Is eating fruits and vegetables good for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d like to say at the outset that I like fruits and vegetables. Even if they weren’t supposed to be good for you I would eat them. I might even eat them if I heard they were a little bit bad for you; that’s how much I like them.

And if I had to cut them almost totally out of my diet—which I did when, in my young adulthood, I went on the very-low-carb Stillman diet for a while—I would not only miss them terribly but I would dream about them.

Yes, I used to dream about fruit.

So it always astounds me when people talk about low-carb diets as being so great. “I can eat eggs and bacon every day! And then a big steak and some gooey cheese for dessert!” Although I like to eat all those things too, the thought of eating them or their equivalent every day, for nearly every meal, fills me with dread.

That said, I realize other people have vastly different desires. But I’ve long thought that the long-standing food wars about what’s good for you and what’s not rest at least partly on people’s idiosyncratic food preferences.

That brings us to today’s article in the NY Times by George Johnson, which is being hailed as knocking the common wisdom that fruits and vegetables are so very good for you.

The article limits itself to criticizing the viewpoint that fruits and vegetables confer some particular benefit in protecting against cancer. But it’s interesting that many commenters seem to generalize it to mean or to imply or to insinuate that there’s no health benefit of eating fruits and vegetables, period (see some of the commentary on this thread for examples of what I’m talking about).

I offer the caveat that attempts to link nutrition and food intake to diseases or health are fraught with peril, whatever the truth about foods and health might actually be. They tend to rely on self-reports about diet, which are certainly suspect, and tend to be about correlations, which can hint at causation but certainly do not prove it. So all diet suggestions for the general public should be taken with (forgive the pun) a grain of salt.

That said, Johnson is talking about something that science (as opposed to popular lore) had been backing off from: the idea that diet has a lot to do with whether one gets cancer or not. If you don’t believe me, see this, from the Harvard School of Public Health:

Numerous early studies revealed what appeared to be a strong link between eating fruits and vegetables and protection against cancer. Unlike case-control studies, cohort studies, which follow large groups of initially healthy individuals for years, generally provide more reliable information than case-control studies because they don’t rely on information from the past. And, in general, data from cohort studies have not consistently shown that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables prevents cancer.

For example, in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, over a 14-year period, men and women with the highest intake of fruits and vegetables (8+ servings a day) were just as likely to have developed cancer as those who ate the fewest daily servings (under 1.5).

A more likely possibility is that some types of fruits and vegetables may protect against certain cancers.

A more nuanced claim, to be sure.

And although Johnson is very careful to limit his article to whether fruits and vegetables protect against cancer, the Harvard publication is pretty clear that whatever the case for cancer protection (and it’s weak at best), the evidence that fruits and vegetables can help protect a person’s cardiovascular health is much stronger:

There is compelling evidence that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can lower the risk of heart disease and stroke. The largest and longest study to date, done as part of the Harvard-based Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, included almost 110,000 men and women whose health and dietary habits were followed for 14 years.

The higher the average daily intake of fruits and vegetables, the lower the chances of developing cardiovascular disease. Compared with those in the lowest category of fruit and vegetable intake (less than 1.5 servings a day), those who averaged 8 or more servings a day were 30 percent less likely to have had a heart attack or stroke.

Although all fruits and vegetables likely contribute to this benefit, green leafy vegetables such as lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and mustard greens; cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, and kale; and citrus fruits such as oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruit (and their juices) make important contributions.

When researchers combined findings from the Harvard studies with several other long-term studies in the U.S. and Europe, and looked at coronary heart disease and stroke separately, they found a similar protective effect: Individuals who ate more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per had roughly a 20 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, compared with individuals who ate less than 3 servings per day.

There is little question that, as with most health/diet studies of this design, there is the complication that there might be a lot of other things that are different about people who eat so many fruits and vegetables compared to people who don’t. Most studies attempt to control for confounding variables of this nature (such as exercise, for example), but let’s just acknowledge that it’s very hard to effectively do so.

All such studies are handicapped by this built-in flaw, and probably always will be. But that doesn’t mean we should toss them out, although you’re free to reject them if you want, and to eat whatever you want—life is for living, after all.

Income inequality: hey, let’s take away most of the money of the rich

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes indeed, that’ll fix it, according to French economist Thomas Piketty:

Piketty’s terror at rising inequality is an important data point for the reader. It has perhaps influenced his judgment and his tendentious reading of his own evidence. It could also explain why the book has been greeted with such erotic intensity….

It’s no surprise that the idea of levying enormously high taxes on rich people’s money has had rising support in this era of proudly unearned self-esteem and entitlement, as well as decline in the power of religious prohibitions such as the commandment against covetousness.

More at the WSJ:

While America’s corporate executives are his special béªte noire, Mr. Piketty is also deeply troubled by the tens of millions of working people – a group he disparagingly calls “petits rentiers – whose income puts them nowhere near the “one percent” but who still have savings, retirement accounts and other assets. That this very large demographic group will get larger, grow wealthier and pass on assets via inheritance is “a fairly disturbing form of inequality.” He laments that it is difficult to “correct” because it involves a broad segment of the population, not a small elite that is easily demonized.

Oh, but it can be done. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Piketty need only take lessons from Stalin re the kulaks, and from Pol Pot re—well, re just about everybody.

This is what Piketty proposes as a remedy for the terrible problem of income inequality [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.” It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop “the meager US social state.”

In case you’re wondering, Piketty’s book has been hailed almost universally on the left—and by “left” I mean almost everyone except the right.

They have turned to “income inequality” as the big bad issue because the actual plight of the poor in objective terms can’t be the point any more, since the poor are doing a lot better than they used to be in terms of their standard of living in most first world countries. In fact:

…[T]he last few centuries have seen us banish starvation and famine from a large part of the Earth. In the most successful countries, the average citizen now enjoys a material standard of living that would have made the greatest king of two hundred years ago turn green with envy…

To see how much more an American worker can buy today, compare the number of hours he would have had to work to obtain various items in 1895 versus 2000 (Table 1). Whereas a one-hundred-piece china set would have taken 44 hours of labor income in 1895, a twenty-first-century American would need to work 3.6 hours or less for it. The numbers are 28 versus 6 hours, respectively, for a gold locket; and 260 versus 7.2 hours for a one-speed bicycle (taken from De Long 2000, based on prices in the 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog). Comparing the prices charged in the Montgomery Ward catalog with prices today””both expressed as a multiple of the average hourly wage””provides an index of how much our productivity in making the goods consumed back in 1895 has multiplied…

As all this was going on, expectations and demands have risen, and so income inequality has been the new buzzword. Stamp it out, because it somehow “offends democracy.” The fact that the remedy Piketty and many others propose offends liberty, and the strong possibility that it could end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg, are both ignored and/or minimized in the rush to social and economic “justice”—that is, equality of outcome rather than opportunity.

I’ll let the inimitable Margaret Thatcher have the last word here (the following clip is from 1990):

[NOTE: For more on income inequality, see this, this, as well as this on the question of how big a problem income inequality really is in the first place.].]

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Can’t wait to hear the rest:

In my opinion, a more sound approach to the problem of pigs

But does the bot mean the problem faced by pigs, or the problem caused by pigs?

Poll: AGW global warming, belief vs. skepticism

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting poll on the subject:

Over the past decade, Americans have clustered into three broad groups on global warming. The largest, currently describing 39% of U.S. adults, are what can be termed “Concerned Believers” — those who attribute global warming to human actions and are worried about it. This is followed by the “Mixed Middle,” at 36%. And one in four Americans — the “Cool Skeptics” — are not worried about global warming much or at all.

The “interesting” part is that, except for that “mixed middle” group (which has less education than the others), the groups don’t differ in their amount of education. Also, men are much more likely to be in that “cool skeptic” group (as are Republicans, which is no surprise at all—and men are more likely to be Republicans anyway).

Also interesting is the following chart, which tracks changes over time. You can see how the “cool skeptics” group has grown and the “mixed middle” shrunk. The “concerned believers” segment has had a few ups and downs, but has ended up pretty much where it began:
galluppoll

At war: the two meanings of “liberal”

The New Neo Posted on by

According to Peter Burrows at Business Week, Stanford law professor Joseph Grundfest remarked, when Brenan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, “This is a particularly fascinating situation, because it involves an illiberal reaction from a very liberal community.”

The “very liberal community” of which Grundfest was speaking was either the Silicon Valley computer industry or the gay activist movement, or possibly both. But his use of the word “liberal” in this context betrays a misunderstanding of the double meaning of the term. Yes, these communities call themselves “liberal” or even “progressive.” But their liberalism breaks down into two opposing groups: one that espouses PC thought and considers conformity to it necessary for right liberal thinking, and one that values individual liberty above those concerns.

The first group was in the forefront of the anti-Eich forces. The second includes those who embraced and promoted the legalization of gay marriage and yet were made uneasy by the Eich witchhunt and its success. They do exist; I saw them on discussion boards back when the Eich controversy was at its height. However, modern liberalism, sadly, seems to contain far more of the former group than the latter, and there is hardly anything so illiberal as a “liberal” bent on stomping out opposing thought.

How could Grundfest have made such as error (and perhaps he didn’t; I’ve not been able to locate his quote in fuller context)? After all, he’s a member of the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, and ought to understand full well what what so many “liberals” are about.

Curiously, this short article from 1989 identifies Grundfest as a “conservative Democrat.” That phrase alone should tell us how profoundly times have changed since then; the appellation “conservative Democrat” would be oxymoronic today.

Michigan’s anti-affirmative action law stands

The New Neo Posted on by

SCOTUS has ruled 6-2 (Kagan abstaining) that Michigan’s law against race-based affirmative action is constitutional.

In other words, it’s not racial discrimination to ban the sort of racial discrimination that is supposedly designed for the purpose of redressing racial discrimination.

Mind-boggling that the question even comes up. As Justice Scalia, joined by Thomas, wrote:

It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 349 (2003) (SCALIA, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is precisely this understanding””the correct understanding””of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law.

Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor strongly disagree. Professor Jacobson writes at Legal Insurrection:

Here’s how Justice Sotomayor framed the issue: Taking away racially sensitive admissions uniquely harms those who benefit from that sensitivity…This is, as Kurt Schlichter calls it, essentially a ratchet theory, that no preference ever can be rolled back otherwise the rollback is discrimination.

I would add that Justices Sotomayor, Thomas, and Ginsburg all have personal experience with affirmative action, or lack thereof in Ginsburg’s case. Sotomayor and Thomas have acknowledged benefiting from affirmative action, although Thomas has indicated he felt it meant that people doubted his credentials for getting into law school. As for Ginsburg, who is older and went to law school before affirmative action existed, although her academic record was stellar she was discriminated against when she tried to get a job in law.

Thomas’ statements about his experience with affirmative action have been especially powerful:

When Thomas applied to Yale Law School, his race was taken into consideration. He wrote in his book, “I asked Yale to take that fact into account when I applied, not thinking that there might be anything wrong with doing so.”

But Thomas says that after he graduated from Yale, he went on several job interviews with “one high-priced lawyer” after another and the attorneys treated him dismissively. “Many asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated.”

The fact that he couldn’t get a job would shape his thoughts on affirmative action programs for years to come. Thomas wrote, “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference. I was humiliated””and desperate.”

In his interview with ABC News, Thomas said he was unable, even when he was nominated to the Supreme Court, to erase the stigmatizing effects of racial preference. “Once it is assumed that everything you do achieve is because of your race, there is no way out.” he said. “”¦it is irrebuttable and it is proved to be true. In everything now that someone like me does, there’s a backwash into your whole life is because of race.”

I am certainly not suggesting a one-on-one relationship between any of these justices’ positions on affirmative action and their own experiences with it; their viewpoints are in line with their general liberal/conservative orientation. But I do find their experiences interesting. My own personal reaction to affirmative action, back when I was a liberal Democrat and it first came into play, was antipathy on the order of “two wrongs cannot make a right.”

[NOTE: In reading the article about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life, this caught my eye:

She credits another professor at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov, with influencing her reading habits and writing style. “He loved words ”¦ the sound of words. ”¦ Even when I write an opinion, I will often read a sentence aloud and [ask,] ”˜Can I say this in fewer words””can I write it so the meaning will come across with greater clarity?’”.

I can’t say I ever saw a connection between Ginsburg’s prose and Nabokov’s. Nabokov was a wonderful stylist, but he was certainly not known for saying things in “fewer words.”

Having read Nabokov’s beautifully controlled and atmospheric memoir Speak, Memory, I recall that his father, whom he highly respected and loved, was a well-known law expert in Russia before the revolution (and I see looking here that his grandfather was involved with law as well, as Justice Minister during the reign of Alexander II).

I don’t have Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir in front of me right now so I can’t quote it. But I remember that, in the wonderful chapter devoted to his father, he praised his father’s ability to write clearly and succinctly in first draft and compared it favorably to his own meanders and convoluted crossings-out while in the act of composition.]

Cultural Amnesia: on the Nazis vs. the Soviets

The New Neo Posted on by

From the Nadezhda Mandelstam chapter of Clive James’ excellent Cultural Amnesia [in the following excerpts I have Americanized the British spelling):

The main difference [between the Gulag and Hitler’s Reich] was that in Nazi Europe the victims knew…who they were, and eventually came to know they were doomed. In the Soviet Union, the bourgeois elements could not even be certain that they were marked down for death. Like Kafka’s victims in the Strafkolonie, they were in a perpetual state of trying to imagine what their crime might be. Was it to have read books? Was it to have red hair? Was it (the cruelest form of fear) to have submitted too eagerly? Other versions of the same story came out of China, North Korea, Romania, Albania, Cambodia. The same story came out of the Rome of Tiberius, but the twentieth century gave something new to history when societies nominally dedicated to human betterment created a climate of universal fear. In that respect, the Communist despotisms left even Hitler’s Germany looking like a throwback. Hitler was hell on earth, but at least he never promised heaven: not to his victims, at any rate. It’s the disappointment of what happened in the new Russia that Nadezhda [Mandelstam] captures and distils into an elixir.

A little later in the essay he writes:

Quite early in the regime’s career of permanent house cleaning—certainly no later than Lunacharsky’s crackdown on the avant garde in 1929—anyone stemming from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was automatically enrolled along with remnants of the bourgeoisie in the classification of “class enemy.”…Civilized articulacy was as deadly a giveaway as soft hands…Eventually any kind of knowledge that had been acquired under the old order was enough to mark down its possessor. Just as Pol Pot’s teenage myrmidons assailed anyone who wore spectacles, so the Soviet “organs” discovered that even a knowledge of engineering was a threat to state security…Any field of study with its own objective criteria was thought to be inherently subversive. Given time, Stalin probably would have applied the Lysenko principle to every scientific field. To this day, scholars puzzle over the reasons for Stalin’s purging the Red Army of its best generals in the crucial years leading up to June 1941, but the answer might lie close at hand. The fact that military knowledge—strategy, tactics, and logistics—was a field of data and principles verifiable independently of ideology might have been more than enough to invite his hatred. In attacking his own army, of course, Stalin came close to demolishing the whole Soviet enterprise. But at the center of the totalitarian mentality is the fear that the internal enemy might be unapprehended…

[Nadezhda Mandelstam] does believe that there is such a thing as independent moral judgement, a quality in perfect polarity with the regime, which can’t tolerate the existence of independent moral judgement, and indeed has come into being specifically so as to eliminate all such values.

You can see for yourself the relevance to our own times. Moral relativism, the destruction of traditional values, the hegemony of PC thought over facts and knowledge—it’s all there. All but the camps. But are camps even needed, when the control of so many of the institutions is good?

Which doesn’t mean that camps—the natural progression of leftist thought—won’t come some day. But I have long thought we’re headed the Chavez rather than the Soviet way. Or in other words, somewhat more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[NOTE: For an example of the sort of thinking that’s become rife in academia and that dovetails quite nicely with this post, see this:

Harvard student Sandra Y.L. Korn recently proposed in The Harvard Crimson that academics should be stopped if their research is deemed oppressive. Arguing that “academic justice” should replace “academic freedom,” she writes: “If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ”˜academic freedom’?”

In other words, Korn would have the university cease to be a forum for open debate and free inquiry in the name of justice, as defined by mainstream liberal academia.

Unfortunately, this is already a reality in most universities across America, where academics and university administrators alike are trying, often successfully, to discredit and prohibit certain ideas and ways of thinking. Particularly in the humanities, many ideas are no longer considered legitimate, and debate over them is de facto non-existent. In order to delegitimize researchers who are out of line, academics brand them with one of several terms that have emerged from social science theory.

I wonder whether the self-righteous Ms. Korn is even aware of whose footsteps she’s following in.]

Bob Shrum gives Republicans advice

The New Neo Posted on by

Bob Shrum is going for his ninth presidential campaign loss. The first eight were in his capacity as Democratic political consultant. The ninth will be as unofficial advisor to the GOP in 2016.

This long-term partisan and dedicated Democrat is sharing some of his wisdom with Republicans in an article entitled “Why the GOP Needs a Return to the Bush Leagues,” the gist of which is that the Republicans have no good alternatives for 2016 except Jeb Bush. Not because Bush is so great, but because everyone else is so exceedingly dreadful.

Shrum’s piece falls into that particular genre of political writing I think of as “helpful hints from your enemy.” Does he really imagine that anyone in the GOP is listening to him and would take his advice? If so, they’re even dumber than I think they are.

What’s the point of Shrum’s writing such an article? To raise Jeb Bush’s profile in the public mind. To put down all the other possibilities. To bring a smile to Democrat faces.

Are you hangry?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nothing much happens to me when I get hungry except that I get hungry.

But some people are different: they get angry and pick fights.

Indeed. I know that quite well because I’ve been closely and even at times intimately involved with people who do just that. It took me many years to realize what was happening. What was all this moodiness about, and these sudden flashes of rage? Hunger didn’t account for all of it, of course, but it certainly was correlated—so much so that I finally learned, after years of puzzlement, to ask a simple question whenever the unprovoked peevishness occurred, “Are you hungry?”

And now I’m happy to learn there’s a word for it: “hangry.” Solution? Eat more often—duh!

Happy Easter!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repost from Easters past. But it still works for me.]

Happy Easter to all my celebratory Christian readers, and to all those who just enjoy the holiday as well!

One year when my son was little, I spent the week prior to Easter blowing out eggs and dying them. Now that he’s grown and away, the eggs are packed away in boxes and stored in parts unknown. If I could get my hands on them I’d photograph them for you, because even all these years later they are beautiful, with dyes both subtle and unsubtle, interesting etched patterns and rainbow effects—definitely one of my finest crafts hours (to tell the truth, I didn’t have so many fine crafts hours, although there was also a gingerbread house we made that was stored in the attic and alas, eaten by small creatures–and not human ones, at that.)

Blown-out eggs are well worth the trouble, and why? Because they last. And nothing eats them. You only have to make them once, and you’re all set. They are a bit fragile, but not so very.

So here’s my Easter present to you (not that you couldn’t find the information yourself)—some instructions for blowing eggs, from a link that has disappeared since I first wrote this post:

First, you’ll need to make a tiny pin hole on each end of the egg. A pin works well, or a wooden kitchen skewer or even the tip of a sharp knife. Gently work the tip of the pin/skewer/knife in a circular motion until a tiny hole appears. Repeat on the other side. Then insert the pin or skewer (the knife will be too big here) far enough into the egg to break the yolk. Use your mouth [blow] to expel the contents of the egg.

And here is a more complex–but perhaps better–way, for those obsessive-compulsives among us.

These aren’t mine, but they’ll have to do as substitute: