Tag: reason

• Misconceptions of Denis Stewart

  Denis Stewart is a herbalist from the Hunter Valley (NSW, Australia). He is an associate professor at University of Newcastle since 2002. He founded the Southern Cross Herbal School in the late 1970s.

  He presents a weekly radio show on 2NUR FM, a Newcastle-based radio station, on health topics.

  I am concerned about some of his material. I posted Denis a (real) letter and sent an email without receiving a response. I also sent an email to 2NUR FM listing some concerns.

  Below is a list of some of the concerns that have not been addressed.

  Read more ➱

  14 November 2017

• CSIRO Low-Carb Diets

  The CSIRO Low-Carb Diet and CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet were developed in Australia by the CSIRO.

  The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet plan "is higher in protein, and lower in high Glycemic Index carbohydrates which supports weight loss, especially fat mass whilst helping with appetite control".

  The CSIRO Low Carb Diet is "lower in carbohydrate and higher in healthy fats which may improve blood glucose control and possibly a reduction in need for diabetes medication".

  The CSIRO Diets DO NOT improve blood glucose control and DOES NOT reduce the need for diabetes medication.

  Read more ➱

  4 October 2017

• BMJ Editorial – Are Some Diets “Mass Murder”?

  Richard Smith’s wrote an article Are some diets “mass murder”? in The BMJ on 15 December 2014. He uses a work of a popular commentator to reach his conclusions in this article. Smith's claim that Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise, demolishes the hypothesis that saturated fat is the cause of cardiovascular disease fails with just a little scrutiny.

  Richard Smith is a British medical doctor and a previous editor of the BMJ (previously the British Medical Journal). He worked for the BMJ for twenty-five years (from 1979 to 2004) and was editor from 1991 to 2004.

  Read more ⇛

  8 July 2017

• How do we know what we know?

  Many “facts” have a long history of discovery, with a sometimes bitter and acrimonious debate before a final acceptance.

  In Life, the Universe and Everything (part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series), Douglas Adams explains our inability to take in new information as a result of the Someone Else's Problem field. Effrafax of Wug utilised the SEP field to create an invisibility device that would run for a hundred years on a single torch battery.

  It relied on people's inability to see anything that they do not want to, were not expecting or cannot explain.

  We obtain our information initially from parents and from interacting with the world around us. We learn that fire is something that should be avoided if we put our hand in it.

  As we grow older, we learn from other people, reading, school, television. Observation is not always a reliable guide. It is obvious that the sun and the moon revolve around the earth - we see the sun rise each morning in the east and set at night in the west.

  Read more ⇒

  14 April 2016

• TIME Magazine Article – Eat Butter

  It is with alarm that I read Bryan Walsh’s article Ending the War on Fat that was published in TIME magazine on 23 June 2014.

  According to Walsh:

  Keys' work became the foundation for a body of science implicating fat as a major risk factor for heart disease. The Seven Countries Study has been referenced close to 1 million times.  But Keys' research had problems from the start.  He cherry-picked his data.

  If the book has really been "referenced close to a million times", it means that it has been referenced close to 80 times every day, including weekends, since the book was published in 1980.

  Walsh claims that Keys “cherry-picked” his data.  It is evident that Walsh has confused with Keys’ 1953 paper Keys’ paper, Atherosclerosis, A Problem in Newer Public Health and his later study Seven Countries, A Multivariate Analysis of Death and Coronary Heart Disease.

  Walsh fails to elaborate on how Keys “cherry picked” his data. Commencing in 1957, the Seven Countries Study studied 12,763 men in 16 regions in seven countries. What data was omitted from this study? How was the data “cherry-picked”?

  Read more ➱

  11 July 2014

• Interview with Karo

  Karo Tak is a wonderful, passionate yoga teacher, vegan cook, animal activist working with the "Sea Shepherd Organisation".

  She visited Maitland recently to teach a vegan cooking class at "Organic Feast - East Maitland".

  Read more ⇒

  21 May 2014