[daenz]

Look at the timeline:

  1930  - first cigarette company uses physicians in their ads
  1950s - evidence starts mounting that smoking causes lung cancer
  1964  - US Surgeon General report on the link between smoking and cancer
  1998  - cigarette companies still maintained that the link is controversial

So it takes 70 years, or nearly an entire generation, before all of the machinery at play (businesses, government, healthcare, scientists) can effectively come to the conclusion that they messed up badly and sold people poison. Grim.

[version_five]

Yeah who knows what unequivocal advice we could be getting from experts right now that will be thoroughly debunked 70 years from now.

(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)

[gruez]

>(Are dairy and grains still food groups... I could easily go on)

I don't get it. Are you saying that grain shouldn't be a food group? I think for the purposes of categorizing foods, "starchy staples" is a pretty useful categorization, even if the recommendation to eat 8 servings a day or whatever is misguided.

[programmarchy]

He's probably referring to the food pyramid, in which those food groups were put forth as foundational building blocks of a healthy diet according to the USDA. [1] That saga overlapped with the sugar lobby blaming fats for heart issues [2], and using their weight with the FDA to keep % Daily Values for sugars off food labels until very recently. [3]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8375951/

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

[3] https://www.vox.com/2016/5/20/11719796/new-nutrition-label-a...

[dylan604]

High Fructose Syrup is the one I'm holding out hope on.

Social Media consumption is another.

[ya_throw]

Yet the current zeitgeist is "Trust the experts, fool!"

We never frikkin learn.

[nzp7chfjks]

Using the word "science" to frame your argument automatically discredits any counterpoint.

[version_five]

This is why there is supposed to be separation of church and stage, but such rules didn't anticipate "science" becoming religion that is exempt from the criticism of religion. We need some updated principles that separate dogma and faith from legitimate motivations

[ya_throw]

https://www.bicyclerepairman.cc/laymans_guide/

[idnefju]

some humans have been drinking animal dairy for so many thousands of years that some ethnicities have evolved to have a lactose breaking down mutation into adulthood

[daenz]

>evolved

Not disagreeing, but that's a much nicer way of saying that nobody wanted to mate with the ones having constant diarrhea.

[lopis]

The amount of dairy and refined dairy products people consume today, like meat, is orders of magnitude bigger than back in the day.

[kipchak]

Vegetable/seed oils is one I’ve been seeing recently.

[frozenport]

That vaping and nicotine is harmless (just like coffee!) despite seeing the negative effects of nicotine intake on developing fetuses.

[edmcnulty101]

Labomotomies won the Nobel prize.

They were supported by the mainstream medical and science establishments. Rosemary Kennedy, JFKs relative got one.

People were giving labotomies to their kids to calm them down, advised by their doctor.

Great article on Howard Dulley one of the kids whose parents gave him a lobotomy advised by a doctor.

https://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my-lobotomy-howard-du...

[enriquto]

What a disturbingly scary article!

> He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.'

Doesn't this description fit most kids in the world? It was used to justify the lobotomy of a poor boy.

[retrac]

Unfortunately, especially historically, psychiatry intersects with "managing bothersome people". Children who wouldn't sit still. Elders who wouldn't stay quiet. Wives with independent personalities. Lobotomies fixed those "problems".

It hasn't really fully separated itself from that today. Some cynical types describe the extremely high rates of psychotropic drugs used in American schools and retirement homes as "chemical lobotomies". In many cases, the drugs are being used to make someone "manageable" (i.e., quiet and compliant) rather than improving their health or quality of life.

(Of course, a mentally sick person who's truly unmanageable, is in fairness, unlikely to have much health or quality of life. But that's the linchpin of justification both historically for actual lobotomies, and today for the widespread use of these drugs. Much caution in medical treatments to make it more convenient to "manage" people is warranted.)

[edmcnulty101]

Yeah. It seems like alot of things within the practice of medicine are brutal and crazy looking back.

I wonder what things from present time future humans will look back on and marvel at how insane they were.

[enriquto]

I guess that when an appropriate treatment for dental cavities is found, the current practice will be seen as barbaric.

[edmcnulty101]

When genetic engineering to give humans regeneration happens all modern medicine will probably look barbaric.

[edmcnulty101]

Yep. Doctor recommended! They would give their wife a lobotomy if she talked too much.

[LocalH]

One in a long history of barbarism-as-medicine. Some would say we're still in that era.

[edmcnulty101]

I can think of some recent experimental treatments recommended by the medical establishment that appear less effective than advertised and the long term effects unclear.

Shock therapy for one.

[svnpenn]

> Labomotomies

[edmcnulty101]

Fat fingered! Great catch!

[oivey]

A generation is more like 20 years. You’re talking about a lifetime, which is even more insane.

[steelstraw]

That's a great reminder to not get too dogmatic about anything, even when business, government, healthcare and scientists are all aligned.

I'm curious if there were doctors and scientists who dissented from the cigarette consensus prior to the 60s? And how were they treated in such an environment?

[jhpaul]

There certainly were doctors and scientists who saw the harm of smoking prior to the general consensus. It seems as though this consensus is a result of both mounting medical evidence and a fundemental shift in the way medicine approaches disease, with the field of epidimiology expanding from the study of infectious disease to include a variety of chronic disease and cancers. IIRC, I've read references and anecdotes of smoking and tobacco having obvious negative health impacts as far back as the US Civil War (1860s).

There's a good record in "Research on Smoking and Lung Cancer: A Landmark in the History of Chronic Disease" (The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 1989) [0]:

> By the 1930s, some evidence had been obtained that the incidence of lung cancer among males was increasing. The evidence came from three sources: official mortality statistics, pathologists' reports of autopsy findings, and the observations of physicians who specialized in the treatment of lung disease.

> Speculation about these factors continued, but there was also much criticism of the view that the reported increase in lung cancer was credible. . . . Factors which were listed as likely to be responsible for an artificial increase were better diagnosis of the disease and increased longevity of the population.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2589239/pdf/yjb...

[nzp7chfjks]

Those would be the "conspiracy theorists".

[crumpled]

Big money is playing a long game.

The tech industry is way ahead of any hint of regulations with regards to things like privacy, security or safety. New generations of people are brought unwillingly onto social media by parents. Some problems are hard to reel in by design.

[lonecom]

And this is for something that the scientific community did not have vested interest in protecting. That is, the scientific community did not come up with smoking as some boon to humanity.

Now imagine if that was the case here; That the big business and the scientific community had a natural alignment in promoting and protecting a practice with huge commercial interests...

[pvg]

The time to reach that level of consensus for lots of things is longer than 70 years - it can easily be infinite. It's not really clear why the final date in your timeline is 1998 since it doesn't mark a time when 'all the machinery in play effectively came to the conclusion'. The dangers of smoking tobacco were widely known through much of the period you've picked and this is also reflected in your timeline.

[daenz]

From the article, 1998 was the year that the Tobacco Institute and the Committee for Tobacco Research disbanded, which I am perceiving as symbolic of the last formal resistance to the idea that smoking causes cancer.

[pvg]

Sure but it's a pretty arbitrary cutoff. Many other significant limits on smoking (workplace bans, indoor bans, airlines, etc) and various limits on tobacco advertising happened both earlier and later. Some big tobacco lawsuits happened later. Just about any doctor in the 70s, 80s or 90s would have told you smoking is bad for you, public perception and knowledge of the dangers changed over time, etc, etc, etc. The whole thing doesn't really fit in a neatly bracketed time period in a meaningful way.

[civilized]

The tobacco lawsuits of the 90s brought the episode to a close. Tobacco companies now have to admit the health harms of smoking. Philip Morris does so at the top of marlboro.com and in several other places.

[ren_engineer]

there was plenty of research available that smoking was bad as early as the 1920s, it just got silenced. Mainly because Germany was one of the countries that led the movement. Plus billions of dollars working to stop anybody trying to end the money printing from the tobacco industry

>In 1930s Germany, scientific research for the first time revealed a connection between lung cancer and smoking, so the use of cigarettes and smoking was strongly discouraged by a heavy government sponsored anti-smoking campaign

>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_control

[daenz]

>After the Second World War, the German research was effectively silenced due to perceived associations with Nazism

That's really interesting. I dug a little more into it[0]. Apparently the underlying reasoning was that the Nazis associated smoking with "degenerates" and damage to "bodily purity." So when the research hit the US, people must have associated anti-smoking with those Nazi ideas. I wonder if tobacco companies latched onto this momentum to keep their public image healthy?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_...

[xmprt]

That tradition hasn't died out yet. There are a ton of common sense things done in many European countries that aren't implemented in the US because of apparent links to "communism."

[mngnt]

Could you give some examples? I am from a post communist country and am interested in what could be percieved as communist in the US. My guesses are publi transport and universal health care on the top 2 spots.

[sofixa]

Any sort of employee protection, paid vacation, maternity leave or sick time. Public transit as well.

[chihuahua]

Universal health care is probably the best example. Another example is universal maternal leave.

[mrguyorama]

Depends how deep into the south you go. It fares from clear ones, like government run anything, to extremes like mixing races, homosexuality, and anything the CDC says right now.

Basically Fox news uses "Communism" as a synonym for "things I don't like"

[watwut]

It is different, because USA was never communist country. And those who argue by "it is like communistm" typically have only very superficial understanding of history of Comunism and of culture it had. Or none at all often.

[dylan604]

When did Big Tobacco start using all of the additives to up the addictive level of the things? Does that correlate to the timing of when they started using the "physician approved" nonsense?

[Maursault]

I don't have a citation, just a hunch this coincided with the chemical revolution of the 1950's. I strongly suspect though smoking may have been correlated with poor health before then, that there probably were not 400K Americans dying of smoking-related illnesses every year until after the chemical revolution and the cigarette industry intentionally taking advantage of addiction by standardizing on precise and elevated nicotine-dosing as well as the infusion of 300 some carcinogens. So Big Tobacco loses a big case in the 1990's, must pay billions of dollars for intentionally making their product extremely addicting, but this punishment is lifted in the early 2000's without full payment. But, astoundingly, the Big Tobacco case and settlement overlooked a major detail (that the intentional addition of 300+ carcinogens, for the purposes of increasing addiction, were, in fact, extremely deadly, and that the industrialized process of creating deadly cigarettes isn't at all necessary for producing and selling tobacco products), which allowed Big Tobacco to continue creating a far more deadly and far more addicting product than tobacco, and thus, inexplicably actually, go on killing 400K Americans annually, and however many more worldwide. It really is the craziest thing.

[inter_netuser]

Generally, 25 years is considered a generation.

so nearly 3 generations.

[sixothree]

You forgot: 1994 - seven top tobacco CEOs testified to Congress that they didn't believe nicotine was addictive.

[ars]

It's longer than that, the term "tobacco heart" was around in 1880! I remember reading a short story from around then (I think by Mark Twain), where the character is criticized for the unhealthy habit of smoking.

Maybe lung cancer was 1950s, but health in general? Much, much earlier than that.

[davidjytang]

In my culture, one generation is often defined as 30 years. Probably the years between own births to giving births.

[refurb]

The issue is that with wealth comes an ever increasing focus on risks as you address the most severe first.

Come visit a developing country and you’ll find that wearing a seatbelt or drinking clean water is still not widely accepted. They have bigger problem right now.

[fjert]

This kind of worries me wrt to my vaping nicotine habit long term

[chihuahua]

It's just now coming to your attention that nicotine might be unhealthy?

[artursapek]

can you imagine if that was happening now? haha no way right