So they feed rats a diet that is not species-appropriate, and the rats develop health problems? Anybody with even slight knowledge of biology, nutrition, and evolution could tell you that.  I wonder what the actual diets were. I’d like to see that. Or is this stuff, “bacon, sausage, cheesecake, frosting, and other fattening, high-calorie foods,” appropriate and typical for rats? I cannot imagine that they evolved on that stuff. Have they had time to evolve to adjust to such foods?

Bacon is very different chemically from cheesecake and junk food. So is sausage. So why are they classified together? The body would respond to these things differently.

What’s more, they conflate “containing fat” with “causing fat.” And they draw conclusions about fat consumption based on feeding fat along with sugars and other crud. It’s impossible to tease out causes the way this study was done, or at least according to how it was reported. If A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, create a certain effect, how does one know A was the cause? Or B?

It would be interesting to see the actual study report. Was this bad “science” or bad reporting?

No wonder American health is bad and getting worse!!

When I was 14, I went to the emergency room with 4 cysts which had ruptured on my ovaries in unison (utterly agonizing pain). But after the ultrasound confirmed that the cysts had ruptured, the doctors said I should be fine and those too were ignored.

I had other signs that something was wrong with my body. When I was 12 my hip joint fell out of its socket and I had to go to the ER to get it put back in place. They didn’t know why it happened so they sent me on my way (my hip and my shoulder continued to do this until I was 26, when I quit eating gluten).

Once I had a head ache so bad it sent me to the ER. The pain that day was worse than childbirth. The spinal tap showed nothing and so it too was ignored.

I looked so healthy despite the symptoms
I guess it might have been hard to take me seriously since I was such a pretty young teen. How could anyone so pretty and thin be such a wreck? And so, I was eventually diagnosed with mental problems. All the cramps, the diarrhea, the pain, the joint problems, the feeling of being out of control were all in my head.

By the time I was 12 it would become the job of psychiatrists to fix me, but they didn’t do a bit of good for someone whose mind suffered as a result of malnourishment and hormonal imbalances. (Even today it seems psychiatrists are mostly clueless about the connection between the mind and the body. Depression and mental problems are totally avoidable and correctable. Emily Deans is aware of this. I wish she had been my shrink.)

…

Like with every other modern health condition PCOS can be avoided and controlled by diet and lifestyle changes. (Genetics can predispose a person to develop the condition but genetics are rarely the cause of disease. Check out this article on Mark’s Daily Apple for more information about the relationship between genetics and disease.)

After learning about grains and sugars, I discovered Loren Cordain’s book, The Paleo Diet. My health improved immediately and within 3 months I was pregnant. It was amazing that I was starting to get my hormonal problems under control but, unfortunately, a return to an evolutionary diet was not the whole solution for me.

So I started taking vitamins, minerals, and hormone balancing herbs. I stopped over-exercising. I did all the things that I read should take care of the problem. But I still didn’t fully recover – many of my thousand symptoms improved but not all of them. For years, even after going Primal, I struggled with (minor by this point) PCOS symptoms.

Read the article to find out what else Mrs. Emch did to return to health — to a natural state of physical health, mental health, and well-being. Very interesting read!

This week we’re glad to welcome Chris Masterjohn to the show. Chris is currently pursuing a PhD in Nutritional Sciences with a concentration in Biochemical and Molecular Nutrition at the University of Connecticut. He writes a blog called The Daily Lipid and is also a frequent contributor on the Weston A. Price Foundation’s blog.

I consider Chris to be one of the foremost experts on the topic of cholesterol and its relationship to heart disease. In this episode, we discuss (among other things):

• the history of the cholesterol-heart disease connection
• misconceptions around diet vs. lipid hypothesis
• finding middle ground between cholesterol skeptics and proponents of the lipid hypothesis
• the LDL receptor and familial hypercholesterolemia and what they can tell us about cholesterol and CHD in normal populations

Copyright © 2011 The Healthy Skeptic

The interview clarifies the role and importance of cholesterol to our health and proper functioning, and gives a good analysis of the science and history of cholesterol research. So the interview is a good way to learn a bit about how science should work and about how we should analyze “scientific” reports.

Student papers are often unreadable not only because their grammar is bad, and sentences incomplete, but also because they are way, way too abstract. Abstractions really trap students. Assigned to write about some idea, students get caught in the sphere of abstract words and stay there. Abstract words multiply on the page in unpleasant clusters. If you ask freshmen to write about, say, The relationship between wealth and productivity in a market society, watch out. Few will notice that the four abstract terms relationship, wealth, productivity and market society need definition or examples. They will just move those abstract terms around like checkers on a board, repeating them, and hoping through repetition that something will be said. The resulting paper will be mush.
…
An alternate approach might be to start the course with physical objects, training students to write with objects, and to understand that every abstract idea summarizes a set of physical facts. I do in fact take that approach. “If you are writing about markets, recognize that market is an abstract idea, and find a bunch of objects that relate to it,” I say. “Give me concrete nouns. Show me a wooden roadside stand with corn and green peppers on it, if you want. Show me a supermarket displaying six kinds of oranges under halogen lights. Show me a stock exchange floor where bids are shouted and answered.”
…
Students led into writing this way at the start of a course…find it strange at first, but…they will learn after six or eight weeks of practice that it does work; about that time they start to smile because their thinking on paper is clearer, they can see what they are talking about, and their writing has become vivid.

© 2011 National Association of Scholars. All rights reserved.

All subjects, from math to physics to chemistry to history to philosophy, should be taught in the same way. Concepts are classifications of real, individual things, and if a student does not know what real things the concepts refer to, he does not know what he is thinking, writing, or talking about; the students mind is then being destroyed and divorced from reality. Not healthy!! Don’t do it, please! In education, as in all else, please be objective: follow a human method (logic) in knowing the facts.

Mr. Maguire’s advice is good advice for the SAT and ACT, too.

If we want record numbers of students to succeed in postsecondary studies and careers, an ancient, accessible concept needs to be restored to its rightful place at the center of schooling: argument. In its various forms, it includes the ability to analyze and assess our facts and evidence, support our solutions, and defend our interpretations and recommendations with clarity and precision in every subject area. Argument is the primary skill essential to our success as citizens, students, and workers.

Sounds good, right? They call for teaching students to use “evidence” and “clarity” and “precision.” Can’t argue with that! Sounds perfect!

But let’s see what else they say. What is their context? What is their underlying epistemology? What is their view of logic and of concepts?

In the meantime, let’s immediately begin, as the new standards urge us, to give students hundreds of opportunities, every year, to dismantle and defend arguments about increasingly rich, complex texts. From the earliest grades, let’s have them argue about the pros and cons of almost anything: literary characters and interpretations, global warming, capitalism vs. socialism, Sarah Palin, or the comparative quality of life in the United States and Canada (based on statistical analysis). Let’s ask students to explain their reasoning for which alternative-energy source we should invest in as they read, talk, and write about what they are learning in novels, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines.

© 2011 Editorial Projects in Education

And there we have what they are really after: divorcing concepts and minds from reality. Students, the authors say, should be encouraged to argue about things about which they know nothing or about which they are cognitively not ready for. The hierarchy of knowledge should be ignored and violated — but, like a building, if you take away the lower floors, the building cannot stand; like a tree, if you take away the roots and grounds, the tree cannot survive, live, and flourish.

Divorce argument from objectivity, hierarchy, context, and the evidence of the senses, and you have a Platonic hash.

He responds to Platonism by giving us Pragmatism — but they are two sides of the same false coin. We need a rational approach, a la Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Galileo and Gauss.

Writing in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, cognitive scientists Hal Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork argue that, of the thousands of articles published on learning styles in recent decades, few really put the theory to an adequate test.

To really determine if a theory is valid, the researchers write, a study would have to first classify students based on the theory being tested and then randomly assign them to one of several different learning methods. Students would also have to be tested before and after the instruction. If the theory is correct, the researchers said, then students would learn best when taught with the teaching methods that mesh with their individual learning styles.

Yet few studies use that or any kind of experimental method to test learning-style theory. And, among those that did, the authors found, several yielded results that contradicted the theory. The authors write:

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.”

That’s not to say learning-style theory would never work, the authors add. Dozens of such theories have been identified and some have never been tested at all.
What many of these theories give a name to may actually be a learning preference. And it’s a long way from preferring to be taught one way to actually learning more when taught by a compatible instructional method.

Besides which, it is we humans who must adjust to the world, to reality and all its modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. — it is not the world which will bend to us. Education is about preparing a child to live independently in the world and amongst other self-sovereign people; it is not about training children to stomp their feet at the world and other people in demand that their “learning styles” be pandered to.

Update (3:30 PM): (1) I should point out that, at this time, I have not yet read the article. (2) I wrote a bit about “learning styles” in my blog post Two Points of Pedagogy.

I.1
A SCIENCE only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.
…

I.5
The wide range taken into the field of pure politics, whilst investigating the subject of political economy, seemed to furnish a much stronger reason for including in the same inquiry agriculture, commerce and the arts, the true sources of wealth, and upon which laws have but an accidental and indirect influence. Thence what interminable digressions! If, for example, commerce constitutes a branch of political economy, all the various kinds of commerce form a part; and as a consequence, maritime commerce, navigation, geography—where shall we stop? All human knowledge is connected. Accordingly, it is necessary to ascertain the points of contact, or the articulations by which the different branches are united; by this means, a more exact knowledge will be obtained of whatever is peculiar to each, and where they run into one another.
I.6
In the science of political economy, agriculture, commerce and manufactures are considered only in relation to the increase or diminution of wealth, and not in reference to their processes of execution. This science indicates the cases in which commerce is truly productive, where whatever is gained by one is lost by another, and where it is profitable to all; it also teaches us to appreciate its several processes, but simply in their results, at which it stops. Besides this knowledge, the merchant must also understand the processes of his art. He must be acquainted with the commodities in which he deals, their qualities and defects, the countries from which they are derived, their markets, the means of their transportation, the values to be given for them in exchange, and the method of keeping accounts.
I.7
The same remark is applicable to the agriculturist, to the manufacturer, and to the practical man of business; to acquire a thorough knowledge of the causes and consequences of each phenomenon, the study of political economy is essentially necessary to them all; and to become expert in his particular pursuit, each one must add thereto a knowledge of its processes. These different subjects of investigation were not, however, confounded by Dr. Smith; but neither he, nor the writers who succeeded him, have guarded themselves against another source of confusion, here important to be noticed, inasmuch as the developments resulting from it, may not be altogether unuseful in the progress of knowledge in general, as well as in the prosecution of our own particular inquiry.

I.8
In political economy, as in natural philosophy, and in every other study, systems have been formed before facts have been established; the place of the latter being supplied by purely gratuitous assertions. More recently, the inductive method of philosophizing, which, since the time of Bacon, has so much contributed to the advancement of every other science, has been applied to the conduct of our researches in this. The excellence of this method consists in only admitting facts carefully observed, and the consequences rigorously deduced from them; thereby effectually excluding those prejudices and authorities which, in every department of literature and science, have so often been interposed between man and truth. But, is the whole extent of the meaning of the term, facts, so often made use of, perfectly understood?
I.9
It appears to me, that this word at once designates objects that exist, and events that take place; thus presenting two classes of facts: it is, for example, one fact, that such an object exists; another fact, that such an event takes place in such a manner. Objects that exist, in order to serve as the basis of certain reasoning, must be seen exactly as they are, under every point of view, with all their qualities. Otherwise, whilst supposing ourselves to be reasoning respecting the same thing, we may, under the same name, be treating of two different things.
I.10
The second class of facts, namely, events that take place, consists of the phenomena exhibited, when we observe the manner in which things take place. It is, for instance, a fact, that metals, when exposed to a certain degree of heat, become fluid.
I.11
The manner in which things exist and take place, constitutes what is called the nature of things; and a careful observation of the nature of things is the sole foundation of all truth.

I.12
Hence, a twofold classification of sciences; namely, those which may be styled descriptive, which arrange and accurately designate the properties of certain objects, as botany and natural history; and those which may be styled experimental, which unfold the reciprocal action of substances on each other, or in other words, the connexion between cause and effect, as chemistry and natural philosophy. Both departments are founded on facts, and constitute an equally solid and useful portion of knowledge. Political economy belongs to the latter; in showing the manner in which events take place in relation to wealth, it forms a part of experimental science.*3
I.13
But facts that take place may be considered in two points of view; either as general or constant, or as particular or variable. General facts are the results of the nature of things in all analogous cases; particular facts as truly result from the nature of things, but they are the result of several operations modified by each other in a particular case. The former are not less incontrovertible than the latter, even when apparently they contradict each other. In natural philosophy, it is a general fact, that heavy bodies fall to the earth; the water in a fountain, nevertheless, rises above it. The particular fact of the fountain is a result wherein the laws of equilibrium are combined with those of gravity, but without destroying them.
I.14
In our present inquiry, the knowledge of these two classes of facts, namely, of objects that exist and of events that take place, embraces two distinct sciences, political economy and statistics.
I.15
Political economy, from facts always carefully observed, makes known to us the nature of wealth; from the knowledge of its nature deduces the means of its creation, unfolds the order of its distribution, and the phenomena at tending its destruction. It is, in other words, an exposition of the general facts observed in relation to this subject. With respect to wealth, it is a knowledge of effects and of their causes. It shows what facts are constantly conjoined with; so that one is always the sequence of the other. But it does not resort for any further explanations to hypothesis: from the nature of particular events their concatenations must be perceived; the science must conduct us from one link to another, so that every intelligent understanding may clearly comprehend in what manner the chain is united. It is this which constitutes the excellence of the modern method of philosophizing.