02 March 2009
Are Sacks & Bray Taking The Piss?
Addendum to last post. Sorry, I just can't let it go. the USA Today article on it has a sidebar showing a sample 1-day menu for the low-carb plan. It's astonishing that these guys get away with calling this "low-carb" and that no one calls them on it. Your 1-day low-carb prescription includes: bagel, pasta, mashed potato, and a graham cracker! (Not to mention banana and raisin.) You have to work hard to find things with a higher glycemic index than mashed potato. Sacks and Bray are either stupid or dishonest.
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2 comments:
Good comment in that last post. In this one you wrote, "Sacks and Bray are either stupid or dishonest." Maybe, but I suspect there's another reason why the idea that high-fat diets are ineffective for weight control persists; prejudice based on consensus of opinion, a consensus likely generated by behind-the-scenes political activity on the part of oilseed interests and food manufacturers.
As for the public, very few of us laymen are interested enough in nutritional controversies to sort things out. So we rely on scientists to identify nutritional hazards and reporters to inform us of them.
Likewise, science reporters rarely take (or have) time to dig for details, expose fallacy, or resolve controversy in the manner of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes.
If Sacks and Bray are stupid or dishonest, then the same can probably be said of most of the remainder of academia.
I think they are being dishonest, at least about practicing science. I've known academic scientist (quite a few chemists), and they just don't seem to operate this way -- i.e. with this degree of spin and agenda, with this mistreatment of lab results. So I'm not willing to indict all of academia.
I am willing to indict the reporting, though. How to fix that problem, though, I'm not sure.
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