Science-Based Medicine figures out what's for dinner

anovasjo

Dr. Harriet Hall wrote this awesome article: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=207

Lemme know what you think!

Some notable quotations:

"Nutrition science is notoriously fallible: it’s impossible to do an accurate controlled long-term study comparing two diets because you can’t trust people to accurately report what they eat, and you can’t hope to randomize and get adequate cooperation. Science can never be absolutely sure it has identified every nutrient important to health. We test what we can isolate and test: when we learned how to identify cholesterol we did lots of cholesterol studies. When we discovered trans-fats we did trans-fat studies. Foods have too many ingredients to test them all separately even if we knew what they all were. 35 antioxidants have been identified in thyme alone, from apigenin to ursolic acid. Even if you could test each ingredient, you couldn’t be sure combinations of ingredients don’t act in unexpected ways – turning the expression of a gene on or off, interfering with each other’s absorption, synergizing for good or bad."

"Remember when fake foods had to be labeled “imitation”? No longer. Now they needn’t be labeled as imitation as long as they are “nutritionally equivalent” – so fats in sour cream can be replaced with hydrogenated oils or guar gum or carrageenan, and bacon bits can be replaced with soy protein without being considered fake. But they are still fake. A rose by any other name…"

anovasjo

har.