statistics

While I was gone, apparently The China Study received some belated smackdown. I've personally never paid much attention to that book. I took several advanced statistics classes for my degree and an epidemiology class. If I wanted to base my diet on that flawed methodology, I might be more interested. But you can hash and rehash data and it won't change the fact that epidemiology (like my own science, economics) has been responsible for crap conclusions that have not bared out in the real world. I don't think economics or epidemiology are bad and in fact I'm quite interested in them, but they are rough tools that I'm not going to use them to manage my life.

As Kurt Harris said:

This is all just epidemiology, and epidemiology is bogus. Now, I don't mean it has absolutely no value. It is good for hypothesis generation. It is almost worthless for finding the truth. It is especially worthless the way it is used by hacks like Campbell who are simply trying to sell people a book that tells them what they want to hear.

You can run all kind of analytics on that China data and maybe find some interesting hypotheses to test, but then you have to worry about the data itself. I'm not sure rural Chinese people from the 80s have much to tell us about what to eat in America now. As Denise pointed out, there are pathogens present in rural China that aren't exactly common in Brooklyn, NY.

While Denise's post is certainly very interesting, I'm alarmed that she is now working with a vegan epidemiologist, but who also is a fruit-based raw vegan. While there are several academics who have formulated scientific vegan nutrition, no conventional science supports the fruit-base raw vegan diet- it's pure quackery and lately its proponents have unfortunately been trolling paleo blogs.

Evolutionary fitness is not about epidemiology- it's applied evolutionary theory. I'll be reviewing some books in the next month about that science, but needless to say, I think it's a far better groundwork for living as a human.