I see a lot of comments referencing the âeggs are badâ(TM), âeggs are goodâ(TM), âeggs are neutralâ(TM) carrousel..
Ask yourself this - if science is not giving us clear signals, could science be getting corrupted by competing interests?
Using the clarity of hindsight we can now see that the science demonstrating the harmful effects of tobacco smoke were being published as early as the 1950â(TM)s, however society went on a âsmoking is badâ(TM), âsmoking is goodâ(TM), âsmoking is neutralâ(TM) carousel for several decades afterwards. Hell, my father still argued that smoking was ânot badâ(TM) up until the day he tragically died of bowel cancer, and that was 2010. One of his best friends who was a Heart Surgeon used to say that it was a conspiracy to erode public freedoms. If a Heart Surgeon can be convinced smoking was not bad for your health, what hope did anyone else have? Mind you he also was a smoker..
Why did this happen? Well, for one the people we trusted to provide us with unbiased clear signals relating to health and nutrition were likely smokers themselves, and grew up with role models who were also smokers. Secondly, industry poured a ton of money into protecting their products and ultimately their profit margins, something their investors expect them to do in order to protect their investments, and as a society we expect them to do to protect the overall contribution they make to our economies through the jobs they create in their supply chains. These interests corrupted our ability to have a clear view on whether tobacco was good or not for our heath.
Have we adequately removed these forces from our systems of knowledge or do they still exist today?
Ask yourself this - if money, conflicted interests and cultural bias can distort science, which side of a scientific debate should you weight more heavily when there is confusion and conflicting results? The side that has industry lobby groups, employs thousands of people, has large supply chains, billions invested and furthermore is backed up by a cultural context that makes their products ânormalâ(TM) to the vast majority of us? .. now I am not saying these forces in isolation are necessarily evil - I am just presenting an argument that when we see conflicting messages about nutrition and health, exercise caution before you assume both sides have an equal weighting and thus cancel each other out. Otherwise we might be using that hindsight again in the future and scratching our heads as to why we were so confused.