MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
Inside Every Fat Person (Health)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... , 9, 10, 11  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Chad


In: Ramsbottom
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ish wrote:
Any solution that invokes "multiple factors" or unspecific causes is evidence only of lazy thinking.

Sorry but I have to disagree... this is a cascade effect.

The root cause [of the current Obesity Pandemic] was Mankind's decision (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to wage all-out war against bacteria. It started with pasteurisation of milk products and chlorination of drinking water, followed by the introduction of antibiotics (and various campaigns to improve hygiene in general).

Before the sanitization program we had a stable and balanced intestinal biome that had evolved with us throughout our entire existence and (in general) lead to a stable and balanced metabolism. Now everything has changed... the gut war has been lost... not because Mankind deployed one single Weapon of Mass Destruction but because of a whole host of measures that have changed the nature of our intestinal biomes.
Send private message
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Maybe. But First-Worlders still outlive the elsewhere-living intestinally-balanced. Our war appears to have yielded overall positive results.

And it remains a principle of Applied Epistemology that there is only ever one cause. Wherever phenomenon are attributed to multiple factors it is an invitation to the AEist to dig deeper.
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I agree with Chad, but to keep the peace with Ish, I will explain.

The "one cause" is like a mathematical formula, it is unique, there is only one. But the formula can have multiple factors or variables.

I will further explain by example.

Back in c.1984, in East Yorkshire, there was a very unusual high incidence of leukemia cases. This was in the era when high-voltage power lines were being blamed for all kinds of ills. But these leukemia cases were not dotted along the route of the power lines (single factor), they were in a number of clusters in discrete clusters, close to the power lines but on a south-west - north-east axis (not a single factor). This axis was consistent with the direction of the prevailing wind from the Capper Pass tin smelting works. From the chimney of which, waste gases were emitted, including some radioactive isotopes (another single factor).

The two factors coincided where the axis of the prevailing wind crossed the power lines, exactly where the leukemia clusters were found.

One cause, multiple factors.
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

This example is pertinent for an additional reason.

The people who were suffering from leukemia never got a penny of compensation. Why? Because to do so would have involved a adversarial court case where a single effect could be uniquely blamed on a single cause and a single party. As that was not the situation, nobody was to blame.

AEL's insistence on a single cause pitches us into an adversarial contest.

If there is no single cause, is there no effect?
Send private message
Chad


In: Ramsbottom
View user's profile
Reply with quote

We should be able to cure obesity by a course of powerful antibiotics, followed by a stool transplant from this guy:



Any volunteers?
Send private message
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Boreades wrote:
The two factors coincided where the axis of the prevailing wind crossed the power lines, exactly where the leukemia clusters were found.

One cause, multiple factors.


I don't buy it.

Power lines do not cause cancer. Radiation, in sufficient doses, does. If the cancer was clustered around the power lines, it suggests that the presence of the power lines somehow increased the radiation dosage from these "isotopes" supposed to be in the air.

One might offer several hypotheses as to how that might happen. Perhaps the poles themselves, being sufficiently high, intercepted the air stream. Perhaps electric current in the air magnetized the isotopes, causing them to cling together and fall to the ground. Each hypothesis would require testing.

When we say that there is only ever one cause, we're not saying that factors don't interact--but that the specific interaction must be an effective cause for the phenomenon observed wherever it is observed. In this case, wherever power lines lie downwind of factories of the same type, cancer must result. Indeed, wherever cancer clusters, one should expect to find power lines present and factories upwind.

Otherwise, this interaction is not the true cause.

P.S. If radiation causes cancer then all cancer is caused by radiation. If that does not appear to be the case then we must dig deeper.
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Ishmael wrote:


I don't buy it.

Power lines do not cause cancer. Radiation, in sufficient doses, does. If the cancer was clustered around the power lines, it suggests that the presence of the power lines somehow increased the radiation dosage from these "isotopes" supposed to be in the air.


Nice try.

The radiation dosage was consistent all along the line of dispersal, gradually decreasing with distance from source, as would be expected with variations in the wind direction. The radiation dosage (and people's exposure to it) was no higher under the power lines than either side of them.

Let's not forget that exposure to radiation, in low dosage, can actually improve some people's health. See the Cornish folk living on top of radioactive radon sources. It can boost the immune system.

What was found (by the medical team that did the investigation) was that the people under the power lines had a significantly suppressed immune system. The presence of the power lines didn't increase the radiation dosage, but it did increase the effect of the radiation dosage. Those people were less able to deal with the radiation dosage. The outcome was the leukemia clusters.
Send private message
Ishmael


In: Toronto
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I'm amazed how you have this mystery so completely sown up! Congratulations!

And you thought it all up yourself too.
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I wish I could claim to be that creative, but it wasn't me who solved the mystery.

It was others that did the research, c.25 years ago, but they were not allowed to publish it back then. They were told it was not in the Public Interest.

Different times.
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Breaking news (da-da-da da-da daaa) :
It's now official, God doesn't like fat people.

Mike Rayner, director of the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group, was on the television advocating for the 'fat tax'.

I’m not going to run through my cv but at the moment I work full time for the University of Oxford in the Department of Public Health. I am the director of a research group there. The funding for my salary comes from the British Heart Foundation and the research we carry out is into issues such as food labelling, food advertising to children, food taxes (such as the Danish fat tax which has been in the news recently) etc....we have had some success in this regard. For example some people credit us with inventing traffic-light labelling for foods and we paid a part in writing the current legislation around the tv advertising of junk foods to children and I think our research was one of the reasons why David Cameron changed his mind about fat taxes recently.


So far nothing much to see, just the usual kind of paid-for research into setting health policies and tell us how to live our lives. And introducing new stealth taxes. But wait! Mr Raynor is also a Church of England priest who is guided by voices.

In all of this I see a sacred dimension. You may not believe that I have heard God aright but I think God is calling me to work towards the introduction of soft-drink taxes in this country and I am looking forward to the day when General Synod debates the ethical issues surrounding this type of tax rather than some of the other issues that august body seems obsessed by.


Cue voice-over : This is no ordinary tax, this is a holy tax.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I remember a Chief Constable of Manchester claimed much the same thing. When asked to state one thing the Omniscient and All-Knowing had told him that wasn't part and parcel of the routine beliefs of an old school Manchester copper, he explained that the O & A-K always stuck to the basics.
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Can I have some more salt on my fat please?

A large worldwide study has found that, contrary to popular thought, low-salt diets may not be beneficial and may actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and death compared to average salt consumption. The study suggests that the only people who need to worry about reducing sodium in their diet are those with hypertension (high blood pressure) and have high salt consumption.

Involving more than 130,000 people from 49 countries.

The researchers showed that regardless of whether people have high blood pressure, low-sodium intake is associated with more heart attacks, strokes, and deaths compared to average intake.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160521071410.htm


Another health myth bites the dust. But where did it come from?
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Asymmetrical Science. Or why you really really should throw-out all that low fat rubbish you've been buying.

As an introductory reminder on how Government policy and medical advice was all based on a suspect house of cards.

Unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans (and Brits), however, the theory that replacing saturated fats with carbohydrates would lower the risk of heart attacks was unproven and disputed. Moreover, the government’s dietary advice led Americans to indulge in the widespread consumption of trans unsaturated fats, which are themselves dangerous. Further, this advice coincided with — and probably contributed to — the subsequent epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes.


i.e. trying to fix one kind of health problem just created another.

Although by 1955, within two years of originally proposing it, Keys had abandoned the dietary cholesterol hypothesis, for another 60 years the federal government continued to warn against consuming cholesterol-rich foods. It was only in 2015 that its Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee classified high-cholesterol foods such as eggs, shrimp, and lobster as safe to eat: “cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.”


Not forgetting that in extreme a low-cholesterol diet also causes neurological problems, as most of the neural pathway insulation, and our brains, is made of cholesterol.

This 60-year delay shows how asymmetrical the official science of nutrition can be: a federal agency can label a foodstuff dangerous based on a suggestion, yet demand the most rigorous proof before reversing its advice. The Harvard professor of epidemiology and nutrition Walter Willett, commenting on the asymmetry in a related area of government nutrition advice, described it as “Scandalous. They say ‘You really need a high level of proof to change the recommendations,’ which is ironic, because they never had a high level of proof to set them.”


This is illustrating the folly of policy-makers rushing into things using the "precautionary principle" as their excuse.

And the problem of the most highly-educated people knowing the least about their own subject.

Meanwhile, the 60 years of official misinformation has taken its toll: a 2015 survey by Credit Suisse Foundation (a social research charity) found 54 percent of doctors falsely believed eating cholesterol-rich food raises blood levels of cholesterol and damages the heart. In the words of the survey, “This is a clear example of the level of misinformation that exists among doctors.”


https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/why-does-federal-government-issue-damaging-dietary-guidelines-lessons
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

This is an illustration of the old AE saw "Anything balanced is sure to fall". In this case it's the 'balanced diet'. The point of balance is only one of an infinite number of solutions and is therefore unlikely to be the correct one. But because it is unique it appeals to the human mind and anything that appeals to the human mind is sure to be proposed by people trying to appeal to the human mind.
Send private message
Hatty
Site Admin

In: Berkshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Just bought some mince which is labelled "typically 10% fat". Is it me or has food labelling got harder to make sense of?
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... , 9, 10, 11  Next

Jump to:  
Page 10 of 11

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group