I trust science. The gradual emergence of science has led to a revolution in human existence that has happened so quickly and with such impact that it is hard to gain perspective on it.
Trusting science is not the same as trusting the pronouncements of people who are designated scientific experts. Establishing the truth of a scientific theory is an entirely different process than the social dynamics of rising to a position of leadership in a group of any kind. Official experts, whether government, corporate or academic, nearly always defend the current version of received truth against challenge of all kinds; most of those challenges are stupidity and ignorance. My go-to expert on this subject, as so many others, is Dilbert:
Sadly, those same establishment experts tend to be the strongest opponents of genuine innovation and scientific advances of all kinds. As I explain here, with examples from Feynman and the history of flight, one of the core elements of successful innovation is ignoring the official experts.
My skepticism is well proven in the case of so-called Computer Science, which doesn't even rise to the level of "useful computer practices" much less science. As I have shown extensively, Computer Science and Engineering is largely a collection of elaborate faith-based assertions without empirical foundation. And computers are all numbers and math! If it's so pathetic in such an objective field, imagine how bad it can get when complex biological systems are involved.
This brings us to the subject of saturated fat (solid fat of the kind that's in meat), whole milk and human nutrition. This ongoing scandal -- for which no one has been imprisoned, sued or even demoted -- in spite of its leading to widespread obesity and other health-damaging conditions -- is still rolling along. The hard science concerning the supposed connection between saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease is in. The results are clear. It is positively healthy for people to eat saturated fat. Period. The scandal is that the "expert" people and organizations that have declared saturated fat and cholesterol to be dangerously unhealthy for many decades refuse to admit their errors and continue to waffle on the subject.
This is relevant to computer science because of the stark differences between the two fields. Software is esoteric and invisible to nearly everyone, while the results of eating are tangible to everyone, and the statistics about the effects are visible and measurable. The common factor is ... people. In both cases there is a wide consensus of expert opinion about the right way to build and main software, and the right way to eat and live in order to be healthy. Experts! From blood-letting to flying machines, they lead the way!
Usually the Science-challengers are wrong
It has taken me a great deal of time to dig in to this scandal, in part because there are so many cases of "the experts are all wrong -- me and my fringe group have the truth." I wanted to make absolutely sure "it's good to eat saturated fat" wasn't another of these. After all, the simple notion that eating fat makes you fat makes common sense!
The Scandal
Surely the diet recommendations of the major medical and government institutions in favor of limiting fat must be valid! Sadly, this is not the case. Rather, it's a wonderful example of how hard paradigm shifts are to accomplish, particularly when the prestige of major institutions are involved. And, sadly, how prestige and baseless assertions have substituted for science, shockingly similar to bloodletting and other universally-accepted-on-no-objective-basis practices.
A basic, understandable summary of the subject may be found in The Big Fat Surprise, which is loaded with appropriate detail. Here is a summary:
"the past sixty years of low-fat nutrition advice has amounted to a vast uncontrolled experiment on the entire population, with disastrous consequences for our health.
For decades, we have been told that the best possible diet involves cutting back on fat, especially saturated fat, and that if we are not getting healthier or thinner it must be because we are not trying hard enough. But what if the low-fat diet is itself the problem? What if those exact foods we’ve been denying ourselves — the creamy cheeses, the sizzling steaks — are themselves the key to reversing the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease?"
Yes, this sounds like what an anti-science crank would say. All I can say is, dig in. You'll find the shoddy beginnings of the fat-cholesterol-heart hypothesis; the biased studies that seemed to support it; the massive, multi-decade Framingham study which was trumpeted as supporting the anti-fat theory, but whose thoroughly confirmed and vetted results were actively suppressed for many years; the uncontested studies that disprove the anti-fat recommendations; and the improved understanding of the biological systems that thoroughly debunks the widely promoted campaign against saturated fat and LDL, the "bad" cholesterol.
More detail
If you want a start on more detail, I recommend Dr. Sebastian Rushworth at a high level and the recent book by long-term cardiac doctor Malcolm Kendrick that gives the details of the studies and biology that explain what really happens.
Here are a couple explanations from Dr. Rushworth:
"the LDL hypothesis basically says that heart disease happens because LDL somewhow ends up in the arterial wall, after which it is oxidized, which starts an inflammatory reaction that gradually leads to the hardening of arteries and eventually to bad things like heart attacks and strokes."
"... the LDL hypothesis is bunk. There is by now a wealth of evidence showing that LDL has little to do with heart disease, such as this systematic review from BMJ Evidence Based Medicine, which showed that there is no correlation whatsoever between the amount of LDL lowering induced by statins and other LDL lowering drugs, and the benefit seen on cardiovascular disease risk (if indeed any benefit is seen – it often isn’t)."
Rushmore's summary of the Kendrick book is:
"The ultra-short elevator pitch version of what he argues in the book is that heart disease is what happens when damage to the arterial wall occurs at a faster rate than repair can happen. That’s why everything from sickle cell disease to diabetes to high blood pressure to smoking to rheumatoid arthritis to cortisone treatment to the cancer drug Avastin increases the risk of cardiovascular disease – they all either increase the speed at which the arterial wall gets damaged or slow down its repair. It’s why heart disease (more correctly called “cardiovascular disease”) only affects arteries (which are high pressure systems) and not veins (which are low pressure systems), and why atherosclerosis (the hardening of the arteries that characterizes heart disease) primarily happens at locations where blood flow is extra turbulent, such as at bifurcations.
This alternative to the LDL hypothesis is known as the “thrombogenic hypothesis” of heart disease. It’s actually been around for a long time, first having been proposed by German pathologist Carl von Rokitansky in the 19th century. Von Rokitansky noted that atherosclerotic plaques bear a remarkable similarity to blood clots when analyzed in a microscope, and proposed that they were in fact blood clots in various stages of repair.
Unfortunately, at the time, von Rokitansky wasn’t able to explain how blood clots ended up inside the artery wall, and so the hypothesis floundered for a century and a half (which is a little bit ironic when you consider that no-one knows how LDL ends up inside the artery wall either, yet that hasn’t hindered the LDL hypothesis from becoming the dominant explanation for how heart disease happens). We now know the mechanism by which this happens: cells formed in the bone marrow, known as “endothelial progenitor cells”, circulate in the blood stream and form a new layer of endothelium on top of any clots that form on the artery wall after damage – thus the clot is incorporated in to the arterial wall.
In spite of the fact that probably at least 99% of cardiologists still believe in the LDL hypothesis, the thrombogenic hypothesis is actually supported far better by all the available evidence. While the LDL hypothesis cannot explain why any of the risk factors listed above increases the risk of heart disease, the thrombogenic hypothesis easily explains all of them.
Conclusion
Many major institutions have dialed down their fervent condemnation of the low-fat and LDL-is-bad myths, but haven't done what they should do, which reverse their positions and mea culpa. They should at minimum take at least part responsibility for the explosion of obesity, useless pharma mega-dollars wasted, and the attendant health disasters for countless humans. The fact that they're not helps us understand the resistance to correction of the similarly powerful mainstream myths about software. It's not about the LDL or the software; it's about people, pride, institutions, bureaucracy and entrenched practices and beliefs that fight change.
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