Here’s how a Ph.D. student at UC San Francisco doing research on neural stem cells answered that question:
If dietary fat affected the brain in a significant way, we would know about it. It would have been discovered. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t affect it in a trivial way. Not just an acute action — like if you drink a small amount of alcohol or the effect of a sugar high. I mean the long-term functioning.
Why?
Because a lot of people would have tested it. Fat gets a lot of money. It’s a crowded area of research. People try to exploit it. It’s an area with a lot of public interest. It’s very popular to study anything related to fat. Also anything related to the brain. People are worried that they will lose their mind as they age. If there was something significant found it would have been a big story all over the New York Times.
She was very sure of this, it seemed to me.
Where do these quotes come from?
A conversation. “Can I quote you?” I asked. She said yes.
She believes in a rational world and an efficient Jeffersonian market in ideas. I once did too. If I still did I’d probably be a PhD student like her instead of being in business.
Whether she is right or wrong – I dunno.
But her thinking seems to fall victim to a variant of Ad Populum fallacy: if a lot of people don’t (or do) think X exists, then X doesn’t (does) exist.
Not to go off topic, but I should also add this is the argument made by many for Global Warming — everyone/many says it exists, (i.e. there is ‘consensus’) therefore it exists. Whether or not it exists, is independent of how many people think it is true.
She is wrong. For a reason that is easy for long-term academics to see but would be hard for a graduate student to see: People in nutrition know almost nothing about experimental psychology and never do such measurements. (When the nutritional scientist R. K. Chandra published a paper containing psychological measurements, he didn’t realize how absurd they would appear to actual experimental psychologists — see the Chandra page of my website for details.) Likewise, professors of experimental psychology know almost nothing about nutrition and never do nutritional manipulations. So it is actually very easy for such effects to go undiscovered.
What if, when asked the question, she became too fixated on what she “knows” to actually perceive what is there, or what might possibly be evident?
Ask someone (especially a child, or someone who isn’t an artist) to draw a self-portrait, and he will usually draw images from his brain, rather from his reflection in a mirror.
If that correlation makes sense or is relevant to anyone but me…(?)
An interesting something else concerning perception and value goes on at this link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
Her comments remind me of the economist who won’t pick up the $20 bill lying on the ground since it must be counterfit: if it were real, it would have been picked up already.
JR Said: April 16th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
“Her comments remind me of the economist who won’t pick up the $20 bill lying on the ground since it must be counterfit: if it were real, it would have been picked up already.”
…or maybe the starving philosophy student grappling with the question of the Toast in the Machine:
https://www.nearingzero.net/screen_res/nz136.jpg