Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

You mean, that cheeseburger WON’T be the death of us all?

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Nope:

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn’t choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn’t suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study’s star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders’ diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws weren’t revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by his erroneous data had become international dogma. More.

Okay, this is not an ID issue as such. If saturated fat or smoking or sarin gas is bad for us then it is bad for us because that is the design of life.

But what if someone has misread the design?

Unfortunately, what too often happens is that we are told to believe as science whatever is fashionably represented that way, and such benchmarks are easy to achieve. A post here, a politician there, a conference in a cool venue, a dramatic public relations campaign, and … none of those trappings make it science.

Comments
death by cheeseburger. i could be so lucky.Mung
May 8, 2014
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Certainly, a cheeseburger now and then isn’t going to kill anyone unless the person eating it is allergic to some ingredient. However, if a person is going to live on them then to me there is going to be trouble ahead. A good documentary to watch on this sort of thing is “Super Size Me” on Hulu where Morgan Spurlock attempted to do just that under medical supervision and ended up quitting early because of the health risks that were mounting.fossil
May 4, 2014
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It is a origin issue. its about conclusions based on incompetent research only later found out. Evolutionism etc is likewise moved in small circles and only now is being destroyed. The cheeseburger error is over and now I'll fries (evolution) to go!1Robert Byers
May 4, 2014
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