This article about the Marc Hauser case tells a brief story about a Harvard coverup in the 1960s. “In the late 1960s I was eating lunch in William James Hall with a few fellow assistant professors in the Harvard psychology department when a woman named Patricia Woolf sat down at our table. . . . She asked whether we had heard anything about the fabrication of data by one of our colleagues.”
This sad and fascinating post tells how pediatricians encourage Vitamin D deficiency by warning parents to keep children out of the sun. Then, making things even worse, children with broken bones due to Vitamin D deficiency are assumed by pediatricians to be victims of child abuse. “Dr. Carole Jenny, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Child Abuse, implies such tragic miscarriages of justice simply don’t happen. She then claims, “We have been checking every child with multiple fractures for metabolic bone diseases for several years and have not identified a single child with vitamin D deficiency.” How can that statement be true if every other researcher is reporting infantile and early childhood vitamin D deficiency to be rampant in normal children? Furthermore, how can an infant beaten severely enough to cause multiple fractures not be bruised or in distress? Dr. Jenny cleverly avoids the question.”
4 thoughts on “Assorted Links”
Seth, thanks for linking to the Taubes interview. It contains the pithiest explanation of the obesity epidemic that I’ve ever read:
“The experts decide that Americans get fat by eating fat. Then they find strains of rat that get fat eating fat, then they breed those strains. And now that they have found an animal model that confirms their preconceptions they argue that the preconceptions must be true too – obviously humans get fat on fat because the rats do. Then some journalist like me comes along, and says, “What about all the other animals that get fat on grains and vegetable matter?” And they look at you and say, “Oh, you’re one of those Atkins people aren’t you?”
The experts decide that Americans get fat by eating fat. Then they find strains of rat that get fat eating fat, then they breed those strains. And now that they have found an animal model that confirms their preconceptions they argue that the preconceptions must be true too – obviously humans get fat on fat because the rats do.
Most rats do not get fat eating fat. This was a big reason that Sclafani developed the supermarket diet (consisting of supermarket foods, such as salami and cookies) — so that rats would get fat more quickly (making it more easy to use them to study obesity). You cannot get a rat fat quickly simply by feeding him a high fat diet, Sclafani told me.
Seth, thanks for linking to the Taubes interview. It contains the pithiest explanation of the obesity epidemic that I’ve ever read:
“The experts decide that Americans get fat by eating fat. Then they find strains of rat that get fat eating fat, then they breed those strains. And now that they have found an animal model that confirms their preconceptions they argue that the preconceptions must be true too – obviously humans get fat on fat because the rats do. Then some journalist like me comes along, and says, “What about all the other animals that get fat on grains and vegetable matter?” And they look at you and say, “Oh, you’re one of those Atkins people aren’t you?”
Most rats do not get fat eating fat. This was a big reason that Sclafani developed the supermarket diet (consisting of supermarket foods, such as salami and cookies) — so that rats would get fat more quickly (making it more easy to use them to study obesity). You cannot get a rat fat quickly simply by feeding him a high fat diet, Sclafani told me.
The link to the Vitamin D post seems to be broken.
Fixed the Vitamin D link.