I see only a brief mention of the fact he is appealing in the Ars Technica article. But I'd like to know how I could send him a few bucks.
District court decisions like this are often overturned when they reach the appeals level, with judges who aren't quite so mired in local interests.
It's amazing that on a site like Slashdot, when it comes to anything else, peer reviewed publishing of scientific study is the gold standard. But when it comes to food, nutrition, or exercise, it's all conspiracy, self-published videos/books, and Whole Foods organic new-age mantras.
Observing what another culture eats ("The China 'Study'"), and their corresponding rates of various diseases (which is what the summary seems to loosely claim) without considering or eliminating other variables is all but useless. It's like saying elevators make people because they're empty when the doors close, and then more people come out the next time the doors open. It's certainly a reasonable hypothesis based on available evidence, but closer inspection is warranted before, e.g., installing an elevator because you want more people in your club.
I'm not sure where you got "self-published" and "new-age mantras" from. I think a 30-year long medical study, multiple publications in nutrition, epidemiology and other medical journals and a collaboration between Cornell University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences qualifies as peer reviewed science. The same goes for a Johns Hopkins anthropologist's life work researching the sugar trade and its consequences.
Now I would readily agree that no study is without its flaws. Similarly, no model of scientific inquiry is without its flaws. One of the troubles with almost all medical studies of nutrition is that isolating a variable is quite difficult. Having been a research scientist at the Salk Institute, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the idealized model of science we have from billiard ball physics, in which isolating the variable is paramount, doesn't really work well for studies at this physical scale of research. Human organisms and human nutrition are complex systems; complex stochastic methods are probably the best methods to study something as nebulous as human health at an organismic (or cultural) level.
In the end, however, I'd concede the result is usually of the variety that science has shown that "eating your vegetables" is good for you. And eating too much sugar is bad for you. In other words, common-sensical. Don't know about yours but my mother's advice about eating right was the same, and she was no new-ager.
Not to be glib, but [citation needed]. At least in the US, the food advice handed out by the USDA is generally considered to be accurate to the current information available to scientists. Everything I've personally seen contradicting it has been merely bare assertions without citation or data, or else points to a study done by a clearly biased group or individual. If you've got something substantive, I'd love to see it, as this is a special interest of mine.
Nope, the USDA recommendations are subject to an intense amount of lobbying by the large food companies. Anyone who thinks that government scientists are free to speak their minds hasn't worked in government, and unfortunately their scientific research is largely ignored or reshaped by economic and political forces when it comes time to make policy recommendations (see Reagan, R., under whose administration ketchup was famously considered a vegetable in school lunches).
If you really want to eat healthy, and wanted to eat what the science tells you is best, you might start with the research by Dr T. Colin Campbell and Dr Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. who did large-scale studies of the effects of eating processed crap vs. whole foods. See for example their books The China Study and PlanEat for citations, if you want to understand the evidence and know what to eat.
For the history of this, I recommend the anthropologist Sid Mintz who wrote Sweetness and Power, a history of sugar. In it he traces the shift in the British diet from healthy, farm-based foods to sugar-based foods and shows how that shift in diet was inextricable from the growth of cities and factories during the Industrial Revolution. In other words, he shows how the political economy of sugar has led to our present sugar and carb based diet. Unlike Campbell and Esselstyn, Mintz won't tell you what to eat, but he will tell you why everyone wants to sell you processed crap masquerading as food.
The upshot, however, is simple. Eat no-to-little processed, sugar, dairy and high-carb foods; eat only a little meat and some fish; eat a lot of protein-rich legumes, nuts, vegetables and whole grains. Drink mostly water; avoid sugary soft drinks, fruit cocktails and even too much juice. And cook for yourself; restaurants suck (from a healthy eating perspective).
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
