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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

Don't confuse unsupported with no scientific basis. The scientific method allows for making hypothesis that are later demonstrated to be false. It can absolutely be the case that the old recommendations were the best we knew at the time from science, and be unsupported today.

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>It can absolutely be the case that the old recommendations were the best we knew at the time from science, and be unsupported today.

It can also absolutely be the case that old recommendations were a mix of old wives tales (with no scientific basic whatsoever), bad papers (replicated and taken as gospel without reproducibility and further study) and studies sponsored by the food industry to promote this or that foodstuff...

No, the saturated fat argument was pure bullshit from day 1. Ansel Keys cherry picked his data and did not do his multivariate analysis correctly. He then went on to bully and threaten anyone who disagreed with him for the rest of his life.

we tend to believe that scientists belong to a different breed of humans who do not hold grudges, aren't greedy, biased etc. The reality is completely different, unfortunately.

Dietary science performs so ridiculously poorly compared to every other branch of science, that I can't simply chalk it up to the inherent nature of scientific progress. There are a lot of variables and complex systems, yes, but you get whiplash from the way so many of these hypotheses turn out to be absolute bullshit every few years. Really the lesson should be that no one should place much confidence at all in any of these ideas until they've actually been supported by many sources for a very, very long time. Branding these things as "current scientific knowledge" is exactly the kind of thing that gets people doubting science, and it's an insult to the rest of science.

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