[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Do you trust your doctor? I don’t trust mine. Why? you might ask. The reason is simple. She relies far too heavily on the conventionally accepted wisdom of “science.” My doctor has recommended a low-fat diet (reliant on processed foods with high fructose corn syrup, no less). My dentist promotes fluoride. And during my short-lived relationship with my last obstetrician/gynecologist – he offered “information” on breastfeeding, heavily disguised as marketing for Enfamil.
In school, I learned all about the “scientific method.” It should work like this: Scientist (doctor, pharmacist, researcher, whomever) comes up with a hypothesis. Scientist designs experiment to test hypothesis. Scientist’s experiment either disproves or provides some validation for the hypothesis, and we have apparent scientific confirmation of the hypothesis or the scientist needs to go back to the drawing board.
With scientists beating their figurative heads against the wall time and again, there should eventually be a breakthrough, some hypothesis that is broadly validated by a variety of tests (and testers) that are themselves broadly validated for achieving consistent, accurate, repeatable results. And when breakthroughs are made, then the rest of us should be able to reap the benefits. Penicillin follows this model, for example.
This is not often what we get, though. Instead we have jerry-rigged experiments, result-oriented science. Much of the system has been hijacked by those with an interest bias, mainly corporations, or the government and educational institutions that have been hijacked by, you guessed it, corporations.
I’ll give you a few examples. Every year I get a water quality report from the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power that professes the water is fine, better than fine – as they’ve added beneficial “stuff’’ to it to make it better. One of those “benefits” is fluoride, “for healthy teeth,” they proclaim. On the surface, that seems lovely – if the water were only for rinsing out our mouths. But we heat it, cool it and bathe in it – allowing chemicals (sometimes altered) to enter our bodies in a number of ways. So for kicks, I started reading about fluoride. It’s not a pretty picture.
Common Belief vs. the Truth
Here’s the science. Calcium fluoride, a mineral regularly occurring in water, reduces cavities in children – though the effect wears off with age. What do our governments do? They pollute our water with sodium fluoride or hexafluorosilicic acid – a known toxic waste product otherwise illegal to dump in water – and promise us good health. Are there objective studies showing the benefits of fluoridation? Um, not really. Does ingestion of a toxic substance cause toxicity of bones, teeth, or livers and thyroids? Um, yes – but hey, fewer cavities (for a few years) are worth it.
Does my water quality report discuss the fact that the reduction of dental cavities in industrialized countries (i.e. socialist continental Europe) is actually the same over the long run whether the water is fluoridated or not? No, they seem to have left that part out. Instead, I’m subject to the adulteration of drinking and bathing water based upon dubious science. Of course, someone is getting paid to supply all that fluoride. Guess who provides the bulk of the science?
It’s the same story, time and again. Just this morning my mother-in-law broached the topic of my son’s penis. She finally asked if it had been circumcised. No, my husband informed her. We’ve left him intact. We decided to forgo tying him to a board and mutilating his genitals without anesthesia, as is done in most American hospitals today. (If my husband or I were practicing Jews or Muslims, we’d have made the same decision). But, she asked, how would his penis stay clean? We assured her that if evolution favored a penis without foreskin, he’d have been born without it. Here is another practice (popular in our country and others we’ve helped “civilize”) where the science is dubious.
No Bris Here
There are studies that suggest that circumcised men are less vulnerable to H.I.V. infection. Others suggest that the rate of penile cancer is lower, as is the incidence of general infection. Now we know there are other methods of H.I.V. transmission and ways to block transmission other than circumcision. The studies acknowledge (especially if you read past the abstracts) that circumcised penises also have infections. The rate of penile cancer is fairly low in either case, and circumcision seems to be on par with cutting of the breast to avoid breast cancer (or cutting out the brain to avoid brain cancer!) — an interesting prophylactic idea, but not necessarily the preferred preventative. Yet someone gets paid for all those circumcisions. Guess who provides the bulk of the science favoring it?
The lipid hypothesis is another scientific calamity. The lipid hypothesis (scientists never refer to it as the lipid fact) suggests that eating fat makes one fat. Indeed, it goes on to assert that eating saturated fat, such as those found in animals, not only will make one fat but clog one’s arteries and cause one to die of a heart attack. This idea, that we in this and several other fat countries perceive as fact, is based, in large part on one study — by Ancel Keys — conducted in 1953 in which he indisputably cherry-picked the data to support it.
There is no time to parse out all the flaws of that study in this essay (entire books are dedicated to the topic), but let’s just say that his study didn’t prove causation, and is even wonky on an association between so-called bad fat and coronary heart disease. As always, government and industry (or government pushed by industry) jumped on the low-fat bandwagon (or did they engineer and build it in the first place?), consigning Americans, among others, to deleterious health based on diets of denatured, manufactured foods, pushing whole nourishing (and yes, fat) foods out of the reach of many.
When I’m not pounding my head against my computer monitor in frustration at the latest articles in the purportedly liberal New York Times, I often find myself visiting one of the three or four most popular mommy sites that aim to provide information and community support for those of us raising children. In the last few weeks, my monitor has been overwhelmed with bright yellow ads beckoning me to “See the Science” of better feeding through Enfamil. The World Health Organization (yes, the very same WHO that discusses the benefits of circumcision and HIV, but if others can cherry pick – so can I), and the U.S. Centers for Disease control (who have it right, here) promote breastfeeding. But right alongside that little funded promotion are big yellow Flash ads that follow me from site to site.
The so-called ‘emerging science’ is that prebiotics may be beneficial to babies. Do we have proven science, for what that’s worth? Well, no. Do we know that the ‘prebiotics’ (read chemicals) we add are beneficial? Well, no. All the marketing seems designed to let them use our babies as test subjects – and if they ingest a few beetles along the way, then so be it. Oddly, all the formula companies are quick to suggest that whatever they’re selling today is ‘closer to breastmilk’ than what they were selling yesterday. Sure, science, or at least evolution, has shown what’s best – but why not rely on scientists (we hope) and marketing departments (we know) to suggest that science can produce baby milk that is almost as good as what’s made naturally. Heck, even better.
Sadly, in the years that we’ve relied on the benefits of ‘science’ – we’ve gone from proven (only to be later disproved) theories to mere suggestions of science.
I could give you many more examples where our doctors, other health professionals and governments rely on pseudo-science when promoting policies. But I will spare you (at least in this piece). The bottom line is that while great scientific breakthroughs have allowed us to travel to the moon, orbit the earth and similarly try to destroy it with atomic and nuclear weapons, too much faith in “science” has done damage when it comes to the promotion of the health of us human beings. Instead, our health and welfare is inextricably intertwined with corporations’ profit motive — making much of the so-called science it produces suspect.
People often tell me I’m crazy about these kinds of things. Everything in moderation, they say. Others say things like ”I’m” (or “my baby’s”) alive and seemingly healthy — it can’t be all bad.” I say that our test of the validity of science should not be whether whatever is being promoted or consumed today has failed to immediately kill the organism. I am not a sacrificial lab rat. At least, that isn’t how I remember the scientific method.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
