Personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias

As I finish off my delicious meal featuring pollock, peas, carrots, wheat berries, red and yellow peppers, tomatoes, mango, avocado, orzo pasta, and rosemary glazed salmon, Mona Charen writes:

Throughout my adult life, I have conscientiously followed the guidelines dispensed by the health arbiters of our age. Trusting utterly in the scientific research of the American Heart Association, the CDC, and the USDA, I accepted the nearly universal wisdom of the medical and nutritional experts.

Boy, did I accept. I practically banned red meat from my diet for decades. Butter? Only on special occasions. Cream? Do they still make it? Lean chicken, turkey, and fish combined with complex carbohydrates and of course, lots of fruits and vegetables, were the ticket, I was certain, to the best odds of avoiding heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. When the Atkins diet craze swept the country I shook my head sadly, half expecting my friends who indulged in it to keel over from heart attacks.

Now, the Annals of Internal Medicine declares that beef, butter, and cream do not cause heart disease. Women whose total cholesterol levels are high live longer than those with lower levels.

How could the experts have been so wrong for so long?

Nina Teicholz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, notes that “there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias.”

The moral of this story is not to ignore science, but to stay skeptical. The scientific method remains the best way yet devised to ascertain truth. But the scientific establishment is hardly immune to politics, fads, bias, and self-interest. Bad science is endemic. As The Economist noted in October, “half of all published research cannot be replicated . . . and that may be optimistic.”

Our experience with nutrition science over the past half-century should arm us with doubt about climate science too. The point is not to ignore scientific data but to treat all studies, models, and predictions with a degree of skepticism. Don’t accept the argument from authority: That the entire medical establishment endorsed the war on saturated fat did not make it true.

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