Trust in science and medical experts

This week is a good time to talk about trust in expert opinion and science.
For the past forty years, nutrition experts in the US have warned us about cholesterol and fat. Eat too much of it and it will block your arteries, was the proclamation. Americans did what the scientists and experts said. They ate low-fat foods. You see how that worked out.
Now, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will soon tell the American people that they were wrong about saturated fat and cholesterol. Experts, who had based their recommendations on scientific evidence, will reverse course and say…oops. Our bad. The science was not that good, and, it turns out, human biology and atherosclerosis is more complicated than we thought. Eat your eggs.
More important here is not that science was wrong and that old discoveries were overturned by new evidence. That is normal. What bothers me is something Dr.David Allison, a public health professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, rightly said in the Washington Post piece.
… the problem in nutrition stems from the arrogance that sometimes accompanies dietary advice. A little humility could go a long way.
“Where nutrition has some trouble,” he said, “is all the confidence and vitriol and moralism that goes along with our recommendations.”
Confidence, vitriol and moralism are not just a part of nutrition advice. These human characteristics infect lots of other expert scientific recommendations. Ad hominem attacks followed m...

Source: Dr John M - February 12, 2015 Category: Cardiology Authors: Dr John Source Type: blogs