Be careful. Eating too little salt is more dangerous than too much, and the official US recommendation is too low. See, for example, http://drmalcolmkendrick.org/?...

"Can you give a TLDR of the main points of those books?"

Sorry about the delay in replying - hope you see this. Teicholz' book is new, and explains the facts about the "lipid hypothesis" - that fat makes you fat, and also causes heart attacks, strokes, and many other diseases. Also that until the 1950s everyone - including nutrition experts, doctors, and lay people - knew that starch makes you fat, so to lose weight you should avoid all baked foods including bread, pasta, and to a lesser extent potatoes. In the 1960-1980 period some very arrogant, manipulative, and ambitious scientists established the lipid hypothesis as holy dogma, culminating the US government's buy-in. By the 1990s no experiments could be done on high-fat diets, because "everyone knew" they were dangerous and it would therefore be unethical to ask anyone to eat them! It turns out that there has NEVER been ANY evidence for the lipid hypothesis, and lots against it.

Taubes' books, which appeared a little earlier, are similar but focus more on the issue of losing weight. (However, as obesity probably does predispose to heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes, the two are linked).

Have a look at the reader reviews on Amazon for more details.

"I skimmed your nusi site......it shows rising obesity and diabetes rates, and then talks about the government's dietary guidelines, as if to imply that the dietary guidelines were causing the obesity and diabetes".

That's partly because the curve of rising obesity starts at almost exactly the time the government guidelines were issued. (There are other, more technical reasons).

Try reading blogs such as The Diet Doctor, Zoe Harcombe, Wheat Belly or Tom Naughton's Fat Head. Dr Malcolm Kendrick (author of "The Great Cholesterol Con") also has a good blog which tends to be more critical than prescriptive.

I can strongly recommend the Jaminets' book "Perfect Health Diet". It's a little on the perfectionist side, but you can't go wrong following its general advice.

The NuSI web site deliberately contains little substantive information. The institute's purpose is to do objective research to determine the truth, and its directors are careful to avoid muddying the waters by publicizing their own views.

If you sincerely want to understand this quite complex topic, you should read the books I recommended. You will find detailed explanations and answers to the questions you ask in your comment. The belief that food "contains calories" is an unjustified abstraction that does not reflect reality. Calories measure the heat given off when foodstuffs (and other materials) are burned. The energy obtained by a human body through digesting foodstuffs is by no means guaranteed to be the same as the heat released by burning them. Otherwise you could gain weight on a diet of coal or petroleum.

If you are young, or genetically slim, you are not qualified to criticize those who become fat. As someone aptly put it, that is like someone who was born on the finish line of a marathon race poking fun at those who are actually running the course.

If you chose "Diet/Exercise", be sure to read Nina Teicholz's book "The Big Fat Surprise" and possibly one of Gary Taubes' books. Oh, and check out http://nusi.org/

Otherwise you'll waste a huge amount of time and effort, and you may make yourself fatter and sicker. (Who knew government advice isn't always right?)

Why was my comment moderated "Troll" when I merely pointed out that the parent had unintentionally inserted an extra negative in his statement? The drift of his comment was surely that ECC RAM is better. Yet he wrote "it's foolish not to use non-ECC RAM".

It's sad that moderators don't take the trouble to read what is in front of them. Or, worse still, that at least one moderator routinely mods my comments "Troll" without reading them.

I assume you meant "it's foolish to use non-ECC RAM".

Reminds me of the first time I ever heard this particular discussion: at DEC in about 1983. A colleague who had gone to do quality engineering on VAX/VMS systems asked for statistics on crashes caused by memory errors. All VAX computers had built-in ECC (of course), but the advanced thinkers in engineering were wondering if it would be more cost-effective to do without. Money would be saved, both by the manufacturer and the customer, and systems would run significantly faster (maybe). Surely that would be worth the fairly infrequent crash, which could be recovered from with the help of backups, logs, etc.?

We all thought the idea was daft - purely on general principle. The reduction in speed due to ECC could be exactly specified, as could the extra cost. But random crashes couldn't - and what if human error caused the backups, logs, etc. to be missing or corrupt? Worse still, what if errors were introduced that didn't cause a crash or any noticeable problem? All sorts of critical systems could go on stacking up subtly wrong data more or less indefinitely.

To this day I always ask for ECC whenever I buy a new PC - but the only machines I have ever found that had it were Dell workstations.

'I'm not sure whether I more bothered by "benchmark queens" or people who flame'.

FTFY. Does anyone ever flame about anything except subjective opinions?

I don't understand your comment about a dictionary. I referred to the standard definition of power - see (e.g.) http://science.howstuffworks.c... if your recollection is rusty.

As I was posting on Slashdot, I didn't think it was necessary to explain why the extract I quoted is confusing (and confused).

"...can boost 300 to 400 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts".

Calling millivolts "power" is sloppy at best, but the real strangeness is the idea of boosting "300 to 400 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts". Given that you can increase the voltage by a factor of 10 or so, one would normally expect that to be accompanied by a corresponding drop in current to keep the power constant. After all, you can't just pluck increased power out of nowhere by changing voltage.

And, of course, you can have a potential difference of millions of volts with no power flowing at all.

"...can boost 300 to 400 millivolts power to 3 to 5 volts".

Power? Volts? Boost? Huh???

Have you tried lying to a cop recently? I wouldn't advise it.

"I doubt the cops care anything about civil law".

There is a mountain of evidence to show that the entire US federal government doesn't care about any law at all - international law, treaties, federal law, state law, or even the Constitution.

The key don't-get-into-jail card is always the same: the decision to prosecute is entrusted to the executive branch. If someone in the right position decides something won't be taken to court, it isn't. From a cop shooting an apparently defenceless and innocent civilian to a president launching unprovoked aggressive wars, authorizing torture, and refusing to prosecute the last president for the same things.

"A nation of laws, not men" - nice idea, but not any more.

That doesn't seem to be quite in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. "Land of the smart enough to avoid being framed by the justice system" - doesn't have the same ring, does it? Especially since (ironically enough) simply being smart doesn't cut it - you need street smarts, expert knowledge, and best of all contacts.

That's it" "Land of the well-connected".