristics of study subjects—their gender, whether they smoked, any family history of heart disease, and so forth.

The problem with this study—and the many related observational studies on what does or doesn’t make us live longer—is that healthy people are different in all sorts of ways from unhealthy ones. Some of the differences between runners and nonrunners can be accounted for, albeit somewhat imperfectly, by considering observable attributes like height, weight, age, etc. But inevitably there are differences that get left out of the analyses: runners might sleep longer; they might eat more almonds or blueberries; maybe they have less stressful work lives, which in turn facilitate a few minutes of exercise each day; maybe they are less depressed because they have shorter commutes; maybe their commutes involve more walking than driving. The list of other attributes and habits, any of which might contribute to a longer observed life span, extends to infinity. Is it running that accounts for the difference in longevity between runners and nonrunners? Or one of these other, unobserved differences? Who knows?

That's right, it is hard to prove that one diet or lifestyle is healthier than another.

Update: NewScientist adds:

ACCORDING to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression "heart attack on a plate" was first recorded in 1984 in a newspaper interview with actor Michael Caine. He was living in health-conscious Los Angeles at the time and missing his full English breakfast. That rings true, as it was around then that the US public was being urged to reduce its intake of saturated fat to cut the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Thirty years on, the idea that pigging out on bacon, egg and sausages can lead to a heart attack is second nature to most of us; it is probably the single most influential piece of nutritional advice ever dished out.

But in recent weeks and months a steady drumbeat of media coverage has suggested that saturated fat has been unfairly maligned. "Eat Butter", declared the cover of Time magazine. "Everything we thought we knew about dietary fat is wrong," said the blurb on The Big Fat Surprise: Why butter, meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet, an influential book by investigative journalist Nina Teicholz.

Really? Everything? As usual, the truth is less earth-shattering. Yes, two large reviews of the evidence have cast doubt on the supposedly rock-solid link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease. Scientific understanding of how the human body handles fat has indeed moved on. And the original research that proved the link has been questioned (see "Heart attack on a plate? The truth about saturated fat"). But it is too soon to declare saturated fat innocent of all charges. Much more research is needed before the nutrition rule book can be rewritten. In any case, meat, butter and cheese already belong in a healthy diet, as long as you don't eat too much of them.

If there is an immediate take-away message, it is that singling out one nutrient at the expense of the wider dietary context is a mistake. In our rush to cut down on saturated fat, we may have inadvertently upped our intake of other unhealthy nutrients, especially sugar. In fact, one of the interesting by-products of the saturated fat debate is that it is helping to reinforce the emerging idea that refined sugar is the real demon in our diets.

The case against sugar is getting stronger, as our story earlier this year spelled out (New Scientist, 1 February, p 34). But it would be a mistake to fixate on sugar at the expense of everything else.

Fatwa against all-you-can-eat

A Saudi Arabian site reports:

The cleric, Saleh al-Fawzan, recently issued a fatwa through a kingdom-based Quranic TV station prohibiting open buffets, saying that the value and quantity of what is sold should be pre-determined before it is purchased.

“Whoever enters the buffet and eats for 10 or 50 riyals without deciding the quantity they will eat is violating Sharia (Islamic) law,” said Fawzan on al-Atheer channel.

I am adding this to my list of reasons to avoid Islamic law.

I am happy to say that you can still eat burgers like this in America.


While we don't have fatwas, you might get cheated on a large beer at a hockey game:

When the couple attended an Idaho Steelheads minor league hockey game in Boise’s CenturyLink Arena, they found that the ‘regular’ size beer they bought actually held the same volume of brew as the ‘large’ size. They decided to shoot and post a video demonstrating that the $4 regular beer (listed as 16 oz.) nearly filled the entire $7 large beer cup (listed as 20 oz.). In the video Gibbs can be heard off camera saying, “It’s the same beer. Seven dollars, you just get a taller cup.”

Update: A lawyer is now seeking a class-action lawsuit over the beer cups having the same beer.

Nutty diet advice

Here is more bad diet advice from health officials. AP reports:

There's more disappointing news about multivitamins: Two major studies found popping the pills didn't protect aging men's brains or help heart attack survivors. ...

"Evidence is sufficient to advise against routine supplementation," said a sharply worded editorial that accompanied Monday's findings in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

After all, most people who buy multivitamins and other supplements are generally healthy, said journal deputy editor Dr. Cynthia Mulrow. Even junk foods often are fortified with vitamins, while the main nutrition problem in the U.S. is too much fat and calories, she added.

These studies are useless, unless you were popping those vitamins to prevent heart attacks or brain aging. People take vitamin to insure against a deficiency, and to feel healthier.

Calories are high nutrition, by definition. Fat people eat to much calories, but not necessarily too much fat. A lot of people get fat on low-fat, high-carbo diets.

Here is better advice from a 99yo scientist with a track record of being correct:

The problem, he says, is not LDL, the “bad cholesterol” widely considered to be the major cause of heart disease. What matters is whether the cholesterol and fat residing in those LDL particles have been oxidized. (Technically, LDL is not cholesterol, but particles containing cholesterol, along with fatty acids and protein.)

“Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,” Dr. Kummerow said. ...

This leads him to a controversial conclusion: that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats does not contribute to the clogging of arteries — and in fact is beneficial in moderate amounts in the context of a healthy diet (lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other fresh, unprocessed foods).

His own diet attests to that. Along with fruits, vegetables and whole grains, he eats red meat several times a week and drinks whole milk daily.

He cannot remember the last time he ate anything deep-fried. He has never used margarine, and instead scrambles eggs in butter every morning. He calls eggs one of nature’s most perfect foods, something he has been preaching since the 1970s, when the consumption of cholesterol-laden eggs was thought to be a one-way ticket to heart disease.

Research also favors eating high-fat nuts:

The reports about their many benefits have come thick and fast: studies finding that people who eat nuts (tree nuts like cashews, almonds and pistachios, along with their legume pal, the peanut) live longer and healthier lives, with less risk of chronic ailments like heart disease, respiratory problems and Type 2 diabetes.

But perhaps the most startling news is that nuts may help in maintaining a healthy weight. Research has found that people can snack on modest amounts of them without gaining pounds, and that nuts can even help in slimming down.

So maybe the ideal meal is steak and eggs, with cheese and nuts.

Fast food burgers are most nutritious

Freakonomics considers:

It has been my gut-level (sorry, pun) feeling for a while now that the McDonald’s McDouble, at 390 Calories, 23g (half a daily serving) of protein, 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and iron, etc., is the cheapest, most nutritious, and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history.

I said something similar back in 2007. To the best of my knowledge, no one has shown that any other food is better.

Update: NY Post columnist agrees.

The big fat truth

Nature magazine reports:

The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies including 2.88 million people, had been released on 2 January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1. A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed 'overweight' by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period.

The result seemed to counter decades of advice to avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage in most major news outlets — and a hostile backlash from some public-health experts. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” said Walter Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio interview. Willett later organized the Harvard symposium — where speakers lined up to critique Flegal's study — to counteract that coverage and highlight what he and his colleagues saw as problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many people, we thought it really would be important to dig down more deeply,” Willett says.

But many researchers accept Flegal's results and see them as just the latest report illustrating what is known as the obesity paradox. Being overweight increases a person's risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other chronic illnesses. But these studies suggest that for some people — particularly those who are middle-aged or older, or already sick — a bit of extra weight is not particularly harmful, and may even be helpful. (Being so overweight as to be classed obese, however, is almost always associated with poor health outcomes.) ...

Public-health experts, including Willett, have spent decades emphasizing the risks of carrying excess weight. Studies such as Flegal's are dangerous, Willett says, because they could confuse the public and doctors, and undermine public policies to curb rising obesity rates. “There is going to be some percentage of physicians who will not counsel an overweight patient because of this,” he says. Worse, he says, these findings can be hijacked by powerful special-interest groups, such as the soft-drink and food lobbies, to influence policy-makers.

So leading nutritionists like Willett will lie to you about food science, because they do not want to undermine their pet public policies or help the food lobby.

A lot of professional athletes have a BMI of around 26. It seems crazy for experts like Willett to argue that there is something wrong with that.

Determinists behave like beasts

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne has another rant against free will:

This all reminds me of the famous (and possibly apocryphal) response of the wife of the Bishop of Worcester when her husband told her of Darwin’s theory that humans evolved from apes. “My dear, descended from the apes!” she said. “Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.”

And it all supports my notion that one motivation for promulgating “compatibilist” free will (i.e., the view that pure determinism of human actions is still compatible with some conceptions of free will) is that if people learned that their actions are predetermined, and that dualistic free will did not exist, they’d either behave like beasts or lapse into torpor and nihilism. (This is, of course, the same argument that religious creationists use against evolution.)

Some of those free will deniers do behave like beasts. See the Wikipedia article on Free will in theology, to see which religions believe in free will, and which do not. I'll give you a hint: which religions are making the world better, and which worse?

It is funny how most academic atheists reject free will, with Richard Dawkins squirming over the issue. I say that free will is a philosophical issue, not a scientific one.

Here is philosopher Sarah Conly arguing for a nanny state, because our free will is lacking:

In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance. The proper reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another.

That’s what the government is supposed to do, help us get where we want to go. It’s not always worth it to intervene, but sometimes, where the costs are small and the benefit is large, it is. That’s why we have prescriptions for medicine. And that’s why, as irritating as it may initially feel, the soda regulation is a good idea. It’s hard to give up the idea of ourselves as completely rational. We feel as if we lose some dignity. But that’s the way it is, and there’s no dignity in clinging to an illusion.

I would rather have that large soda when I want one.

Update: Coyne post new research related to this:

In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them: brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision. The implications of this research are obvious: by the time we’re conscious of having made a “choice”, that choice has already been made for us—by our genes and our environments—and the consciousness is merely reporting something determined beforehand in the brain. And that, in turn, suggests (as I’ve mentioned many times here) that all of our “choices” are really determined in advance, though some choices (e.g., whether to duck when a baseball is thrown at your head) can’t be made very far in advance!

This line of experiments shows that it takes our brains a few seconds to make certain types of decisions, and we can be fooled about the timing of those decisions. The brain has many processes, and we are not consciously aware of most of them. This research says nothing about free will.