Remember the "Got Milk" commercials? They tell you that milk is good for you, that your children need it to grow healthy and strong.
Has your doctor ever asked you if you get enough protein? For women who have been pregnant, remember being told you had to drink lots of milk?
Well these are some of those fraudulent stories that somehow, everyone believes. The real info. is that milk and meat are bad for us. Our bodies are not built to handle this type of food.
At this point you may be thinking, "where does she get this crazy idea?" Well there is lots of medical info. out there, and I think it is quite accurate. What isn't accurate is how industries that process dairy, beef, and poultry have somehow convinced everyone (including health care providers) that we need these things to be healthy - and of course we always believe what our doctor tells us...
Actually, it is the other way around - food from animal sources is bad for us.
Famous cardiologist Dean Ornish says he can save post heart attack patients and one of the main things he does is stop them from eating meat and dairy. Doesn't that tell you something?
This information has been around for a long time, somehow we missed it. Here is an excerpt from a 2 decades old New York Times article:
Personal Health: New Research on the Vegetarian Diet
by Jane Brody, October 12, 1983
In a 1982 study of more than 10,000 vegetarians and meat eaters, British researchers found that the more meat consumed, the greater the risk of suffering a heart attack. Though eliminating meat from the diet is likely to reduce your consumption of heart-damaging fats and cholesterol, substituting large amounts of high-fat dairy products and cholesterol-rich eggs can negate the benefit. To glean the heart-saving benefits of vegetarianism, consumption of such foods as hard cheese, cream cheese, ice cream and eggs should be moderate.
for more information on this, check out this book:
"Doctor accused of faking studies," Boston Globe, March 11, 2009
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Medical scumbag's masterclass in fraud
o Ben Goldacre
o The Guardian, Saturday 14 March 2009
Like you, I've developed a sneaking respect for all the fun and interesting tricks a person can use to distort the scientific evidence, so Dr Scott S Reuben, an anaesthesiologist in Bayside Medical Centre in Massachusetts, is a double scumbag: this week, in the biggest fraud case from recent medical history, he has been caught out, rather unimaginatively, just fabricating his data.
How did he get away with it?
Firstly, if you're planning a career in scientific fraud, then medicine is an excellent place to start.
Findings in complex biological systems - like "people" - are often contradictory and difficult to replicate, so you could easily advance your career and never get caught.
And fraud is not so unusual, depending on where you draw the line. In 2005 the journal Nature published an anonymous survey of 3,247 scientists: 0.3% admitted they had falsified research data at some point in their careers, in acts of outright fraud; but more interestingly, 6% admitted failing to present data if it contradicted their previous research.
They are not alone. Robert Millikan, to take just one example, won a Nobel prize in 1923 after demonstrating that electricity comes in discrete units (electrons) with his oil drop experiment. Millikan was mid-career - the peak period for fraud - and fairly unknown. In his famous paper from Physical Review he said: "This is not a selected group of drops but represents all of the drops experimented on during 60 consecutive days".
That was untrue: in the paper there were 58 droplets, but in the notebooks there are 175, annotated with phrases like "publish this beautiful one" and "agreement poor, will not work out". Chillingly, there is a continuum between this naughtiness and lots of apparently innocent research activity: what should you do with the outliers on the graph? When you drop something on the floor? When the run on the machine was probably contaminated?
Reuben was at the other end of the scale. He simply never conducted various clinical trials he wrote about for 10 years.
In some cases he didn't even pretend to get approval to conduct studies on patients, but just charged ahead and invented the results all the same.
The details haven't come out yet - investigators have asked various academic journals to formally withdraw at least 21 studies - but fabrication is often easier to spot than selective editing, and some people have argued for various fraud detection tools to be used more commonly by academic journals...more
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