Comment by ianamartin
9 years ago
Of course this happened. Duh. It's still happening today. I'm not saying where because I don't know where. But if you do the simple math about how many people are working as scientists, it's not hard to figure out that there are companies who could benefit from positive scientific findings--no matter how wrong--and realize that some of what we're reading in original research was paid for and not really true.
I wish people would keep that in mind when they get all worshippy about science being self-correcting and a great system.
It's not a particularly great system if you are looking, for example, for certainty. If you want absolute certainty, a good dose of syllogist reasoning will serve you better than any inductive method.
The problem is that syllogistic methods break down very quickly in real world applications because you have to find ways of classifying all the objects that may or may not fall into your category of "all", "some", or "none".
The scientific method is not a bad method, but it's not great. And it's weak in ways like this. It is not even close to the best method. But it's the only one we've found that's generally applicable to the human endeavor.
That's all it is. Better at being more general. I wish we'd get over ourselves and be honest about that.
It doesn't help when most of the information you hear regarding nutrition has been to underwrite the profits of multi-billion dollar corporations that are only out for one thing: Your money... and they don't care what means they have to use to get it. For instance buying exclusive access to resources that you had free access to for pennies on the dollar so that you don't have access to it any more and then selling it to you for gross profits... and I don't mean that in a taxation sense of the word gross. I mean that it's quite literally disgusting.
I'm looking at you Nestle, but realistically, you're just one example of the systemic corruption and propaganda that is pervasive across the entire nutrition market.
The less political the subject, the better the science about it. That's why I love maths. Nobody bribes a set of mathematicians to incorrectly claim the Collatz Conjecture has been proven.