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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's how science works.

We start from a position of ignorance, and we incrementally gain new pieces of knowledge. Years ago, we learned about the health risks of saturated fats and moved away from them. More recently, we learned about the risks of trans fats and are now moving away from them. The people at the Center for whatever are updating their position based on the latest findings rather than sticking to outdated facts that have been disproven. I wish more policy-makers would do that.

Our knowledge and understanding of the totality of nutrition and health is still pretty small, in part because there are lots of interacting components and because many aspects of nutrition are correlated with ethnicity and lifestyle. Nonetheless, it has been demonstrated that trans fats are bad for your health, independent of other factors. We shouldn't keep consuming them just because science didn't manage to uncover this fact until recently.

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> Yeah, that's how science works.

The problem is that various sciences have very different requirements for what constitutes a valid 'discovery'. e.g. In particle physics if you don't have a 5 sigma result you haven't really found something. You often see incredibly weak data accepted into journals in the soft sciences, see the recent 'chocolate makes you thin' faux study as an example.

I think there is a large problem in soft sciences in that they are very quick to declare knowledge with very limited data supporting it. The various dietary sciences are probably the worst offenders at the moment. As you've said we know very little about nutrition and health, so why are we so quick to make definitive statements about it? That sounds like the opposite of science to me.

I'm sure this will be controversial but I'd rather not classify such 'soft sciences' as science at all. I've seen several complete reversals in soft sciences in my life and think that this actually contributes to the general public's mis-understanding and mis-trust of science as a whole. e.g. "Those scientists can't even figure out what I'm supposed to eat so why would I believe this quantum physics non-sense!"

I agree with the dislike for these types of reversals, and I also agree that fields prone to these types of 'discoveries' might be better classified as something else. Although I think the reality is that (at least with dietary 'science') the reason we get these jumps to conclusions is that these fields affect peoples lives a lot more directly. This results in people wanting information on these fields sooner, the public can wait 20 years while we look for all the particles in the standard model, but they wanna know now if they're eating stuff that will kill them. Not to mention it's probably quite difficult to avoid with just about any public journal or magazine willing to profit off proudly trumpeting results that could drastically help their audience.

I think the problem is more to with science journalism than the scientists themselves. I've seen so many headlines that read something like "Is X affecting Y?!" but then the story is something like "scientists published an article saying that there may be a link between X and Y."

But they were 180-degrees wrong on trans fats. They were touted as a healthy replacement for saturated fat.

A fundamental tennent of all heath care/policy is "first, do no harm." If you change or do nothing, people are no worse off than they were to begin with. If you want to change something, you better be damn sure you aren't making matters worse.

Chicken and egg. Hard to tell if widespread use of X is not harmful in anyway until widespread use of X has been studied.

Should we be looking forward to the arsenic diet, then?

> is not harmful in anyway

Better off just eating as naturally as possible, rather than listening to some group that's pushing something that's not.

There are so many competing definitions of "eating naturally" that your sentence is more or less completely meaningless

Partially hydrogenated oils do not exist in nature. If anyone finds that assertion confounding it'd be interesting to hear why.

There's some subjectivity as far as "processing" goes. Olive oil is processed mechanically, canola oil is processed chemically, so that's a pretty wide gap that people might fight over. But partial hydrogenation? Seriously?

    Partially hydrogenated oils do not exist in nature

"Partially hydrogenated" describes what we did to the oil, so of course you won't get that without human involvement. Partially saturated oils, however, even ones with trans bonds, do exist in nature. For example, raw canola oil is around 0.5% trans fat.

That aside, I'm still not sure your classification for "processed" or "natural" makes sense. The key step in partial hydrogenation is mixing hydrogen with the oil, [1] while a step in canola refining is mixing hexane with the oil. [2] How does your naturalness heuristic tell us one is ok and one not?

[1] Which makes it surprising that this would create trans double bonds, since the effect is to reduce the number of double bonds. The problem is that with all that hydrogen available some bonds flip from cis to trans.

[2] As you alluded to by saying "processed chemically".

I did not offer a classification, which sounds like a very boring thing to do. Indeed, I meant to cast doubt on hard and fast classifications with the olive oil versus canola oil example!

I just don't think any classification could categorize partially hydrogenated oils as "natural" without rendering the term entirely meaningless. Because of what we do to make them, because of their effect on the body, or because of how they differ chemically from more "natural" stuff: take your pick. The point being, eating "naturally" might be a slippery concept but a lot of what we're talking about here can be safely excluded by anyone shooting for that "natural" goal.

Food threads on HN are dumb enough that I'm going to leave it at that. The parent comment has already been downvoted multiple times for some reason...

Natural simply means 'existing in nature', which humans do. Human activity is, by extension, also natural. Ergo, partial hydrogenation is natural.

But implying that something that is natural (ie, not borne of human activity, per your usage) is by definition good is fallacy. Remember that Socrates (among other enemies of the Athenian state) died after drinking an infusion of hemlock.

> Natural simply means 'existing in nature'

It took me 15 seconds to find a dictionary entry with seven different definitions for the word. But thank you for your valuable contribution.

> But implying that something that is natural (ie, not borne of human activity, per your usage) is by definition good is fallacy.

But as a heuristic it's probably not terrible. The paleo diet people have some strange ideas but the diet itself is really not bad. Veganism as a heart healthy diet is playing out well for a lot of people. And so on.

It's a relative term. First step is to eat food that's had as little processing as you can afford (which is the opposite of trans fats).

Ideally: if it's meat then non-intensive because that means less chemicals injected into the animals; if fruit and vegetables then try to source from farms that put an emphasis on re-mineralising their soils - they are less likely to rely on chemicals combined with genetically engineered varieties.

Essentially, buy food that makes the food industry as little profit as possible. The sort of food that would never be advertised on TV. The sort of food that costs a lot to produce, doesn't last long and lacks fancy packaging.

lots of asian countries are doing it right then.

>they are less likely to rely on chemicals combined with genetically engineered varieties.

I don't know how you could possibly resolve these issues - all our food is genetically engineered, and all of it contains chemicals.

The problem is acting like we do understand nutrition because a few new studies say something is bad. Especially when you start digging into the funding of said studies.

There is very little evidence to prove saturated fats are bad, but plenty to prove sugar is. Yet you don't see the policy makers telling us to eat less corn.

Also trans-fats (the ones that are bad) do not occur in nature which seems to be of the best predictors of whether something is net-good for you or not.

I don't quite understand the logic of "natural" being "good for you" and "not-natural" being "bad for you". For example, the glasses sitting on my nose are not natural, yet without them I wouldn't be able to see too well. And the sanitation and water supply systems are an improvement to what was there otherwise (i.e., people dumping their chamber pots into the street). And yet, if I stumble across a copperhead snake, I'm going to avoid it even though it is natural. And don't forget that tobacco is natural.

No, this has never been anything but non-scientists using science's name dishonorably. There has been and continues to be a large mismatch between what primary source studies say and what is reaching the public.

> Years ago, we learned about the health risks of saturated fats and moved away from them.

Sadly, we did not as the health risks from saturated fats were incorrect, based on absolutely terrible science. The unprecedented public health initiative that resulted in everyone moving away from saturated fats (and the fat scare in general) did substantial harm to public health.

Until scientific literacy improves, we're going to keep running into this wall.

People and organizations are seen as more reliable if they don't waver in spite of facts. Is it hardware, or software? Can we learn to favor those who update their decisions based on validated facts, or is it hardwired in how our brains perceive confidence and reliability?

It's not about the public's perception of wavering, it's about the scientific outlets wanting to say "Yolk is bad!!" instead of "we now think egg yolk is bad because we found that the foo in the quux frobs the narl in a human's stomach lining". Not to mention the lack of apologies and retractions by those same outlets.

> it's about the scientific outlets wanting to say "Yolk is bad!!"

The outlets that want to say that aren't scientific outlets, they are popular media outlets and the marketing arms of entities selling diet fads and/or substituted products.

This is not just an issue in science - it's present in politics, business, really all of human society

> Yeah, that's how science works.

> Our knowledge and understanding of the totality of nutrition and health is still pretty small...

Making policies based on ignorance without acknowledging that ignorance in the slightest is not science, it's politics. Instead of saying "we don't really know anything about this topic" they lobby the FDA to make policies -

http://www.academia.edu/1429225/The_Perfect_Solution_How_Tra...

I don't look at these studies with the same eyes I did as a young man. I have been lied to just too many times. No, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I am so much more skeptical than I was 15 years ago.

"Years ago, we learned about the health risks of saturated fats and moved away from them."

Yes, we "learned" about a lot of things over the years, and vilified the product to the point of absurdity. 'I can smell my neighbor's cigarette smoke--I will get cancer, or COPD?'. My cholesterol is high--I must take statins?.' 'I think I'm depressed--I must get a prescription of a hetero, or tri-cyclic antidepressant?' 'I'm a vegetarian; I must be healthy? Give me a wheel of that blue cheese, I hear it has penicillin in it, and I can eat it because I don't eat red meat!'

I don't know where the truth lies, and follow most recommendations, and trans fats are probally terrible; I just question these scientific, peer reviewed, doulble blind studies. I don't just call it Science anymore, and they know best. I look at all these studies with an air of skepticism that wasn't in me when I got out of college.

When a doctor, or nutritionist relays some information; I do my homework before accepting the advise as a universal truth.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest sounds more like a group of people using science as a flag of convenience to steer public policy.

As such I wouldn't say they are doing unadultered, capital S, Science. They are, after all, politicians by the sheer circumstance of their own name.

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