[MisterBastahrd]

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed that a balanced diet includes 5-7 servings of rice and grains a day, 2 servings of fruits and veggies, 2 servings of protein, and a small amount of fat.

That's one of the biggest problems here. What people have been taught is patently incorrect. It's a recipe for riding a blood sugar roller coaster.

We teach our kids from an early age to eat sugary foods. We use cartoon characters to goad them into begging their parents for them. What's cereal and milk? Most of the time, it's a sugar coated grain-based product soaked in a sugary liquid that is somehow healthier when you remove all the fat from it and add more sugar. What do kids want for a drink? Sunny Delight, a half-artificial sugar bomb which is nutritionally not much better for you than a can of soda. What do most kids get at school for lunch? Two enriched slices of bread surrounding a small piece of meat and some fried starch on the side. And more milk, because you can't ever have enough sugar to drink.

I can go on and on, but the point is, this starts with parents getting educated and taking charge of the eating habits of their kids.

[crusso]

Balanced diet? For the longest time, the FDA has claimed

This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the extent that they received media attention, they were ridiculed or held up as misguided or frauds.

It was an extremely painful and costly example of top-down, politically motivated, government funded "science". Although we learned some lessons about sugar vs fat vs protein, society learned almost nothing about avoiding this kind of trap again in the future.

[sparkie]

I see quite a striking parallel in the way AGW "denialists" are treated similarly to how the likes of Yudkin were treated for speaking out against the dogmatic ideas of health "science".

Very few scientists today speak out against the "climate change" dogma out of fear of losing their jobs, status among their peers, or funding - and those who dare are ridiculed, despite having published peer reviewed science (although little of it gets into established journals). There's no such thing as "settled science", and the term alone should set alarm bells ringing.

[sparkie]

Of course, it's always easier to bury dissenting views - it makes it look like there's a "consensus".

[eropple]

Peer reviewed denialist science? Links please. (And this isn't a joke--I very much want to read this, but it looks like downvotes are easier than substantiating.)

[pdonis]

http://nipccreport.org/

Note that "denialist" is a very broad (not to say loaded) term. A better term would be: skeptical of the claimed "consensus" that we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, even if the economic costs are huge, or else the planet is doomed.

[eropple]

I'm sorry, maybe I was unclear. I'm talking about peer-reviewed work (which the NIPCC stuff is not) that is being trumpeted by people who are, like, not being funded by a libertarian think tank. I mean, NIPCC is bankrolled by the Heartland Institute (a Cato-alike wishcasting group) and two advocacy groups that won't reveal their funding, one of which was headed by Fred Singer (who to this day is trying desperately to make people think that the University of East Anglia emails are actually a thing).

I wanted to give you a chance to show me something I hadn't seen before, on the off chance that maybe somebody, somewhere, was actually doing intellectually defensible work that wasn't being publicized...and you bilged it by bringing up the same utterly discredited junk that's in the denialist toolbox. I mean, you do realize why it's named the NIPCC, right? It's named that to confuse people with the IPCC, an actual scientific organization that does not lead off their papers with statements about how politically independent they are.

The mindset that compels one to the false equivalency you are choosing to employ between a policy group's own paid-for studies and the peer review process of, like, actual science is exactly why I use the term "denialist".

(For folks interested in a pretty good rundown of exactly why I and folks who pay attention to this may react in this manner towards the NIPCC, I recommend this as a great summary: http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/09/09/heartland-inst... )

[pdonis]

I'm talking about peer-reviewed work (which the NIPCC stuff is not)

Neither is the IPCC report, taken by itself. It references peer-reviewed work. So does the NIPCC report. Did you bother to actually read any of it?

NIPCC is bankrolled by...

In other words, you didn't bother to read any of it. You just assumed that they must be wrong because of their funding source. Well, guess what? If we're going to judge by funding sources, the IPCC itself is just as suspect. They are funded by governments which have a vested interest in increasing government control over all aspects of life. Government-funded research is not likely to come up with the answer, "No reason for government regulation here", even if it's the right answer.

If you want to play the funding source finger-pointing game, sorry, I'm not interested. I don't care who funds what; I want to see the actual content. See below.

the IPCC, an actual scientific organization

No, the IPCC is a political organization. It's an Intergovernmental panel. It uses information from scientists, but the final reports, and particularly the summaries for "policymakers", are driven by politics, not science.

the false equivalency you are choosing to employ

Not at all. Anyone can refer to peer-reviewed science, and both the IPCC and the NIPCC do so--see above.

Actually, if anyone is making a false equivalency here, it's you; you are equating "peer-reviewed science" with "valid science", which is simply laughable. Many peer-reviewed papers turn out to be wrong, for a variety of reasons: honest mistakes, insufficient knowledge in the field, reviewers too busy to really review, and corruption of the peer review process by political agendas.

If you want to actually distinguish valid science from invalid science, you have to look at the content. There is simply no shortcut; there is no way to tell what's valid science by looking at funding sources, or "consensus", or any other indirect measure. You have to look at the actual content. In the case of the IPCC, there's a very simple content question you can ask: have the IPCC's predictions about the climate matched the actual climate? The answer to that question is "no". No amount of harping on how wonderful the IPCC's process is will change that.

I recommend this as a great summary:

This article makes the same mistake you are making: it looks at process instead of content. There's not a single substantive point addressed; it's all about who is funding whom and what process they are using. Sorry, no sale.

[crusso]

NIPCC is bankrolled by

University of East Anglia emails are actually a thing

So we're supposed to disregard one group's arguments because of some perceived bias, but look the other way when "our team" is guilty of unprofessional, unscientific behavior.

This is exactly the kind of special pleading political advocacy that is a disaster for good science.

[cbhl]

This is why I love the work of Dr. Maya Adam out of Stanford; I took the 1.0 verison of her "Just Cook For Kids" MOOC[0][1] and found it really beneficial.

Granted, getting parents to sit down and spend an hour or two a week watching videos on eating right (and then spending more hours buying groceries and cooking at home) is difficult if they're working minimum-wage jobs and barely making ends meet, and the children of those parents seem like they'd be most vulnerable.

Government initiatives in Canada to improve healthy eating in Nunavut, for example, ended up with passion fruit and coconuts[2] being shipped up to the arctic. I'm not convinced that resulted in better diets for children.

[0] http://justcookforkids.com/

[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/childnutrition

[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/why-i...

[grannyg00se]

"Parents getting educated"

I think most of us know that sugar cereals are bad, sunnyd is fake and disgusting, and soda is poison. The problem is we just don't care. At least that's what it looks like. When you see an obese child whose parents are also obese and they're all happily consuming their favorite poisonous snack do you see that as an educational challenge? I see it more as a discipline problem.

[prawn]

Potentially a combination of things. Education and reinforcement, discipline, opportunities, etc. All would surely help. On the last item, at a servo (what an Australian generally calls a "gas station") soft drinks and energy drinks are often cheaper than water or promoted in two-for-one deals. They're also always at eye level, leaving milk and water on lower shelves of the display fridges.

When you reach the counter (and the same thing happens near supermarket checkouts), there is literally shelving with hundreds of chocolate bars between you and the attendant.

And this is where you're filling the car that enables you to avoid walking a distance instead.

Another opportunity example is fast food. The 24-hour shops will be Hungry Jacks (Burger King in AU), McDonalds and so on, or servos. Supermarkets will generally have shut by 9pm.