Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Why I Don't Trust ANY Nutrition Advice

Someone asked and so here I answer.

Because medical science in general and nutrition in specific has suffered too many fads, too much ideology and way too many reversals to be considered credible. You're not just dealing with the complexity of the human body, something which is FAR from mastered. You're ALSO dealing with the complexity of food.

Take fats. There is not one skerrit of evidence ANYWHERE that fats are bad for your health. Some retarded imbecile just decided they were and imposed his ideology on everyone when he was the head of the medical committee on the subject. And that was before we knew about all the different kinds of fats. So picture this, some retard saying that eating what makes up most of the human body after water is BAD for you.

There is a rule about complex systems you know. It's not possible to make complex systems perform better by measuring (creating reductive linear metrics of) their variable outputs. But it IS possible to make them perform better by measuring their PERSISTENT inputs. The things the system doesn't routinely react against and so can't "improve" by making a tradeoff against something else.

So when the Finnish education ministry decided to publish measures of schools, that degraded education. But when the Finnish polity decided to publish the tax records of their politicians and to kick out any tax cheats and evaders? That improved their government.

Now consider the medical science establishment as a giant complex system. And consider not the variable inputs such as money going into the system. Or the variable outputs such as papers produced. No, forget all that crap. Consider only the quality of the MINDS in the system, categorized on a standard such as Bloom's taxonomy of cognition.

What is that quality? Piss poor. You're looking at high IQ imbeciles here. Deeply irrational morons incapable of logic, plodders incapable of any creativity, but capable of memorizing lots of useless arbitrary facts. These are people who can do the work but not have the slightest comprehension (because that requires analysis) nor understanding (because that requires synthesis) of what they do.

So here is my diagnosis: the system is shit and so I do not trust it.

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