Another Great Quote

In reality, those who repudiate a theory that they had once proposed, or a theory that they had accepted enthusiastically and with which they had identified themselves, are very rare.   The great majority of them shut their ears so as not to hear the crying facts, and shut their eyes so as not to see the glaring facts, in order to remain faithful to their theories in spite of all and everything. 

MAURICE ARTHUS,

Philosophy of Scientific Investigation, 1921

Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 1514-1518). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Quotations: Lustig on Fructose and Glucose in Nature

Glucose

Despite its absolute necessity for life (see chapter 10), dietary glucose isn’t perfect. When it exists in nature without fructose, it’s called “starch,” and it truly does supply “empty calories,” energy for either storage or burning.

Fructose

Fructose is never found alone in nature. Rather, it is always partnered with its more benign sister molecule, glucose.

Robert Lustig,   Fat Chance

p.154, 156

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Quotations: Taubes on Pathological Science

INTERVIEWER Marc Hellerstein thought that the obesity epidemic was caused by people being sedentary?

TAUBES He believed that the key is whether you’re sedentary compared to how you used to be. When I told him about the Pima and the Sioux Indians and this 1981 study of obesity in oil field workers, he had an excuse for everything. So the Pima and the Sioux Indians, they lived on reservations, so they could be obese because they were relatively sedentary, at least more sedentary than they used to be. And the oil field workers, well, they're Mexican-American, so they have some kind of "thrifty" gene going. You know this is what pathological science is: a field in which you can find a reason to explain away all negative evidence. In pathological science, it’s no longer possible to refute the hypothesis. Remember, science is about trying to test your hypothesis and refute it, but in a field like this, if you test it and come up with a counter-example, the counter-example is just explained away with whatever comes to mind. Negative evidence never means anything. So you have an obese person who's sedentary, that's proof of my hypothesis. If you have an obese person who's very active — at least, compared to most people today — the Sioux Indians, for instance, who were so poor they had to walk down to the river to get their drinking water; who had no televisions, no cars; they had to walk outside to evacuate their bowels — those people are obese because they used to be more active than they are now.

~ Gary Taubes, January 2008

Interview with Seth Roberts 

Leaving aside Gary's example here, and focusing on his discussion of science, I contend that low carb "science" has long since passed into the realm of the pathological.

Quotations: Jimmy Moore on Exercise

In a review of a diet book,

One final thought: What about exercise? Strikingly silent on the subject, don’t you think? Shamblin openly and proudly shuns exercise in the Weigh Down Diet approach and Hawks makes no mention of the role of exercise in discussing “intuitive eating.” If you’re going to be serious about losing weight and keep it off, then you have to talk about exercise. It has been an instrumental part of my success on the low-carb lifestyle. That’s why I devote an entire chapter to it in my book.

~Jimmy Moore, November 2005 

Quotations: Taubes on "The Establishment"

The way I see it is that the establishment has an immune system to protect itself from challenges. Every science needs that kind of immune system to protect itself from quacks and easy-to-swallow but erroneous ideas that might infect the good science in the field. My question is whether I can infect enough people, enough serious scientists, that I can pose a threat to this immune system, that I could compromise the immune system of the establishment and make them take this idea seriously. Because some times these immune systems work against challenges that are legitimate. I honestly don't know if I can. It's going to be an interesting year. I hope I don't become one of those bitter old men who, when I fail to do so, who can't let it go.

~ Gary Taubes, January 2008

Interview with Seth Roberts

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