(continued from yesterday) Mr. BS has good reason to at least attempt to be high handed with GCBC. GCBC is an elemental attack on the quality of work of the entire field of nutrition for the last forty years. If Taubes is right, a very large number of people in government and in the “leaders” of the nutrition field are being told, effectively, “you guys have wasted the last 40 years of your professional lives and have been upstaged by a journalist.” In fact, that is what has happened, in my humble as ever opinion. This is how Taubes describes it in his rebuttal to one such field leader (link below):
“Finally, I would like to identify one potential conflict of interest on Bray's part that he neglected to mention. In the 1970s, as I discuss in GCBC, the hormonal/enzymatic regulation of fat tissue was deemed irrelevant to the cause, cure and prevention of human obesity. I identify Bray as one of two individuals most responsible for this dubious accomplishment, and 'for effectively removing the [century-old] concept of the fattening carbohydrate from the nutritional canon . . .' (GCBC, p. 417). Thus, Bray's critique of GCBC may be as much a defense of his own career as it is an unbiased assessment of the book.”
Even worse, if Taubes is right, the folks who were doing what they thought was best for the people of this nation, actually have done incalculable harm in recommending consumption of high carbohydrate and low fat over the last 30 to 40 years. At the very least, it is clear that those recommendations were not based on good science, and at the worst, they’ve killed and damaged as many or more people as the cigarette industry, and used the United States Government to do so.
The prestigious nutrition journals that Mr. BS is so proud to have been published in, and his entire profession, is diminished in significance if Taubes is right. They’ve been advocating, for as long as I’ve been aware, a diet loaded in carbohydrate, including such nonsense as ‘healthy whole grains’, low fat dairy, bananas, oatmeal, breakfast cereals, and potatoes while avoiding saturated fat. They have confidently stated, without scientific proof, that the way towards better health is by eating more high density carbohydrates as a way of avoiding fat. We’ve been told by this “profession” that high protein will damage our kidneys, but they’ve made this pronouncement with no scientific evidence to back it up. If they got anything right, it was to avoid transfats (which ironically only came into vogue after the saturated fat witch hunts began). How eager do you think Mr. BS and his profession will be to embrace it if the proof is forthcoming of just how badly they’ve missed the mark?
Taubes puts it like this (GCBC page 450) commenting on the “no assumptions” nature of two researchers Taubes admires:
“This is how functioning science works. Outstanding questions are identified or hypotheses proposed; experimental tests are then established either to answer the question to refute the hypotheses, regardless of how obviously true they might appear to be. If assertions are made without the empirical evidence to defend them, they are vigorously rebuked. In science, as Merton noted, progress is made only by first establishing whether one’s predecessors have erred or “Have stopped before tracking down the implications of their result or have passed over in their work what is there to be seen by the fresh eye of another.” Each new claim to knowledge therefore, has to be picked apart and appraised. Its shortcomings have to be established unequivocally before we can know what questions remain to be asked, and so what answers to seek – what we know is really so and what we don’t. “This unending exchange of critical judgment,” Merton wrote, “of praise and punishment, is developed in science to a degree that makes the monitoring of children’s behavior by their parents seem little more than child’s play.”
The institutionalized vigilance, “this unending exchange of critical judgment,” is nowhere to be found the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.”
We live in interesting times. Information that would not have been available to the vast majority of us is but a few keyboard clicks away. Unburdened by professional indoctrination, we have the benefit of wanting to believe what is true about diet and health, regardless of who the truth may embarrass, and we have the chance to test it out for ourselves, on ourselves. How to do that? Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar and no wheat. Supplement with fish oil and gel cap vitamin D. Get your lipids tested, insulin levels too if you can, and note that your TG to HDL ratio will be less than 3.5. Then consider yourself a victor in the diet wars, and live long and well.
Another critique of GCBC may be found here: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/bray-review-of-gcbc.pdf
Dr. Mike Eades’ and Gary Taubes’ Response to Dr. Brey: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/taubes-response-to-bray-ob-reviews.pdf
Dr. Mike Eades’ additional response: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/more-braying-from-bray/
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