No health claim is ever proven. Even with overwhelming evidence for a claim we can't really say it's proven. At best we can say we have very high confidence, supported by a lot of data.
Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed.
There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).
As a complete non-expert, as far as I can tell, the only true agreement out there is that certain very specific substances are bad for you if you consume them too often. That's tobacco, alcohol, painkillers...and that's about it for consensus ones, with alcohol having wiggle room among the public thanks to some poor studies.
Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as controversial. Not in the sense that one side is obviously stupid or malicious, but in the sense that both sides earnestly think they are right.
> that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often
There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems.
As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
The real hard thing is accepting that people are going to make different decisions and get different outcomes.
I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems.
My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life quality is great.
Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.
Improving life quality is easy all you need to do is eat your vegetables and exercise.
I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.
exercise is beyond important which my wife and I do in spades, but the crazy thing is what happens when you fix the diet at a foundational level. For example, my wife has MS and due to carnivore alone (lion diet specifically), she is off both anti-depressants and generic adderal (common for MS patients). That alone is worth whatever silly risks are associated with lack of vegetables (and having gone over a year on this, I'm not sure what those risks are)
I was, for a long time, in the "follow the statistics" camp until about 5 years ago when I did an experiment because of an HN comment. My wife has had low-key GI problems for years. I read a random comment in a thread here about a specific L. Reuteri strain that BioGaia sells and how it had cured someone's IBS. I thought "why not, what's the worst that could happen?" and ordered a bottle. Two weeks into taking it daily, she comes to me with this look on her face. "What?" "I think that stuff you ordered fixed my guts." "What?!"
It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.
>People disagree on a bunch of extremely politicized topics within the realm of nutrition and health which is famously complex and hard to understand even for experts in the field.
The very first example that this study says is "false or unproven" uses ambiguous language at best:
> Animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein.
All commonly consumed sources of animal protein (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, etc.) are complete proteins, meaning they provide all essential amino acids. This is not true for all sources of plant-based protein. In addition, "protein" as is often used to indicate a part of a meal (I mean not just the technical definition of a chain of amino acids). Vegans are nearly always advised to supplement with B12 because good plant protein sources like legumes are poor sources of B12.
I understand what the study is getting at with the question, for as far as I am aware there are no studies that show that getting, say, 10 grams of complete protein from animals is any different from getting 10 grams of complete protein from plants. Still, given this question is easily ambiguous for valid definitions of "healthier", I find this study suspect, despite having no problem with the general idea that tons of people believe absolute batshit insane ideas about health and nutrition.
- Human amino acid requirements vary with age, physical condition, and physiological state. PDCAAS and DIAAS use a young child as reference pattern.
- Amino acid proportion also varies across animal foods: eggs closely match the child pattern, while beef is slightly lower in tryptophan.[0]
- Some plant proteins are considered complete above scoring systems: soy, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, hemp, chia, and potato protein, though potatoes themselves are low in protein/carb.
One thing that would help, and that I don't see addressed here is "avoid taking public positions on divisive issues that are not absolutely clear and directly linked to your area of expertise."
It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said:
> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected
As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.
However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.
Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.
You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour.
[1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada.
[2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.
For me wildest one is vegan diet, i.e. Bryan Johnson stays away from animal products, while levelsio mostly eats meat. Both track their biomarkers and seem to be extremely fit.
Personally I have to fight my entire country (and most of Eastern Europe fwiw) that cold weather, drafts, air conditioning, wet hair and cold feet does not cause common cold or flu. Yes there is rhinorrhea, but that's just reaction to change in air's humidity.
They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about.
- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.
- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.
- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.
- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."
Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."
We can't even necessarily claim that oily fish is "super-healthy". People shouldn't rely on it as their only source of protein due to the risk of heavy metal toxicity, especially for larger fish. A few servings per week are probably fine depending on the exact fish species.
Some plant proteins are "complete" in the sense of including all essential amino acids, but the ratios are wrong which still leaves at least one amino acid as a limiting factor. It's usually best to mix at least two plant proteins instead of relying on a single one.
“vaccines are used for population control”
Bill Gates has stated this is a goal, but in a different context. The idea is if you’re in a country with a large number of early deaths you are likely to have more children, and vaccines should help reverse this trend. So this is kind of an ambiguous question.
"vaccines are used for population control" in practice might as well be "do you extremely dislike and distrust the medical industry." It gives people an opportunity to express hostility at the cost of strawmaning their own disorganized opinions.
In the first three questions asked I could see reasonable people argue either way, with legitimate papers backing their "side", so I'm happy to at least see an even split.
For the autism question I agree with you, people simply believing their government is reasonable.
But I am quite worried about the last question. That 25% of people believe vaccines are used for population control is worrisome, no matter how you spin it.
Note that while it is not a vaccince, there is an injectable birth control, and immunocontraceptives which would actually be vaccines are in development. Further there have been well documented cases where people were sterilized against their will under the guise of other medical procedures, including receiving such shots. It really doesn't take too much whisper down the lane for that to be misunderstood, and once you get it in your head that a vaccination program could be used for population control I imagine it would be pretty hard to find evidence to convince yourself otherwise.
It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.
> COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary:
- Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably.
- Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say.
Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.
Right, but the word "prevented" in this is way too subtle and nuanced:
> whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
Because the correct answer is "no, it didn't prevent transmission". It likely reduced transmission. Someone who'd been vaccinated twice and still caught the virus twice would very rightly say "no, this vaccine did not prevent me from being infected"
2) Against something that mutates quickly the vaccine will always be behind. Thus the new variants win out. (The same thing would happen in the absence of vaccines, but it would take longer.)
The idea that it could actually be stamped out was very wishful thinking. But the vaccine does have a big benefit in reducing death.
Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why.
It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3].
>> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”
OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word.
And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4].
And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway".
The public is going to have to make a semi-to-un- informed judgement call regardless.
If they take scientists at their word, and different groups of scientists are saying different things, the public is going to have to make a judgement call as to which of those groups' credentials they trust more, or which sources they trust re: group-composition claims like "it's not 80% vs 20% of scientists, only a few of those 20% are accredited, so it's more like 98% vs 2%".
And that's an even trickier problem to solve than "scientists need to build trust". Which scientists? How do you determine if an opinion is from trustworthy scientists or from elsewhere? Even if scientists build trust, there will be very well-resourced forces trying to influence the public's answers to those questions.
Or perhaps “journalists” shouldn’t wildly and sensationally extrapolate from the most nuanced of findings in research to create unrealistic and unjustified expectations, especially when there exists other research drawing somewhat different conclusions.
Maybe people need a better education in science, the scientific method, logic, and reasoning.
Yeah, most "scientific" wild claims upon investigation are journalists ignoring the nuances.
Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake.
And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.
Healthcare professionals: "Gathering in large groups in causing a genocide of the old, infirm, and immunocompromised!"
Healthcare professionals a week later: "Racism is a global health crisis and you must gather and protest in large groups to combat it. No, these specific gatherings won't spread COVID."
No health claim is ever proven. Even with overwhelming evidence for a claim we can't really say it's proven. At best we can say we have very high confidence, supported by a lot of data.
Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed.
There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).
As a complete non-expert, as far as I can tell, the only true agreement out there is that certain very specific substances are bad for you if you consume them too often. That's tobacco, alcohol, painkillers...and that's about it for consensus ones, with alcohol having wiggle room among the public thanks to some poor studies.
Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as controversial. Not in the sense that one side is obviously stupid or malicious, but in the sense that both sides earnestly think they are right.
> that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often
There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems.
As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
Poison moves this probability towards 100%.
Alcohol is bad for you regardless of the frequency, not “if you consume them too often”. It’s literally a neurotoxin and metabolic toxin aka poison.
And going to the pub once a week is terrific for your social life and mental wellbeing.
Swings and roundabouts init.
It sure is, especially when you can visit one without succumbing to peer pressure to poison yourself.
What a sanctimonious response!
Drink tea in the pub if you must, though the social lubricant of alcohol is obvious to all.
Drink and be merry my friend!
[dead]
The real hard thing is accepting that people are going to make different decisions and get different outcomes.
I believe a lot of crazy health stuff because in my N=1 story, they work and drive results. This where I polarize people because I only eat meat, love raw cheese or a2 cheese. I have fixed so many problems.
My wife has also fixed a large number of problems such that her MS is so much more manageable and life quality is great.
Whatever science someone has has to contend with lives stories, and i no longer care to bother to believe centralized science. I want a thousand experiments to run where the results are life and death.
Improving life quality is easy all you need to do is eat your vegetables and exercise.
I actually find it amusing how complicated people try to make it with all their retarded diets and pills. And then you ask how often they go to the gym and they clam up.
exercise is beyond important which my wife and I do in spades, but the crazy thing is what happens when you fix the diet at a foundational level. For example, my wife has MS and due to carnivore alone (lion diet specifically), she is off both anti-depressants and generic adderal (common for MS patients). That alone is worth whatever silly risks are associated with lack of vegetables (and having gone over a year on this, I'm not sure what those risks are)
I was, for a long time, in the "follow the statistics" camp until about 5 years ago when I did an experiment because of an HN comment. My wife has had low-key GI problems for years. I read a random comment in a thread here about a specific L. Reuteri strain that BioGaia sells and how it had cured someone's IBS. I thought "why not, what's the worst that could happen?" and ordered a bottle. Two weeks into taking it daily, she comes to me with this look on her face. "What?" "I think that stuff you ordered fixed my guts." "What?!"
It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.
>People disagree on a bunch of extremely politicized topics within the realm of nutrition and health which is famously complex and hard to understand even for experts in the field.
Yup, I'm "staggered".
Table of question vs country (page 42): https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2026-0...
Recent small discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876068 (13 points | 11 days ago | 6 comments)
The very first example that this study says is "false or unproven" uses ambiguous language at best:
> Animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein.
All commonly consumed sources of animal protein (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, etc.) are complete proteins, meaning they provide all essential amino acids. This is not true for all sources of plant-based protein. In addition, "protein" as is often used to indicate a part of a meal (I mean not just the technical definition of a chain of amino acids). Vegans are nearly always advised to supplement with B12 because good plant protein sources like legumes are poor sources of B12.
I understand what the study is getting at with the question, for as far as I am aware there are no studies that show that getting, say, 10 grams of complete protein from animals is any different from getting 10 grams of complete protein from plants. Still, given this question is easily ambiguous for valid definitions of "healthier", I find this study suspect, despite having no problem with the general idea that tons of people believe absolute batshit insane ideas about health and nutrition.
> complete proteins
If I may nitpick:
- Human amino acid requirements vary with age, physical condition, and physiological state. PDCAAS and DIAAS use a young child as reference pattern.
- Amino acid proportion also varies across animal foods: eggs closely match the child pattern, while beef is slightly lower in tryptophan.[0]
- Some plant proteins are considered complete above scoring systems: soy, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, hemp, chia, and potato protein, though potatoes themselves are low in protein/carb.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331560091/figure/fi...
One thing that would help, and that I don't see addressed here is "avoid taking public positions on divisive issues that are not absolutely clear and directly linked to your area of expertise."
Avoid politics like Codex avoids goblins.
It's hard to tell what the correct public health play is. Take the controversial mask issue. Anthony Fauci on why he didn't say that masks would be effective said:
> Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected
As a public health official, perhaps you want to create an outcome like this by ensuring that you sacrifice some number of unknown people in order to preserve the capacity to fight the disease (and perhaps through doing that, save untold more people, including the people who are originally placed at risk). That will make sense to anyone who has played an RTS, I suppose. But if you're the guy about to be sacrificed, you are less likely to be thrilled about it. Trying to solve a collective action problem is hard, so I won't claim to knowing what I'd do in his position.
However, one way or another, each individual is going to look at that and conclude "sometimes the government will not tell me the truth in order that society may make it and they'll say I'm wrong and not following science to make sure I go along with it" and some individuals will say "okay, we need to take some risk to go along with the thing" and maybe another will say "no, fuck you, tell me the truth" and so on. I think this particular cat is out of the bag.
Once it's made obvious to people that the things you're telling them may not be entirely truthful so that you can create an outcome you want, they won't trust you. I lean on the side of being entirely truthful and appealing to the better angels of people's nature. But I'm an armchair quarterback. Hard to play it back and see what would have happened, or if we were in the counterfactual world with a Spanish Flu like disease that killed the working age more.
You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour.
[1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada.
[2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.
For me wildest one is vegan diet, i.e. Bryan Johnson stays away from animal products, while levelsio mostly eats meat. Both track their biomarkers and seem to be extremely fit.
Personally I have to fight my entire country (and most of Eastern Europe fwiw) that cold weather, drafts, air conditioning, wet hair and cold feet does not cause common cold or flu. Yes there is rhinorrhea, but that's just reaction to change in air's humidity.
> For me wildest one is vegan diet
Depriving children of calcium is a bad thing that all dieticians agree on.
It’s perfectly possible to have a calcium-less non-vegan diet and calcium-full vegan diet, or vice versa. We need nutrients, not a specific diet.
What an obtuse response!
Both are difficult to achieve as you well know.
I wonder what are the stats just for doctors rather than general population so we know what the realistic results to strive for are.
They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about.
- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.
- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.
- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.
- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."
Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."
We can't even necessarily claim that oily fish is "super-healthy". People shouldn't rely on it as their only source of protein due to the risk of heavy metal toxicity, especially for larger fish. A few servings per week are probably fine depending on the exact fish species.
https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/prenatal...
Some plant proteins are "complete" in the sense of including all essential amino acids, but the ratios are wrong which still leaves at least one amino acid as a limiting factor. It's usually best to mix at least two plant proteins instead of relying on a single one.
Everything in moderation.
> plant proteins are "complete" [...] but the ratios are wrong
While I understand the idea, it lacks to point out the right ratio of others plants. A better generalization would be:
See my sibling comment for a short list of "complete" plants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018888“vaccines are used for population control” Bill Gates has stated this is a goal, but in a different context. The idea is if you’re in a country with a large number of early deaths you are likely to have more children, and vaccines should help reverse this trend. So this is kind of an ambiguous question.
"vaccines are used for population control" in practice might as well be "do you extremely dislike and distrust the medical industry." It gives people an opportunity to express hostility at the cost of strawmaning their own disorganized opinions.
In the first three questions asked I could see reasonable people argue either way, with legitimate papers backing their "side", so I'm happy to at least see an even split.
For the autism question I agree with you, people simply believing their government is reasonable.
But I am quite worried about the last question. That 25% of people believe vaccines are used for population control is worrisome, no matter how you spin it.
Note that while it is not a vaccince, there is an injectable birth control, and immunocontraceptives which would actually be vaccines are in development. Further there have been well documented cases where people were sterilized against their will under the guise of other medical procedures, including receiving such shots. It really doesn't take too much whisper down the lane for that to be misunderstood, and once you get it in your head that a vaccination program could be used for population control I imagine it would be pretty hard to find evidence to convince yourself otherwise.
It's interesting they didn't ask questions like whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus. The number might have been even more staggering.
> COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary:
- Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably.
- Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say.
Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.
I was not talking about "subtle and nuanced" claims though, just the one I mentioned.
Right, but the word "prevented" in this is way too subtle and nuanced:
> whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
Because the correct answer is "no, it didn't prevent transmission". It likely reduced transmission. Someone who'd been vaccinated twice and still caught the virus twice would very rightly say "no, this vaccine did not prevent me from being infected"
No it's not, in the context that people believed it. That's the point.
[dead]
Huh?
1) No vaccine is 100% effective.
2) Against something that mutates quickly the vaccine will always be behind. Thus the new variants win out. (The same thing would happen in the absence of vaccines, but it would take longer.)
The idea that it could actually be stamped out was very wishful thinking. But the vaccine does have a big benefit in reducing death.
Yeah I know it sounds crazy but that was among the misinformation being spread, and many widely believed it without evidence.
>> "Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized"
Oh dear, my very own pet peeve.
Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why.
It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3].
>> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”
OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word.
And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4].
And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway".
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[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/
[2] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348...
[3] And I don't even have children.
[4] Unlikely.
> You have to take scientists at their word.
The public is going to have to make a semi-to-un- informed judgement call regardless.
If they take scientists at their word, and different groups of scientists are saying different things, the public is going to have to make a judgement call as to which of those groups' credentials they trust more, or which sources they trust re: group-composition claims like "it's not 80% vs 20% of scientists, only a few of those 20% are accredited, so it's more like 98% vs 2%".
And that's an even trickier problem to solve than "scientists need to build trust". Which scientists? How do you determine if an opinion is from trustworthy scientists or from elsewhere? Even if scientists build trust, there will be very well-resourced forces trying to influence the public's answers to those questions.
maybe medical professionals shouldn't have discredited themselves through rent seeking and playing politics
Or perhaps “journalists” shouldn’t wildly and sensationally extrapolate from the most nuanced of findings in research to create unrealistic and unjustified expectations, especially when there exists other research drawing somewhat different conclusions.
Maybe people need a better education in science, the scientific method, logic, and reasoning.
Yeah, most "scientific" wild claims upon investigation are journalists ignoring the nuances.
Admittedly, sometimes the scientists involved are complicit--consider the oft-reported claim that 2/3 of bankruptcies are due to medical debt. No, what the study actually said is that 2/3 involve medical debt. Well, duh, when someone's going bankrupt think they don't have unpaid bills?? The fact that the majority have an unpaid medical bill doesn't mean the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. It's only a few percent that are mostly medical in nature. I think it was crafted to get journalists to make this mistake.
And all too often the real issue is something caused both medical bills and a loss of income.
Healthcare professionals: "Gathering in large groups in causing a genocide of the old, infirm, and immunocompromised!"
Healthcare professionals a week later: "Racism is a global health crisis and you must gather and protest in large groups to combat it. No, these specific gatherings won't spread COVID."
Big gatherings *indoors*: big risk.
Big gatherings *outdoors*: low risk.
Church is pretty dangerous, a protest is reasonably safe.