We hate the NY Times
Jan. 29th, 2007 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tikistitchWe hate the New York Times for many, many reasons, too many to really detail in a single blog entry. Most of all, we hate them for helping to start the Atkins craze with this really stupid article in their magazine.
So we were stunned to pick up the Sunday Times magazine today and actually see a not-stupid article about nutrition by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma), Unhappy Meals.
We're about halfway through so far, and still haven't had to stop and wipe Teh Stupid out of our eyes (a constant problem when reading diet and nutrition advice from the mainstream media). And check out this quote:
Yup. We actually found ourselves *nodding*. And, we've actually done real actual scientific studies on nutrition (it's a long story, but we looked at some of the effects of a low fat diet on some of the participants in the Women's Health Initiative, which is also mentioned in the article).
Here's the scenario: researchers will find an obscure tribe in the Galapagos who consume a lot roly-poly fish heads in their diet and live to be 110. So, other scientists get mashed up Extract o' Fish Heads in a pill and feed it to a group of smokers, hoping it will somehow prevent lung cancer. (We exaggerate, of course, but it's not that far off.) Then, six years later, after an awful lot of money has been spent, said researchers will have to call off the study when the fish head pill consumers are found to suddenly have 100X the lung cancer rate of the controls. Everyone, of course, having ignored the fact that roly-poly fish head eaters live hardscrabble lives as fishermen whereas the pill-poppers mostly sit on their couches and click remote controls.
But, you can't get a grant from NIH from telling people, "Eat your vegetables."
New York Times, we've almost forgiven you for Atkins.
Almost.
So we were stunned to pick up the Sunday Times magazine today and actually see a not-stupid article about nutrition by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma), Unhappy Meals.
We're about halfway through so far, and still haven't had to stop and wipe Teh Stupid out of our eyes (a constant problem when reading diet and nutrition advice from the mainstream media). And check out this quote:
But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. “The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.”
Yup. We actually found ourselves *nodding*. And, we've actually done real actual scientific studies on nutrition (it's a long story, but we looked at some of the effects of a low fat diet on some of the participants in the Women's Health Initiative, which is also mentioned in the article).
Here's the scenario: researchers will find an obscure tribe in the Galapagos who consume a lot roly-poly fish heads in their diet and live to be 110. So, other scientists get mashed up Extract o' Fish Heads in a pill and feed it to a group of smokers, hoping it will somehow prevent lung cancer. (We exaggerate, of course, but it's not that far off.) Then, six years later, after an awful lot of money has been spent, said researchers will have to call off the study when the fish head pill consumers are found to suddenly have 100X the lung cancer rate of the controls. Everyone, of course, having ignored the fact that roly-poly fish head eaters live hardscrabble lives as fishermen whereas the pill-poppers mostly sit on their couches and click remote controls.
But, you can't get a grant from NIH from telling people, "Eat your vegetables."
New York Times, we've almost forgiven you for Atkins.
Almost.
