There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who reads these interactions but who doesn't post.
This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
Obesity simply wasn’t as common and most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place in the pasts, so calories alone were less vilified.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
The general understanding at the time was basically a full stomach tells people they have eaten enough. We didn’t understand the multiple systems the body uses to adjust the hunger drive and how much a high carb low fat diet messes with them.
> I'm sorry, but this is simply nonsensical. Calories were EVERYTHING among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
Less vilified is on a relative scale, I was alive back then and there was plenty of nonsensical low calorie diets being promoted. However you also saw crap like the Fruitarian Diet where unlimited fruit meant people could actually gain weight on a diet that also gave them multiple nutritional deficiencies.
Low fat dieting is in part from that same mindset as fruitarian diet where it’s not the calories that are the issue but the types of food you were eating. Digging just a little deeper these ideas made more sense before global supply chains and highly processed foods showed up. Culture can be a lot slower to adapt than technology or economics, diet advice from your grandparents could be wildly out of date. Cutting X means something very different when you have 20 available foods vs 20,000.
See "carbohydrates", "complex carbohydrates", "integral grain" and so on.
Quite frankly, plain sugar from fruit is less dangerous than the complex carbs from grains. But fructose is still dangerous, just less so.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.
You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.
The same rule changes tightened the rules on added sugar.
If you are trying to have some reasonable balance of fat, protein, and carbs in your diet, pushing kids from whole to skim milk is going to move the diet towards consuming more sugar/carbs, even if you have a seperate rule trying to tighten sugar consumption.
You are making an argument that people do so, do you have any evidence for this ?
There is a negligible difference in glycemic index / glycemic load between the variations of M.F. milk products. Some analysis has skim milk as having a lower GI.
Unflavoured Milk is not relevant to the GI conversation.
Ok, there's no different.
Beyond that, Minor differents in glycemic load are irrelevant if you're consuming milk with a meal, like the kids in school are doing.
2% milk is a pretty good balance.
Read the slash as “or”, not “also known as”.
It did twenty years ago, when I noticed, I have not bought it since
The meal does not get smaller. The meal has a calorie target, and the milkfat gets replaced with new food. And almost never will that new food be a chunk of lard, so it will increase the carb ratio.
This is not accurate.
No they didn't "replace" the fats with sugar. There is a chocolate milk option, just as there was before, but all options need to be 1% or low M.F., which nutrition and medical science overwhelmingly supports.
Is chocolate milk not ideal? Of course. We all know that. They shouldn't serve it either.
That has been kind of a consequence of that though. Low-fat foods tend to taste pretty bland, so sugar is added instead to improve flavor.
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-op...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben
> in every other industry that i can imagine
Our own industry (tech) is rife with unpunished fraud.
It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated. How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding? How many have been criminally investigated?
But being wrong isn't a crime. Intentional fraud is.
> It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated.
And it's hard to investigate without some reasonably solid evidence of a crime.
I’d say the Ariely affair is reasonably suspicious.
I am glad it takes more than mere suspicion for the government to go search my private writings and possessions.
the witness and reportee who i am friends with was directly instructed by this professor to falsify data in a more positive light in order to impress grant funders. multiple people were in attendance in this meeting but even that was not enough to see any disciplinary action.
duke also has a notorious reputation for being a fraud mill.
They also kept the grant money. The university investigating itself isn’t meaningful.
Is that not the reasonable response if an investigation didn't turn up wrongdoing?
Industry funded research? Results that disagree with the current consensus? Nutrition science entirely?
That is what I hate about the everything in moderation. We need to do better since some things should be in much larger amounts than others.
I think we all would agree that any amount of rat poison is a bad thing, thought perhaps this is too much of a strawman.
In a lot of ways, it's actually been easier. Because my blood sugar isn't crashing every few hours, I can easily skip a meal and feel perfectly fine. Fasting is very easy for me now, which it wasn't at all on an unhealthy diet.
Also:
- If you are eating more fish (as opposed to eating meat), you are likely consuming more mercury.
- If you are eating more fresh veggies you are probably ingesting more pesticides.
- If you are easting dark chocolate for its health benefits, you are also ingesting cadmium and other heavy metals.
So all the above should be done in moderation. Even things that seem like unalloyed good can be dangerous. A burst of exercise beyond your conditioning can lead to a CV event. Too much water can be poisonous. Some people get constipation for too much veggies in their diet.
For example, instead to sticking to a narrow faddish supposedly healthy diet, you can enjoy a wide range of foods, which will make it more likely you are getting all the nutrients that will do you good (of course clearly unhealthy food should be avoided).
The body is more complex than we can ever know. There are some general principles for good health (including CV health) that should be followed, but to me it is clear that good health does not arise from a slavish devotion to very detailed set of rules.
It'd be funny if lots of fad diets actually works because people are forced to eat a single type of food and that's entirely enough for it.
> "don't eat something obviously terrible"
This is an exact thought in the comment.
> "bad things can happen so why bother"
The exact thing I was arguing against.
Jeez, why bother responding if you can't be bothered to read the actual comment I wrote.
I cook my own food and optimize around eating healthy. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I made less money or had a more demanding job or didn’t have great grocery stores in a 10 mile radius or had to spend time in childcare or any of the other completely valid reasons people have.
Besides, you yourself just described “do things in moderation” yourself: holidays, Christmas, restaurants etc. That’s really what the philosophy is.
The main issue is overconsumption leading to overweight and obesity. Food that’s high in refined sugars and/or saturated fats tend to contribute to this, because it’s palatable and calorie-dense
So in that sense, yes - I believe that as long as your diet is varied enough that you get sufficient intake of all, or at least most, of the essential nutrients, and you don’t eat too much (i.e. in moderation), the ratio of macronutrients doesn’t make a big difference to your health outcome
The crux is that moderation is hard when the food is jam-packed with calories, and it’s so delicious you just want to keep stuffing your face
You have to restrict yourself to produce and a few scant other options to escape with balanced nutritional products.
They even advertise cereals as a "part of a healthy breakfast". Which is a lie under any circumstances, because it's never a healthy part if you eat it long term. (Yes it could keep you from starving to death in a famine, still not 'healthy'.) Imagine if they could only say "it will keep you from starving, and may significantly contribute to diabetes"
What I've seen is that the best and most well documented way to prevent CVD is the DASH diet paired with exercise and potentially statins.
If you are an unhealthy weight you are both eating too much and/or not exercising enough. High calorie foods can be fatty, sugary, or both.
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus.
Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public.
More here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
My go-to source for nutrition information is Understanding Nutrition by Whitney and Rolfes.
For some people choice of diet really does seem core to their identity. It’s literally all the OP ever posts about.
There may be a misconception that there is one single best diet for everyone, when in reality we people (over generations) evolve with our diets, and your best diet and my best diet may be completely different.
The problem with using science as a guide is that there are just too many variables and not enough time, data and money to isolate them all sufficiently.
However that is distinct from the idea that too much of something like refined sugar might be unhealthy for just about everyone. So science does have an important role to play, I just don't think it's advanced far enough to fully answer the question for everyone.
You have to get your calories (ie raw energy) from somewhere. If you limit saturated fat to 10% then what's left for the other 90% is (roughly speaking) unsaturated fat, simple sugars, carbohydrates (ie complex sugars), and protein. In terms of long term habits converting protein to calories is probably not a great choice for your health. If you decide to go for complex carbohydrates over various oils then vegetables that provide those are a good option.
Your body can certainly "manage" on a high protein low fat low carb diet but I don't understand it to be good for you.
Technically speaking, dietary requirement for sugar is 0. This doesn't mean it isn't useful to have some, but it definitely shouldn't be the basis of the food pyramid.
Or do I want to live longer?
They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but different actions could result in different outcomes for each.
For nearly everyone, this isn't impactful to their life. Only their vanity
I'm not saying that ketosis has this kind of an effect, but rather that eating or not eating some other things might. Eg vitamin K2. The body is be able to make vitamin K2, but we might have stronger bones and teeth, and a healthier cardiovascular system, if we get extra K2 from an external source.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
rather like MSM eating its own tail, it's happening way over there and our lives continue irreguardless.
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right?
Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right?
In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle.
At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better.
Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. )
Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
Does "reduce fat consumption" mean a proportional reduction (i.e. increase carb/protein consumption) or an absolute reduction (i.e. decrease overall caloric intake)? In either case, what macros and level of caloric intake relative to TDEE are the assumed starting point? Who knows, but the net effect has been multiple generations hooked on absurd concentrations of sugar and UPFs.
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...
If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.
But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
People lose fat on calorie restricted diet. How will you get to it, either by counting them or by improving metabolism or by changing insulin levels, is a different thing.
Vegan or keto diet can both be calorie restricted, as much as any macronutrient mixture. However, it doesn't mean its sustainable. If you are hungry all the time, you can stay on the diet for some time, but not forever. Since insulin is the primary storage hormone, reducing it will make you less fat (just look at type 1 diabetics). We now know that carbs are the highest promoters of insulin, that fat has 0 influence, and protein some. We have drugs like metformin or GLP-1 that brute force some of it and they are working.
So, we know that sugar is mostly bad and that fat and protein are not. Ofc, some fats are bad for other reasons (by promoting inflamation) but that has nothing to do with obesity.
"Hungry all the time" is actually vegan thing, but plants have so few calories and pass through so quickly that vegans end up being skinny despite eating literally all the time.
You mean leafs, not plants? Cereals, beans, fruits and some roots have plenty of calories but your true fatty friends are all sorts of seeds and nuts. You also can buy their fat extract: oil.
But grains and seeds do seem to be quite obesogenic, yes.
I don't know Fruitarians but what you describe makes sense. However the vegans I know aren't "Hungry all the time". Some are skinny and some fatty but I wouldn't say the average are skinny, you wouldn't stare at their size if you don't know their diet. Might be a personal bias though, I don't know studies about vegans hungriness or BMI.
Turns out, it is fats that produce satiety signals, and the effect seems to be by far the strongest with saturated fats, weaker with monounsaturated fats, while polyunsaturated fats actually induce hunger as strongly or even more strongly than carbohydrates do. The idea that "protein induces satiety" is a side effect of the fact that most (though not all) protein foods tend to be quite fatty.
Very traditional diets also tended to include lots of foods that are both highly processed and contain both sugars and fats, like cheese or sweet nut cakes. Paleo diets are a modern invention, and have little in common with the concept of what our ancestors ate. They often have deeply anachronistic ideas, like favoring raw foods, when the use of fire has been a core part of our ancestors consumption since way before Homo Sapiens existed.
Traditional diets however are still diets that came after the advent of agriculture.
High carbohydrate content causes sugar spikes, which leads to insulin spikes, and insulin spikes both a) cause hunger and b) promote storage of energy in the form of body fat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3894001/
Second issue is as I said lack of nutrients. Your body needs nutrients, and will force you to eat until nutritional requirements had been satisfied. Since processed foods have very few nutrients, your organism compensates by increasing dietary intake... which means increasing caloric intake.
In general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is wrong in quality and quantity; you can't track enough people for the amount of time where supposed effects would manifest), there is almost zero control over what people eat (diets and available foods even considerably over a decade for whole countries, never mind within individuals), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid category, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree, and each again with different kinds in each category).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects, or the rare results of natural experiments / famines), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
Maybe it'll become actual science one day, but that won't be for decades.
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999...
If you have a randomized controlled trial, the sugar dose is varied and other confounding variables are controlled by randomization. So you measure the causal impact of sugar only. There are studies showing that.
With observational studies, if you have a dose-dependent effect, then that's good evidence (although not completely conclusive) of a causal relationship. This is what many studies do.
If you have a meta analysis covering many primary studies, and if those vary a lot of context (i.e. countries, year, composition of the population), and you still get a consistent effect, then that's another piece of support for a causal relationship.
The few studies that I've looked at seem to show a pretty robust picture of sugar being a cause, but there might be selection bias - i.e. we'd need an umbrella / meta meta study (which ideally accounts for publication bias) to get the best estimate possible.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
Or spend $23,134,000 on all of the House and Senate.
How do you corrupt an entire government? One congressperson at a time.
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
That's over half a million, in today's dollars.
With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
> To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...]
So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
> the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars
I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.
As a unrelated note it really is depressing to think about how easy it is to buy off politicians and how much money the bribers have vs an average person.
~$6,000-$7,000 is the amount the researchers were paid off with in the mid 60s. This is roughly equivalent to ~$50,000 in 2016 when using CPI-U figures.
$25,000 in the mid 60s would be equivalent to ~$193,000 by the same measure, and does not relate to $50,000 in 2016 in any way.
But your core point that the items in the CPI-U basket do not adjust equally, which is why it's a basket in the first place. Median housing price in 2016 was ~$300,000, so ~$193,000 is a bit of variance... but not nearly as much as mixing the numbers from the different comparisons made it sound.
In terms of 2016, from gemini:
> In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.
> Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period
rendaw was pointing out the $50k in the article & parent comment was in terms of 2016 dollars, not that the mid 60s $25k in CodeWrite23's comment converts to $50k in 2016.
I.e. that the researchers would not be getting anything close to a house + charger + spare change for just half the $50k amount. They got more like $6k-$7k at time of payment in the mid 60s. Which is still a good chunk of change for the time... just not the amounts it was made to sound.
The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current system isn't just a loss of purchasing power, it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money: the banking/financial system. So of course the system invested a lot of money, time and effort in convincing you that it's a good thing to continuously donate a fraction of your purchasing power to the finance industry every year.
So what? Nominal wages can go up just fine. They do that all the time.
> it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money
No. That would only be true, if economic actors were too stupid to anticipate expected inflation. People ain't that stupid.
The second part is just confusing. Inflation benefits the first to "receive/spend" new money? Receiving and spending are opposites, and inflation benefits anyone that's spending whether they got that money first or fiftieth.
If you want demons to point a finger at, you're going to have to look further back in time than the 20th century. Then and now we're just doing a frantic tap dance to keep what we inherited from catching on fire.
(Modern day 2%-ish stable inflation is mostly fine for the economy, even if it technically erodes the value of money in the long term. The classic pre-WW1 gold standard was also fine-ish. The Frankenstein gold standard-ish they until the 1970s was bad. And so was the rampant inflation that followed for a while.)
Political evolution is spread over many years and is structurally anisotropic. Metallism's death was inevitable by the 18th century at best, but don't misunderstand that to mean it was going to happen immediately. It's also just a symptom. The enlightenment's political revolution is a manifold spread across centuries. Don't just look at the symptoms, you won't understand anything and it will lead you to half-baked conclusions.
Gold is way too inelastic to work as a basis for currency in an industrial economy.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
This logic is faulty because both vegans and keto/carnivore people are selected for adherence to diets. If you can stick to either dietary restrictions, you can probably also not pig out on pop tarts or whatever.
Because processed food diet is IMPOSSIBLE to adhere to without gaining weight. Caloric restriction simply doesn't work - your body wants nutrients, not just calories. Which is to say, your willpower will fail sooner or later, unless you find a way of satisfying nutritional needs without excess caloric intake.
Keto diets might be easier to stick to than calorie counting or whatever, but the fact that you bothered with a diet at all means you're selecting for people who care about their health.
Either way you cannot be sure your selection applies to other people.
UPF is the new devil as far as I can see, alongside refined sugar.
Also the size and sugar contents of some fruits nowadays is just insane and many still think they're "healthy".
That doesn’t mean they have to be processed, though, or that it requires gaining weight along with them. I personally survive primarily off of clean meats and homemade sourdough bread (which has literally 4 ingredients). If I cut out the bread I get hypoglycemic after runs and pass out. And with it, my weight stays around the same (though I’ve lost maybe 30lb in the last year or so due to just running more and lifting less).
Edit: and when I say “clean meats” I do not mean “lean” meats. Plenty of saturated fats. My bloodwork and other vitals are probably the best my doctor sees all year.
Because these are often in conflict they must compromise something. If you find a way to be fat while: looking good, living a long life, and being able to do the other things in life you want through life people would be happy.
Of course being fat correlates strongly with things people don't like about living a long healthy life and so we try to lose weight, but that is only a proxy.
In this specific case.
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors.
Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors.
This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research.
https://www.henryford.com/news/2025/09/vaccine-study-henry-f...
Because vaccines aren't all that profitable compared to other pharmaceuticals but produce disproportionate public good.
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.
Fraud etc.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.
Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught?
It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1]
1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
That's not quite what TFA says. Rather:
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?