Comment by Evgeny
10 years ago
I tried to read them and get his point, but his style is borderline unreadable. No scientific arguments,
The first link has 28 references to scientific texts and studies, the second has 57.
Speak what you want about his style, but his works are always well-researched and well-referenced.
Adding random citations to straw man arguments proves nothing. It only make it look "sciency". Is his "work" cited anywhere in relevant science journals?
So far I only find a lot echo-chamber forums and questionable publishers (Kopp-Verlag, esoteric/far right stuff)
Adding random citations to straw man arguments proves nothing.
Did we even read the same articles?
Here are some examples I picked up in five minutes that look like completely reasonable referencing to me.
Anyone with an Internet connection can easily verify as much for themselves by visiting the Food and Agriculture (FAO) website, and checking the per capita intake of sweeteners in Japan for that year. Do that, and you’ll see the Japanese were averaging 52 calories per day from fruits, and a far more significant 174 calories daily from sugar. “Sweeteners, Other” and “Honey” supplied another 86 cals/day[7]
So just from sugar alone, the Japanese were obtaining 22 grams, or 4.4 teaspoons, of fructose per day. The Japanese do indeed eat fructose-containing sugar, and have been doing so for hundreds of years[8].
The same FAO data we just checked out shows that in 2009, the average per capita energy intake in Japan was 2,674 calories/day. The corresponding figure for the USA was 3,652 calories/day[7]
Unlike the US rise in obesity, which stems from both declining activity and a marked increase in per capita caloric intake[11, 7], Australia’s rise seems to have been caused almost entirely from decreasing physical activity.
The indignant paediatrician then completely refuted himself a moment later when he admitted that Americans were indeed eating more than they were in the 1980s[13]. And at 7:30 in his “Bitter Truth” video, Lustig acknowledges to his audience: “We are all eating more now than we did 20 years ago.”[4]
Taubes cites a 2004 CDC article reporting that since 1971, total fat intake increased among women by a mere 6.5 grams but decreased among men by 5.3 grams[14]. This gives the impression overall fat intake has remained relatively unchanged.
You are obviously too biased to be reliable on this subject.
If you really find Robert Lustig scaremongering a scientific argument, then do you find the relative increase of meat consumption relevant and scary enough (Is Meat Killing Us? jaoa)?
It is absolutely not necessary to be a scaremongering pseudoscientist to notice that epidemiological result on 1.5 million people implying that meat raises all-mortality risk isn't relevant, despite being published in a relevant science journal. When the data is flawed no statistics wand waving will be able to eliminate the effects of bad lifestyle that most meat eaters have.
I'm a vegan, and I'm probably the best man to enjoy using the result of that study as a perfect health argument, but I'm not silly enough to believe that the result is relevant.