From Aeon: “Researchers in harder sciences have a name for such situations: ‘pathological science’, defined by the Nobel Laureate chemist Irving Langmuir in 1953 as ‘the science of things that aren’t so’. Where experimental investigation is prohibitively expensive or impossible to do, mistaken assumptions, misconceived paradigms and pathological science can survive indefinitely. Whether this is the case with the current epidemics is an all-too-regrettable possibility: perhaps we’ve simply misconceived the reality of the link between diet, lifestyle and the related disorders of obesity and diabetes? As the Oxford scholar Robert Burton suggested in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in cases in which the cures are ‘imperfect, lame, and to no purpose’ it’s quite possible that the causes are misunderstood.
“The history of obesity and nutrition research suggests that this is indeed what has happened. In the decades leading up to the Second World War, German and Austrian clinical investigators had concluded that common obesity was clearly caused by a hormonal disturbance; starting in the 1960s, other research would link that disturbance to the sugar in our diets. But the German and Austrian thinking evaporated with the war, and the possibility that sugar was to blame never took hold, dismissed by a nutrition community who, by the 1970s, became fixated on dietary fat as the trigger of our chronic diseases. Now, with an explosion of the epidemic and compelling new research, it’s time to reconsider both our causal thinking on obesity and diabetes, and the possibility that sugar is playing the critical role.”
Unfortunately science was sloppy and we were all hoodwinked by the powerful sugar lobby and the sugar based “foods” such as the sugary soft drinks. For the complete article please click here.