[mkautzm]

The science behind nutrition health is extremely complicated and expecting it to remain constant represent a total misunderstanding of how nutrition research is done and how results are determined.

> The history of medical reversals -- and in this case, nutrition reversal -- shows that the government isn't magic.

What it shows is that nutrition science is hardly 'solved' and you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher in the field suggest otherwise.

> A whole raft of restrictions could be converted to warnings and recommendations, freeing up industry to innovate and consumers to take a little more responsibility for themselves.

The problem with this is that the average consumer is both A) dumb, and B) doesn't know what they need. Alternative medicine skirts very cleanly around FDA regulation by not making any medical claims on it's product. They still market their product as a solution for various diseases and conditions, but they never make a formal claim. It's a $30,000,000,000 industry of people buying stuff that does nothing, or worse yet, can cause potential harm. To suggest their is no value in regulation of the drug markets is to suggest that people's health has no value. The defense of, 'well, people are responsible for their own decisions' doesn't hold any water when we know that the direct consequences of that mentality can be measured in literally tens of billions of dollars.

[BurningFrog]

> The problem with this is that the average consumer is both A) dumb, and B) doesn't know what they need

Note that the customer for prescription drugs is a licensed doctor.

[afterburner]

> Note that the customer for prescription drugs is a licensed doctor.

Who can be bought and misled like anyone else.

[wonder_er]

Just like federal regulators can be bought and misled like anyone else.

[afterburner]

Federal regulators are not in any way the consumer in this line of discussion, so your comment is a non sequitur. Doctors are not expected to regulate the drug industry, federal regulators are. Please read the comment I was responding to.

[baddox]

Also note that the proposed (and current) alternative is for these consumers to vote for politicians who will make these scientific decisions for them.

[FrancoDiaz]

The problem with this is that the average consumer is both A) dumb, and B) doesn't know what they need.

Unfortunately, a significant number of bureaucrats and statists would prefer consumers to be dumb (or at least say that they are) in order to maintain power.

Oh and let me guess, you're not one of the dumb ones....it's the other guys right? ;)

[mkautzm]

For nearly all the products I buy, I'm definitely 'dumb'. I have a narrow expertise that gives me insight into a narrow set of consumer products where I can effectively evaluate product quality and value. For nearly everything else, I'm 'dumb'.

If you show me a rack of food product, I probably can't identify which is the best for a particular person given a set of goals. I probably can't even tell you which ones are 'bad' or 'good', because I don't really know. While food is but one subject, this applies to nearly everything I purchase. Which plastics are the best for a given task? What ingredients in a shampoo would actually give me results I want? What kind of bed or bedding is the best for my comfort? To all these questions: I have no idea. I'm at the mercy of google or a salesman, the latter which has a different motive than me which immediately calls that in to suspicion.

I'd be a fool to say I'm an all-knowing consumer, but so would anyone. Most people don't know what the need. They know what problem they want to solve, but they have no idea what the best product or solution is to solve said problem. Acknowledging this, we can easily see why when it comes to our health, it's probably best to see some regulation lest people do what they do best: make really dumb choices.

[Naritai]

I'm a complete idiot when it comes to what drug is going to have what effect on me. That's why I consult an expert: a doctor.

[FrancoDiaz]

You're choosing your own doctor, right?

Do you just blindly take whatever the doctor prescribes to you without doing your own research? How do you know your doctor is an expert? I'm pretty sure my doctor is not an expert in lots of things pertaining to medicine. He's not studying all the new research. That doesn't mean I can't have a conversation with him, but it's healthy to be skeptical of doctors too...that's why we get second opinions.

I don't have a huge problem with the FDA, but I'd rather have a number of choices of where to get information, and at the end of the day make my own choice on what to consume.

Also if people are so stupid like the OP suggested why not ban a whole plethora of foods like Twinkies, potato chips, soda, etc..?

[Broken_Hippo]

"Do you blindly take whatever the doctor prescribes to you without doing your own research?"

Yes, and the more serious or painful the issue is, the more likely I am to blindly take the stuff. I'm simply not rational: I know this happens to a few other people as well, who all have migraines. Some folks willingly admit that when the migraine gets bad enough, it really doesn't matter if they overdose on pain medication because that would make the pain stop: I was similar with my gall bladder pain. Didn't care what they shot into my veins, so long as I stopped dropping to the floor in pain.

"if people are so stupid like the OP suggested, why not ban a while plethora of foods like twinkies, potato chips, soda, etc?"

We have to an extent: A lot of schools have taken such snacks out, for example, and some have tried to stop folks on welfare from buying any of it. And we tax it. But the real reason we don't do that is because food carries its own risks that aren't nearly as instantly deadly as drugs. The main exception is new food products, colorants, and flavors. Now, I'm a little fuzzy on the actual regulation, but there are approved and non-approved things to use for food, and I was thinking you had to prove it generally safe for humans. I could be wrong on this bit, however.

[mkautzm]

> Do you just blindly take whatever the doctor prescribes to you without doing your own research?

Yes. I'm do not have a medical background and at best, I could gain a surface-level understanding of the drug, which is not useful to determine which drug(s) are best for me.

> How do you know your doctor is an expert?

They went to 10 years of school and several years of residency to do doctor things. These things are also regulated by several boards which have the power to revoke medical licenses if doctors suck.

[wyager]

If nutrition science "isn't solved", the government shouldn't be making laws and regulations based on it.

[SilasX]

Basically, yeah. As a general rule, the bigger the change you want to make to existing practice, the better your model for that domain needs to be. (I call that the "if it ain't broke" heuristic.)

Changing the composition of an entire nation's schoolchildren's food supply ... should require something like skyscraper-failure-prediction accuracy.

It's no defense that "science learns and revises". If the learning and revising is still that big, you don't have a basis for telling others to do it your way.

(IMHO, this is, at root, the same mentality as "fake it till you make it" / "all self doubt must be Impostor Syndrome and never an accurate assessment".)

[delecti]

Morality isn't "solved" either, but we still outlaw murder. We can't not try to protect ourselves.

[pessimizer]

Murder is long solved. We've conclusively determined, with no exceptions, that it is unhealthy for the victim.

[tomp]

Clearly there are exceptions (military, capital punishment, police with guns, etc).

[WillPostForFood]

That is why people have been so slow to mobilize around climate change predictions.

[mustacheemperor]

Only through people's incorrect interpretation of reality.

>nutrition science is hardly 'solved' and you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher in the field suggest otherwise.

You'd be hard pressed to find a climate scientist not in agreement with the consensus on climate change, at least one that isn't already promoting book deals on Fox.

[hueving]

>You'd be hard pressed to find a climate scientist not in agreement with the consensus on climate change

You'd also be hard pressed to find a numerologist not in agreement with the consensus that numerology is effective.

Argument from authority isn't appropriate in this forum.

[mkautzm]

k.

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

[WillPostForFood]

yup, the science is "agreed on." Disagree and lose your job/funding. That's how to build climate consensus.

[mkautzm]

That's not at all true, and that level of ignorance is actually quite dangerous.

Scientists in no field are punished for disagreement. Even in really fringe science, disagreement is not only well-funded, but encouraged. A great example is String Theory: It has a lot of supporters and a lot of people saying it's untestable bunk, but research for both sides continues.. Consensuses happen when there is sufficient data to collapse to a consensus, not because 'funding'. Disagreements are extremely common in research and suggesting that the overwhelming consensus on the state of climate change is somehow a conspiracy or due to research pressures (that don't seem to exist anywhere else...) is complete garbage.

[tertius]

Are your a scientist? You seem very naive about the scientific world.

If you haven't experienced the cut throat nature of science or the immensely aggressive politics you may need to reassess your rose colored view.

The mantra, is your haven't heard it, is publish or perish.

Disagreement is well funded? What are your talking about? Good data is well funded. Doesn't matter how much you disagree, if the data is missing or bad you get no money.

[WillPostForFood]

I wish science was as functional as you imagine.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/sep/21/society.politics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098773

[wyager]

Nope, that's not how it works. Do you work in the science community? Many fields of science and engineering are gradually being eaten by politics. Going against progressive politics is dangerous for the career of any academic scientist in the US. This isn't a huge issue (yet) for math or hard physics. It's hard to politicize those fields (not for lack of trying; I could go on a very long rant about how non-scientists are trying to make scientific fields conform to their political expectations), but for other fields like environmental science (which, by the way, is only weakly scientific in the sense that it does not follow good practices for having high predictive power, so it's relatively easy to manipulate) political concerns are very powerful.

This is a bit rambly, but the gist of it is that it's naive to pretend that many nominally scientific fields are actually entirely objective and free from politics.

[baddox]

String theory doesn't, as far as I know, have significant government policy implications, so I wouldn't expect heterodoxy to be stigmatized as much as in climate science.