Climate “Science” vs Dietary “Science”

Critically Thinking about the parallels 

My last two commentaries (here and here) have been about the Climate issue. This will be a guest post on this same topic, by my friend Dr. Tom Sheahen…

Dear Colleagues:

Recently, a friend gave me a book entitled “The Big Fat Surprise,” about the importance of fat in everyone’s diet. It was written in 2014, and describes the many ups & downs of fat over the past century — the changing food guidelines from the government, the campaign against saturated fat, trans fat, polyunsaturated fat, etc., that rose to ascendancy at various intervals.

The very recent change in “the food pyramid” reflects the fact that fat-in-your-diet has now been rehabilitated.

However, the reason I write is because of the remarkable parallels between the trajectory of national diet guidance and the trajectory of climate change beliefs. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

“The hypothesis [against saturated fat] became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health. And the normally self-correcting mechanism of science, which involved constantly challenging one’s own beliefs, was disabled. While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. And the whole system by which ideas are canonized as fact seems to have failed us.

Once ideas about fat and cholesterol were adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them. One of the 20th century’s most revered nutrition scientists, …, discovered this thirty years ago, when, on a panel for the National Academy of Sciences, he suggested loosening the restrictions on dietary fat.

‘We were jumped on!’ he said. “People would spit on us! It’s hard to imagine now, the heat of the passion. It was just like we had desecrated the American flag. They were so angry that we were going against the suggestions of the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.’

This kind of reaction met all experts who criticized the prevailing view on dietary fat, effectively silencing any opposition. Researchers who persisted in their challenges found themselves cut off from grants, unable to rise in their professional societies, without invitation to serve on expert panels. Their influences were extinguished and their viewpoints lost. As a result, for many years, the public has been presented with the appearance of a uniform scientific consensus on the subject of fat, especially saturated fat, but this outward unanimity was only made possible because opposing views were pushed aside. ”

You’ll recognize the exact same trajectory in the case of climate science. WE are the dissenters from orthodoxy who have been suppressed and denigrated.

It ought to be of some consolation that the tide has turned, the climate orthodoxy has been proven wrong (by scientific measurements over decades, similar to the case of nutrition & diet). Just as now there is a new “food pyramid” the includes fat, hopefully someday there will be a correct understanding of the role of CO2.

However, note that “The Big Fat Surprise” was published in 2014, and the revised food pyramid came out in 2025. We’re facing a backlog of several decades of indoctrination of school children (who grow up to be teachers and indoctrinate the next generation). It won’t happen quickly.

Dr. Tom Sheahen (MIT)

I concur with what Tom is saying. Further, his warning that it will take years to fix the harm done by the Left and ignorance applies to the K-12 Science Standards (NGGS) in spades. We do not have another day to waste!

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