[ericdykstra]

Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source, but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles expecting bias in reporting.

It's not just the politics, either. I ran across this article from just a couple of days ago and couldn't believe it got past an editor: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/well/why-take-diet-advice...

> Keep in mind that the life expectancy of people before the advent of agriculture 15,000 years ago rarely reached or exceeded 40, so their risk of developing the so-called diseases of civilization is unknown.

To completely ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy shows a complete lack of knowledge of history or statistics.

[nl]

I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet.

I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article.

Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another fad diet.

[paulgb]

I think the issue is that 40 years seems to be extrapolated from an average, but the distribution of human lifespans (especially in pre-modern times) is bi-modal so the average doesn't tell you much about how long they lived conditioned on reaching adulthood. I found mostly questionable-looking paleo-diet related results as well, but to their credit the chain of citations led back to peer-reviewed research such as this:

> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-horticulturalists reach age 45. The acculturated hunter-gatherers show lower young adult mortality rates, with 79 percent surviving to age 45, conditional on reaching age 15.

http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.ed...

[nl]

Sure, I agree it's a good point. But it does seem to be a fairly minor point in the whole article, and I really don't understand what the OP's point was.

Was it just they didn't like the criticism of paleo? Because honestly, to me publishing reasonably well thought out criticism of anything seems exactly what a good newspaper should do.

[darkerside]

> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.

You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.

[ejstronge]

>> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.

> You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.

This is a false equivalency.

Science requires experiments to support or refute hypotheses. The fact that new experiments may cause us to revisit a theory does not mean that one can assert any arbitrary theory to be correct.

[darkerside]

Where did I assert any theory as being correct. Stop twisting my words. You're seeing an agenda where there isn't one.

[tanilama]

I can echo that. Their journalism feels predictable, not only the opinion, but also the writing of it. The way they approach the subject from an observer, and possibly assumed superior perspective make me feel detached and indifferent as with the reporter. Other left-learning publication, like Guardian, suffers less from such formulaic problem, make me wonder this might be intentional.

[scarface74]

What’s far left about criticizing yet another fad diet?