To put the upcoming seven-part PBS series "Evolution" in perspective, think fat. Dietary fat.
For decades folks in white coats have confidently assured the public that shunning fatty foods – bacon and eggs, butter, steak – would make for longer, healthier lives. Well, guess what? In "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat," published in the March 30 issue of the leading journal Science, science writer Gary Taubes recounts a situation eerily suggestive of Woody Allen's movie Sleeper. In one scene of the 1970's film, a doctor of the future is incredulous when told that 20th-century medicine considered fatty foods and other dietary taboos to be unhealthy. "Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true," he muses.
Not exactly the opposite, but certainly different. Taubes reports that several very large studies designed to nail down the link between leaner cuisine and longer life have given ambiguous results. Worse, the link never was strong in the first place. Rather, through the combined influence of some zealous scientists and crusading bureaucrats, as well as the ascendancy of a less-is-more philosophy, in the 1970s, cholesterol – a substance found naturally in every cell in your body – was labeled "bad for you." The message, sclerosed into dogma, was taught to school children and consumers throughout the land.
Whatever future work on nutrition may find, here are two questions to keep in mind while watching "Evolution":
If it's so difficult to pinpoint the causes of a single, very specific biological process – heart disease in modern humans – where you can study living specimens who walk into your laboratory, then why shouldn't we expect to have considerably more trouble identifying the causes of the general development of life in the distant past?
If, in the teeth of uncertain or contradictory data, social forces in science and society manufactured a consensus about what constitutes a good diet, why shouldn't we expect much more pressure to impose an artificial consensus about who we are and where we come from?
Friday, September 28, 2001
World Net Daily
Documento HTML