Hi, Matt! You asked for examples of studies in which the data doesn't match the conclusions.
Well, there's none larger than the Women's Health Initiative. A multi-year billion-dollar study to try to prove that the low-fat diet reduces heart disease. Tim Noakes drills down in detail into exactly how the authors deliberately manipulated and misrepresented the data, or simply ignored it, to publish conclusions that were in direct contradiction to their actual clinical data.
The video presentation is beautifully done and you hear more about the back story -- especially that he knows and has worked with some of these people.
But I can't do all the documentation myself. I spent 2 hours a day on the wiki, and that's sparing a lot of productive time. We need more people helping, desperately, if we're going to open the minds we can.
Jan 8, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Do what you gotta do -- I realize you're insanely busy. To me, the dietary literature does feed directly into the metabolic dysfunction in the majority of our population, which has correlated tightly with the bulk of the worst outcomes, as one arguably causes the other. But, yes, I'll look for more directly related to pandemic.
Jan 8, 2022·edited Jan 8, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
It was during the low-fat craze of the 90s that I first discovered the phenomenon of abstract-contradicts-analysis. I kept reading low-fat diet studies looking for all this great scientific proof of how low fat diets make people thin and healthy. Tons of abstracts told me that, yet the numbers within the studies never matched the promise. At first, I was just a confused, enthusiastic young analyst, but gradually, I became a jaded old analyst who understood that was just how industry- & gov't-funded research works...
I read everything I could on diet from age 13, growing up in the 80s with low fat recommendations. Turning point for me in sensemaking was when I read the Diet Delusion (Good Calories Bad Calories in the US title) by Gary Taubes; it opened my eyes to all the lobbying study- rigging and shenanigans of the diet industry, Ancel Keys hypothesis etc & the removal of countries that didn't fit from his study! Had to read the 600 page tome all over again! I guess maybe it set me up for my observations in the last couple of years. Would love to hear Taubes' take on this as a science writer.
Exactly! Taubes GCBC was also my initial drop into the ice water. Those who have already had their eyes opened to the corruption of science in nutrition (and other areas with political implications) come in knowing that dishonesty, misrepresentation, scare tactics, and coercion are a consequence of shoddy science, especially in the service of political ends.
Yep! And those were generally uselessly short, like 3 weeks, or just questionnaire-based surveys that asked people to fill out their diet for the previous year, to the best of their memories. And there was always a significant "healthy-user bias", esp. when they lump anything that's not a low-fat diet into a single bucket. So, cigarettes, whiskey, beer, meat, & potatoes is in the same bucket as a serious keto, or carnivore, or paleo diet.
The Women's Health Initiative was much more tightly monitored, though, even there, they had no high-fat diet, or any other variant that wasn't their favored low-fat diet. Even so, the results were highly useful. And, yes, there is nothing objective about gov't-funded research.
It's designed to support Big Ag & Big Pharm and it does a great job at that.
I also always enjoyed Mark Sissons' "Mark's Daily Apple" although I never finished the course- I do get Sunday emails with links to studies, often addressing how dietary study setup is manipulated in the ways you describe.
It's pretty obvious that high non-complex carbohydrates are by far the biggest problem concerning health and weight control. Fats can be a health-related problem if one eats a high proportion of saturated fats compared to unsaturated fats. In fact, many foods high in unsaturated fats can be good for health and weight control if portion size is limited (given fats' higher caloric content per gram).
I certainly agree about high carb consumption being a major problem. But processed seed oils (euphemistically labeled vegetable oils by the food industry marketeers), it turns out, are every bit as bad for our health and à fewk in the keto community are beginning to think they might even be the #1 causal factor of metabolic syndrome. Check out Chris Knobbe on seed oils on YouTube.
There is no solid evidence for your statement that saturated fats are bad. That's a residue of the plant-based, low-fat bias of many of the nutritional studies. The problem with unsaturated fats is #1 that they are easily oxidized and trans hydrogenated and #2 that linoleic acid is a signal for fat storage, rather than fat utilization. Stearic is more readily utilized for energy. We do need the unsaturated fats, certainly, but the polyunsaturated fat craze of the 70s and 80s coincided with the rise of obesity. There's a lot more to it, but the shibboleth against sat fats is a diet mantra that has no good evidence to back it up.
This is off topic but.., In my world of criminal law here's what happens: Decision based on precedent X, which is based upon earlier case Y. All cases now follow X. But dig back and go the precedent case Y and find that it relied upon case A. Go to Case A and it didn't actually say what Y says. Bu no matter, X confirms the predetermined decision the court wanted to make. And lo and behold, that is the law.
But surely that's how you're supposed to work in the humanities and social sciences, isn't it? It was when I was at school/university. Always go back to the original source(s). Always sort sources by type. Always try to cross-reference. Are the sources independant or interdependant? Separate subjective language in the source from objectice claims. And so on.
Today it seems it's more like chinese whispers. And 'for want of a pin' certainly applies to the natural sciences as well.
Shallow consistency. It's what gives the law its resilience and adaptability, but it's hardly an unalloyed good. I trained as a mathematician, and I find it stomach-churning.
Actually Case A came after precedent X and it determined that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” and I’m assuming that got overturned seeing that forced sterilization is not still legal in this country yet people still think there are legal grounds to uphold precedent X.
My all time favorite? The CITRIS-ALI study where they concluded high dose intravenous Vitamin C **DID NOT WORK** because out of 46 clinical markers of sepsis they tracked, 43 of them did not improve. This is what the abstract said. You have to read all the way deep into the results to discover that the 3 clinical markers that *DID* improve were deaths cut by half, fewer ICU admissions and shorter hospital stays. lol. Whatta clown show. They were so intent on disproving Paul Marik's ICU sepsis findings that they even rigged the 'study' to show it didn't work (dragged their feet by administering VitC "within 24 hours" of admission when every minute counts & used a fraction of the dose that Marik's protocol proved out). Still found a benefit. Buried it. Let me amend my conclusion: whatta homicidal clown show.
i don't know about "conclusions" for your friend at the CHD but there was that paper that came out about a man who's Angioimmunoblastic T Cell Lymphoma grew enormously post booster. The ending is so sad. The patient made the statement: "He remains convinced that mRNA vaccines represent very efficient products with a favorable benefit-risk ratio." You know either that poor man is either 1) brainwashed, or 2) the researchers and patient had to put that in there to get it published and keep it up appearances. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.798095/full)
Maybe its part of Viral Absurdities, but you need a “ReBunking” project — De-Debunking Reuters and similar, illustrating the logical fallacies they fall into, etc.
Yeah, but the time consumption is hard to justify. I have several half-written debunks (I have >200 partially written articles). Very often they are a piece or two away, or a high priority project pulls me away.
That is the real red pill... And the book virus mania points out the case that these viruses came about to hide other causes, like DDT with polio, sanitation with smallpox etc
Remember even HIV hasn't been directly proven to cause AIDS but we do know that Fauci managed to use the HIV positives to push AZT, like what was done with remdesevir and "covid"
Liberal science has gone astray in sexuality research as well. A scientific paper on homosexuality put online in 2017 proposed a diet-stress-diathesis model of causation of homosexuality and it was viciously attacked. According to recent research inflammation in the pregnant mother in the form of an allergic attack (like from vaccines?) causes disturbed sexual development in the offspring. Expect more LGBT in the future. https://psyarxiv.com/bjxvs/
Let’s talk about how many idiots think that mRNA technology has been in development for decades - that’s technically true, but not in any such capacity as to have honed it as a template for making safe and effective vaccines. Just the other day I got in an argument with yet another person that doesn’t know pseudouridine from Sudafed 😓
The Pfizer vaccine safety study's conclusion reads: "Through 6 months of follow-up and despite a gradual decline in vaccine efficacy, BNT162b2 had a favorable safety profile and was highly efficacious in preventing Covid-19." Meanwhile, severe outcomes (the worst category with statistical significance) were substantially more frequent for the vaccine than the placebo, despite the pandemic being in full swing.
This article is confirmation of my own innate science. I've been noticing the same dichotomy occurring in papers/articles.
I simply figured that scientists were adapting, no different from the folks "playing pandemic" when required.
Putting on the mask, despite your personal feelings, abiding by the "distancing rules", just trying to stay under the radar, so to speak. I figured it was the scientific equivalent.
Personally, I think, like the "majority" in population, the same exists in the scientific community, a large group of people that disagree (in varying shades) with the current narrative. And they are trying in their own way to get the truth out. To help. To rebel. To change the world.
Matt, thinking about the Campfire wiki, for a while I have been debating C19 in some groups, I've posted scientific studies where I thought I had a winning argument, only for some other argument against the study be raised that I may not have the answer to. It would be great to have a place where we could take (for example) a study and then have arguments against/for it and how to best approach an argument. I'm not exactly sure how that would look like, but I hope I convey the purpose. For example, the Bangladesh mask study, so someone will say "oh it shows X% less C19 cases when wearing a cloth mask", it would be good to have a list of those "arguments" with a good response like "yes, but it also shows that blue cloth masks are more effective than red masks, which clearly shows that the data is unreliable", or whatever the message may be (multiple preferred). To be able to shoot down the attacks of the (valid) studies. But also to list the junk studies and the arguments against them.
Hi, Matt! You asked for examples of studies in which the data doesn't match the conclusions.
Well, there's none larger than the Women's Health Initiative. A multi-year billion-dollar study to try to prove that the low-fat diet reduces heart disease. Tim Noakes drills down in detail into exactly how the authors deliberately manipulated and misrepresented the data, or simply ignored it, to publish conclusions that were in direct contradiction to their actual clinical data.
Paper: https://openheart.bmj.com/content/8/2/e001680
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wjEnsEXI0
(where I first saw this)
The video presentation is beautifully done and you hear more about the back story -- especially that he knows and has worked with some of these people.
While I was looking for pandemic-related research, perhaps I'll start a more general Orwellian science article in the wiki as well.
But I can't do all the documentation myself. I spent 2 hours a day on the wiki, and that's sparing a lot of productive time. We need more people helping, desperately, if we're going to open the minds we can.
Maybe fits? https://drflurmgooglybean.substack.com/p/a-risk-assessment-without-assessing?r=r6d2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Good call.
Join Operation Uplift.
Do what you gotta do -- I realize you're insanely busy. To me, the dietary literature does feed directly into the metabolic dysfunction in the majority of our population, which has correlated tightly with the bulk of the worst outcomes, as one arguably causes the other. But, yes, I'll look for more directly related to pandemic.
It was during the low-fat craze of the 90s that I first discovered the phenomenon of abstract-contradicts-analysis. I kept reading low-fat diet studies looking for all this great scientific proof of how low fat diets make people thin and healthy. Tons of abstracts told me that, yet the numbers within the studies never matched the promise. At first, I was just a confused, enthusiastic young analyst, but gradually, I became a jaded old analyst who understood that was just how industry- & gov't-funded research works...
I read everything I could on diet from age 13, growing up in the 80s with low fat recommendations. Turning point for me in sensemaking was when I read the Diet Delusion (Good Calories Bad Calories in the US title) by Gary Taubes; it opened my eyes to all the lobbying study- rigging and shenanigans of the diet industry, Ancel Keys hypothesis etc & the removal of countries that didn't fit from his study! Had to read the 600 page tome all over again! I guess maybe it set me up for my observations in the last couple of years. Would love to hear Taubes' take on this as a science writer.
Exactly! Taubes GCBC was also my initial drop into the ice water. Those who have already had their eyes opened to the corruption of science in nutrition (and other areas with political implications) come in knowing that dishonesty, misrepresentation, scare tactics, and coercion are a consequence of shoddy science, especially in the service of political ends.
Yep! And those were generally uselessly short, like 3 weeks, or just questionnaire-based surveys that asked people to fill out their diet for the previous year, to the best of their memories. And there was always a significant "healthy-user bias", esp. when they lump anything that's not a low-fat diet into a single bucket. So, cigarettes, whiskey, beer, meat, & potatoes is in the same bucket as a serious keto, or carnivore, or paleo diet.
The Women's Health Initiative was much more tightly monitored, though, even there, they had no high-fat diet, or any other variant that wasn't their favored low-fat diet. Even so, the results were highly useful. And, yes, there is nothing objective about gov't-funded research.
It's designed to support Big Ag & Big Pharm and it does a great job at that.
I also always enjoyed Mark Sissons' "Mark's Daily Apple" although I never finished the course- I do get Sunday emails with links to studies, often addressing how dietary study setup is manipulated in the ways you describe.
It's pretty obvious that high non-complex carbohydrates are by far the biggest problem concerning health and weight control. Fats can be a health-related problem if one eats a high proportion of saturated fats compared to unsaturated fats. In fact, many foods high in unsaturated fats can be good for health and weight control if portion size is limited (given fats' higher caloric content per gram).
I certainly agree about high carb consumption being a major problem. But processed seed oils (euphemistically labeled vegetable oils by the food industry marketeers), it turns out, are every bit as bad for our health and à fewk in the keto community are beginning to think they might even be the #1 causal factor of metabolic syndrome. Check out Chris Knobbe on seed oils on YouTube.
There is no solid evidence for your statement that saturated fats are bad. That's a residue of the plant-based, low-fat bias of many of the nutritional studies. The problem with unsaturated fats is #1 that they are easily oxidized and trans hydrogenated and #2 that linoleic acid is a signal for fat storage, rather than fat utilization. Stearic is more readily utilized for energy. We do need the unsaturated fats, certainly, but the polyunsaturated fat craze of the 70s and 80s coincided with the rise of obesity. There's a lot more to it, but the shibboleth against sat fats is a diet mantra that has no good evidence to back it up.
Here's a good Chris Knobbe presentation of the seed oil research and its implications:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kGnfXXIKZM
This is off topic but.., In my world of criminal law here's what happens: Decision based on precedent X, which is based upon earlier case Y. All cases now follow X. But dig back and go the precedent case Y and find that it relied upon case A. Go to Case A and it didn't actually say what Y says. Bu no matter, X confirms the predetermined decision the court wanted to make. And lo and behold, that is the law.
Yes! Science and law seem to have plenty of that in common.
But surely that's how you're supposed to work in the humanities and social sciences, isn't it? It was when I was at school/university. Always go back to the original source(s). Always sort sources by type. Always try to cross-reference. Are the sources independant or interdependant? Separate subjective language in the source from objectice claims. And so on.
Today it seems it's more like chinese whispers. And 'for want of a pin' certainly applies to the natural sciences as well.
Shallow consistency. It's what gives the law its resilience and adaptability, but it's hardly an unalloyed good. I trained as a mathematician, and I find it stomach-churning.
Actually Case A came after precedent X and it determined that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” and I’m assuming that got overturned seeing that forced sterilization is not still legal in this country yet people still think there are legal grounds to uphold precedent X.
My all time favorite? The CITRIS-ALI study where they concluded high dose intravenous Vitamin C **DID NOT WORK** because out of 46 clinical markers of sepsis they tracked, 43 of them did not improve. This is what the abstract said. You have to read all the way deep into the results to discover that the 3 clinical markers that *DID* improve were deaths cut by half, fewer ICU admissions and shorter hospital stays. lol. Whatta clown show. They were so intent on disproving Paul Marik's ICU sepsis findings that they even rigged the 'study' to show it didn't work (dragged their feet by administering VitC "within 24 hours" of admission when every minute counts & used a fraction of the dose that Marik's protocol proved out). Still found a benefit. Buried it. Let me amend my conclusion: whatta homicidal clown show.
i don't know about "conclusions" for your friend at the CHD but there was that paper that came out about a man who's Angioimmunoblastic T Cell Lymphoma grew enormously post booster. The ending is so sad. The patient made the statement: "He remains convinced that mRNA vaccines represent very efficient products with a favorable benefit-risk ratio." You know either that poor man is either 1) brainwashed, or 2) the researchers and patient had to put that in there to get it published and keep it up appearances. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.798095/full)
Maybe its part of Viral Absurdities, but you need a “ReBunking” project — De-Debunking Reuters and similar, illustrating the logical fallacies they fall into, etc.
Yeah, but the time consumption is hard to justify. I have several half-written debunks (I have >200 partially written articles). Very often they are a piece or two away, or a high priority project pulls me away.
How about we challenge virus theory and how they never ran controls on isolation experiments?
https://drsambailey.com/2022/01/05/why-nobody-can-find-a-virus/
That is the real red pill... And the book virus mania points out the case that these viruses came about to hide other causes, like DDT with polio, sanitation with smallpox etc
Remember even HIV hasn't been directly proven to cause AIDS but we do know that Fauci managed to use the HIV positives to push AZT, like what was done with remdesevir and "covid"
Liberal science has gone astray in sexuality research as well. A scientific paper on homosexuality put online in 2017 proposed a diet-stress-diathesis model of causation of homosexuality and it was viciously attacked. According to recent research inflammation in the pregnant mother in the form of an allergic attack (like from vaccines?) causes disturbed sexual development in the offspring. Expect more LGBT in the future. https://psyarxiv.com/bjxvs/
Let’s talk about how many idiots think that mRNA technology has been in development for decades - that’s technically true, but not in any such capacity as to have honed it as a template for making safe and effective vaccines. Just the other day I got in an argument with yet another person that doesn’t know pseudouridine from Sudafed 😓
It's been an abysmal failure just like other gene editing like CRISPR.
Virus theory is another mythology that came from the obsession with genes...
https://drsambailey.com/2022/01/05/why-nobody-can-find-a-virus/
The Pfizer vaccine safety study's conclusion reads: "Through 6 months of follow-up and despite a gradual decline in vaccine efficacy, BNT162b2 had a favorable safety profile and was highly efficacious in preventing Covid-19." Meanwhile, severe outcomes (the worst category with statistical significance) were substantially more frequent for the vaccine than the placebo, despite the pandemic being in full swing.
https://norstadt.substack.com/p/severe-adverse-events-vs-severe-covid
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345
Also documented by Canadian doctors alliance in an easy to understand video
https://www.canadiancovidcarealliance.org/
I am collecting all of your quotations, Mathew! That Bernard Beckett one is spectacular.
I am honored to discover myself included on your Must-Read Substackers list along with many of my own favorites! 🙏
This article is confirmation of my own innate science. I've been noticing the same dichotomy occurring in papers/articles.
I simply figured that scientists were adapting, no different from the folks "playing pandemic" when required.
Putting on the mask, despite your personal feelings, abiding by the "distancing rules", just trying to stay under the radar, so to speak. I figured it was the scientific equivalent.
Personally, I think, like the "majority" in population, the same exists in the scientific community, a large group of people that disagree (in varying shades) with the current narrative. And they are trying in their own way to get the truth out. To help. To rebel. To change the world.
Poor legal arguments are often not mistakes .
Mathew, why are you still using gmail ?
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/resiliency-surviving-in-the-age-of?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2NTI2NDA4NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDY2NTA3MTIsIl8iOiI0NnROcyIsImlhdCI6MTY0MTYzMjg3NiwiZXhwIjoxNjQxNjM2NDc2LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNTgzMjAwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.9krFCsOK_3367cgoikbIaEvZlNvUzjL0KvYe4RrT0yg
This is great, engage the hive mind. 🐝🐝🐝
Matt, thinking about the Campfire wiki, for a while I have been debating C19 in some groups, I've posted scientific studies where I thought I had a winning argument, only for some other argument against the study be raised that I may not have the answer to. It would be great to have a place where we could take (for example) a study and then have arguments against/for it and how to best approach an argument. I'm not exactly sure how that would look like, but I hope I convey the purpose. For example, the Bangladesh mask study, so someone will say "oh it shows X% less C19 cases when wearing a cloth mask", it would be good to have a list of those "arguments" with a good response like "yes, but it also shows that blue cloth masks are more effective than red masks, which clearly shows that the data is unreliable", or whatever the message may be (multiple preferred). To be able to shoot down the attacks of the (valid) studies. But also to list the junk studies and the arguments against them.
Matt, I will be on the prayer team. Art major