"There is a categorical lack of clinical evidence to support the use of statin therapy in primary prevention."

Via Stan the Heretic:

There is a categorical lack of clinical evidence to support the use of statin therapy in primary prevention. Not only is there a dearth of evidence for primary cardiovascular protection, there is ample evidence to show that statins actually augment cardiovascular risk in women, patients with Diabetes Mellitus and in the young. Furthermore statins are associated with triple the risk of coronary artery and aortic artery calcification.

"Simple" Thermodynamics and "Common Sense"

David Berreby – The Obesity Era: (via)

… Moral panic about the depravity of the heavy has seeped into many aspects of life, confusing even the erudite. Earlier this month, for example, the American evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller expressed the zeitgeist in this tweet: ‘Dear obese PhD applicants: if you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.’ Businesses are moving to profit on the supposed weaknesses of their customers. Meanwhile, governments no longer presume that their citizens know what they are doing when they take up a menu or a shopping cart. Yesterday’s fringe notions are becoming today’s rules for living — such as New York City’s recent attempt to ban large-size cups for sugary soft drinks, or Denmark’s short-lived tax surcharge on foods that contain more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat, or Samoa Air’s 2013 ticket policy, in which a passenger’s fare is based on his weight because: ‘You are the master of your air ‘fair’, you decide how much (or how little) your ticket will cost.’

… As the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, recently put it, defending his proposed ban on large cups for sugary drinks: ‘If you want to lose weight, don’t eat. This is not medicine, it’s thermodynamics. If you take in more than you use, you store it.’ (Got that? It’s not complicated medicine, it’s simple physics, the most sciencey science of all.)

Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain. Which means, of course, that they think at least some of the official focus on personal conduct is a waste of time and money. …

It is like the question "Why are some subway cars full of people?" and the answer "Because more people entered the subway cars than left it."

Don't trust any "common sense" explanations with regards to nutrition or health. I now lost 12 kilograms weight in the four month since April 2013. Yes, I eat less – but more importantly I eat no dairy, I eat no cereal grains, I radically reduced the consumption of seed oils and PUFAs (poly unsaturated fatty acids) and I now radically reduced the consumption of sucrose ("sugar") and fructose (to the point that I at the moment even don't eat the supposedly "healthy" fruits). I eat saturated fats from coconut fat, I eat meat, I eat potatoes (preferentially fried) and I eat salad. So fuck you very much Mr. Bloomberg, and fuck you very much Mr. evolutionary psychologist – since when do have animals have to have "willpower" to stay non-obese?

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

I say, it is more and more seed oil (supposedly "healthy"), with its high content of PUFAs (as well supposedly "healthy") that is making animals obese (including the human animals).

David Gorski on Nutritional Science

Long read, some problems in science (and Gorski surely sees only a selection of those), and much food for thought (ha!).

This figure caught my eye:

All results for salt, pork, olive and bacon are on one side of Relative Risk = 1, however with some results coming close to it? Come on, WTF! This smells like publication bias! And then there is milk and onion and beef and sugar and carrot. Just look at them! And don't get me started on tea…

Looks like some of the results are more a mirror of prevailing biases, than a result of inquiry into reality.

Psychology and Denialism

Some time ago I notice that the tendency of psychologists to take "medically not explainable" symptoms (or rather symptoms that are with the current medical knowledge not explainable) and explaining these symptoms as psychological (psychosomatic, somatoform, etc.), that this practice by psychologists places the psychological discipline firmly outside the medical discipline.

Furthermore I would venture that the psychological discipline is dominated by confirmation bias, and until the psychological discipline gets an proper foundation in reality – which can only be a evolutionary foundation –  I will consider it a pseudo-science.

So the rhetoric question that arises is: If psychologists try to redefine the reality of the CFS patient population contrary to reality, does that not count as denial of reality? And shouldn't there be an outcry in the medical profession as to such an quackish behavior of psychologists?

(And taking the CFS patient population with measurable peripheral pain and fatigue, with measurable reduced exercise tolerance, and explaining these symptoms as originating in the brain, as in the "biopsychological" approach, should that not count as denialism as well?)

The Hammer Syndrome – Snell on Exercise Beliefs

Prof Snell on exercise beliefs (at 0:45):

I originally came out of exercise and sports science.

So to come up on a population were exercise did not seem to cure everything that was wrong with them, was antithetical to my beliefs at that time.

That seems to be another case of "hammer syndrome": When your favorite tool is an hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I guess there are a lot examples out there, were people wrongly think they have found one hammer to solve all problems. Some examples (some taken straight out of my QDC) where a (more or sometimes less) legitimate diagnoses in one sub-field is used as an "solve it all hammer":

• It's lack of exercise ("Common sense! Duh!")
• It's the psyche (Psychologists and Psychiatrists, but everybody else as well)
• It's the bones (Chiropractors, Osteopaths)
• It's meat (Vegans, "nutritionists", and other puritanic upholders of moral standards)
• It's Candida, Lyme or other pathogens  (Pathogen quacks)
• It's heavy metals, pesticides or other unnamed "toxins" (Environmental quacks)
• It's neuro-transmitters, inflammation, free radicals or the mitochondria (Pseudo-biomed quacks)
• It's the thyroid, adrenals or other endocrine problems (Pseudo-endocrinologists)
• It's some idealistic/metaphysical woo like "energy", qi, "balance" (Alternative medicine legerdemain)

So my advise would be: If someone wants to use an hammer on you, stay away from that person (unless you are actually a nail).

And just to be clear: I think Prof. Snell is a trustworthy as he relinquished his "hammer" – his lecture is very much recommendable.

Psychologists and Black Crayons

Psychologists and Black Crayons – priceless.

No dairy? "But you NEEEEED the calcium!"

An interesting encounter today at the medical specialist, when I mentioned that I avoid dairy as dairy gives me acne and I was getting worse until I stopped eating dairy and grains:

If you don't eat dairy, then you must take calcium supplements. Otherwise you don't get enough calcium from nutrition.

Yeah, right.

Somehow the information that I tried to convey to her, that "Milk makes me ill", somehow that did not register for her. I know, it's only an anecdote to her, but still.

"If I eat this it makes me ill, if I stop eating it I get better" should be an easy to understand concept.

But I guess I am some sort of freak of nature and the only person in the world that has adverse health effects by dairy? And after all, don't all adult animals need calcium, well, because.

Yeah, right.

Maybe in 10 or 20 years we know much more about the adverse health effects of (pasteurized) dairy, and then she'll look back on what she told me about milk – or maybe not.

I wasn't in the mood to argue, so I just said "I am trying raw-milk dairy and it does not give me acne so far."

I guess she hears all kind of BS, so she'll file it under "Another Nutter", oh well. Whatever happened to being your own experiment, of being your own n-1?

Seriously?

Dear Jo Nijs,

I have a question regarding one of your results.

You state that:
"From the available literature, it is concluded that musculoskeletal factors are unlikely to account for pain from CFS."

My question originates from the 2009 study "Light AR, White AT, Hughen RW, Light KC. Moderate exercise increases expression for sensory, adrenergic, and immune genes in chronic fatigue syndrome patients but not in normal subjects." that you cite in your paper.

I was under the impression that the data by the author Alan Light actually suggest that it are the sensory nerve endings on the muscles that sense increased fatigue (and in extension pain) in CFS (and Fibromyalgia).

E.g. as Alan Light says here in a lecture (at minute 4:11):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Hylumohfo&t=4m11s

I would like to ask what suggest that the increased expression of sensory genes in peripheral blood cells is a phenomenon occurring centrally, and what makes you think that changes in peripheral blood are a central phenomenon and therefore "unlikely" to originate from musculoskeletal factors.

Kindest regards

I really had to watch my language with such fine research from such fine researchers.

Orac on why "PatientsLikeMe" is a bad idea

Orac on why "PatientsLikeMe" is a bad idea

Nature.com: "Fresh dispute about MMR 'fraud'"

Bjarnason says he doesn't believe they are sufficient to support claims in the Lancet paper of a new disease process. He also questions whether "non-specific" on the grading sheets refers to colitis, saying it could refer to any kind of gut changes. But he says that the forms don't clearly support charges that Wakefield deliberately misinterpreted the records. "The data are subjective. It's different to say it's deliberate falsification," he says.

I think Andrew Wakefield is a quack, but even he deserved a fair trial – with less foaming accusations and more scientific inquiry. Or did Bruno Bettelheim ever get the Wakefield treatment?